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From: rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: Re: Images vs. Text
Message-ID: <1991Apr2.162821.21318@leland.Stanford.EDU>
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Organization: Stanford University, Department of Geophysics
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Date: Tue, 2 Apr 91 16:28:21 GMT
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In article <10292@pitt.UUCP> grefen@sun14.cs.pitt.edu (Gregory Grefenstette) writes:
>
>I'm doing work on hypertext visual interfaces and I
>would like to be able to prove what seems evident to me,
>that is,  that people can scan information presented
>in a visual image-based form FASTER than in a plain
>textual form.

I don't know if this is relevant to your inquiry, but Chinese speed readers
claim peak speeds about five times that of alphabetic readers.  The fastest
I heard from Chinese in soc.culture.china was 50,000 characters per minute
and for English 5,000 words a minute.  On the average a Chinese word
is two characters.
Chinese characters are more visual than alphabetic words.  However, alphabetic
speed readers see the whole word at time, rather the characters, so they can
claim to be reading icons too.  Chinese characters have the same horizontal
width in contrast to alphabetic words, so readers of the later may slow down
in predicting where the next word is.