Important!

[Jeunemaitre]

Vowels actually tend to matter least, and it's not surprising that (not counting y, of course), they tend to be less distinctive as letters go.

I know this thread started with a research report on English, but Griselda 's post got me thinking about Hebrew, where vowels are represented by ancillary dots and lines below and around the consonant characters (and lets also remember that the Torah is written with no vowel marks whatsoever (so I'm told by my wife)). Apparently English is not the only language where vowels are less relevant than consonants.

One thing to remember about language is in the case of learning new vocabulary, we tend to search our memory for similar sounding or looking words that we already know; for example, whenever I hear something that ends in -ology I immediately deconstruct the word into the study of- and whatever the preceding root might be from context. It seems to me that this step would be the goal of phonics, where we use the combination of sounds to call to mind root/prefix/suffix combinations that we already have in memory to help us along in learning. I agree that phonics are insufficient for teaching reading, the same why that pattern recognition is inadequate for teaching integral calculus: yes, I could tell you the integrand of e^x dx (if I remembered Calc II), but I couldn't tell you why. Stopping at phonics is like stopping at wrote memorization: you have the answer, but only in the way a computer knows where your files are without caring what’s in them. However, everyone relies on phonics to get through the day on a regular basis.

Like all other decisions (yes, speech and reading are decisions (including word choice, inflection, tone, etc.)) there are two ways to go: 1) thorough processing to arrive at a reasoned decision, and 2) heuristic judgment (matching the current state to a pre-thought decision pattern, eliminating the time taken for processing buy using mental frameworks already in place). The reason we can read the text in SwissMercenary 's post is because we are allowing our reading heuristic to do it for us. This type of reading is the sort of thing where we read the text, but it doesn't get any further than short term memory. That's why all the writing teachers in the world hammer the fact that writing must be interesting and impacting, especially at the beginning of a piece: to jar people out of their heuristics and into actual processing.