Presumably there's a tremendous amount of data processing going on in our brains to check out the stuff in the middle ~ odds are it's a probability search rather like the one Google.com uses to look ahead to give you clues about where to look next.
I use a combination of WHOLE WORD and WORD SHAPE to rapidly whip through any amount of writing ~ from an address to a whole book.
I think this comment is based on that so-called research from Cambridge?? First and last letters? Probably a hoax.
Anyway, I believe the brain does as much—or as little—as it needs to do to keep moving along. No rules. Just right. But you are probably not using shapes, because that would imply you have all those thousands of shapes in your memory, like flags, and you are looking for matches. Isn’t it simpler just to read?
You are a sight reader. I am too. When I was a freshman in college, I was in an Eng comp class for kids that scored over 650 on the Eng Achievement and SAT. We were the only class that had spelling because they told us that studies showed the the best, fastest sight readers were notoriously poor spellers. Are you a poor speller?
Anyway, there is no one right way to learn to read because there is no single way people learn. There are visual learners and there are auditory learners and all sorts of combinations in between. I get tired of hearing people say that teaching sight reading is wrong, phonics is the only way to teach. It would have bored me to death if I had to sound out every word that I read.
Sight reading is simply a natural way to learn to read. The student actually teaches himself and that is the way many pre-schoolers pick up reading on their own. My two year old grandson can read, but he doesn’t know the alphabet.