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One recent discovery is that as you track a line of text you simultaneously read the end of a word with the beginning of a word. For example: You have the word "Antidisestablishmentarianism" ~ you read "AN" and "SM" immediately. Your processing system matches that discovery against the context of the story line preceding the word "Antidisestablishmenarianism".

You might even say something like "Animalism" if you were reading it out loud and "animal" had anything to do with it.

If that doesn't make sense to you, you take another look at the word and check out what the other phonemes are telling you.

In short "WHOLE WORD" doesn't work by itself and neither does "PHOENICS". It's much more like reading hieroglyphics or ideograms than not.

Could be why the first successful writingsystem, Sumerian, was done in hieroglyphics. Er, so was the second, and the third, and the fourth, and so on.

Alphabets are a far more recent invention ~ pretty good for typing ~ not necessarily strictly phonic ~ more line linear hieroglyphs that are easily written.

Your processing system matches that discovery against the context of the story line preceding the word "Antidisestablishmenarianism". You might even say something like "Animalism" if you were reading it out loud and "animal" had anything to do with it.

That's why it's been called a "psycholinguistic guessing game." Word shapes and other, perhaps, idiosyncratic distinctive features are used along with context to winnow possibilities down into something both manageable and intelligible. If a guess doesn't make sense in the context, you stop and back up and try again with something else that works and then proceed through the text.

Alphabets are a far more recent invention ~ pretty good for typing ~ not necessarily strictly phonic ~ more line linear hieroglyphs that are easily written.

Actually, hieroglyphics are phonetic based and not pictographic. It's what made their initial translation impossible as they look like little pictures so people assumed they represented an object and not a sound. That wonderful Rosetta Stone provided the key and the insight on how to read hieroglyphs.