Can You Raed Tihs?

An aoynmnuos raeedr sumbtis: "An interesting tidbit from Bisso's blog site: Scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place. Word of mouth has spread to other blogs, and articles as well. From the languagehat site: 'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.' Jamie Zawinski has also written a perl script to convert normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are scrambled."

Comments

Hmmm

[Verteiron]

So d__s t__s m__n t__t we d_n't n__d t_e m____e l____s at all?

Re:Hmmm

[Verteiron]

Okay, I know it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I noticed something. When writting "letters", l____rs seems more recognizable than l_____s. Apparently plurals are handled by the brain as the word followed by the plural suffix. Interesting...

Does this work for non native speakers?

[PredatoryDuck]

I showed this to a student here who is native to Indonesia, so english is not her first language, and she had a very difficult time reading it. Any thoughts on why this might be so tied to your native tongue? I would have thought that anyone fluent in english (which she is) would be able to read the post without much difficulty.

D

Re:Does this work for non native speakers?

[Hamstaus]

Spoken language and written language are two separate entities when it comes to usage and process. It is not uncommon to find people who are very well-spoken in a second language, but cannot write a word. I would venture to guess that your student takes much longer to read something in English than in her native language, despite her fluency. The patterns of English words would still require more concentration and interpretation by her brain than those of her native language, which have been ingrained into her since she was very young.

You did not mention if she is a fluent reader/writer, speaker, or both? From what you describe I would say that when you said "fluent" you meant as a speaker.

Re:Does this work for non native speakers?

[RobertB-DC]

I would have thought that anyone fluent in english (which she is) would be able to read the post without much difficulty.

Actually, since I'm not British, the final word of the canonical scramble threw me off:

Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

I read the rest of the text correctly, but I had a devil of a time figuring out the reference to the Miyazaki film Spirited Away, also known as Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi !

grammar still not optional

[kellan1]

This meme has been kicking around blogland for a couple of days, and it definitely seems to be true. The only part of the above paragraph that was difficult to read was the sentence, "the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae".

Normally I would never post a comment about grammar, but it is kind of startling that in a block of text that jumbled the absence of 'the', and the swapping of 'is' for 'are' still jump out at you.

Re:Here you go

[DoomHaven]

Yuor porgarm has a falw. It csnoiders pinctuouatn mkars as ltteers and tuhs any word wtih a pntctuuaion mark at the end wlil condeisr the fanil mark to be the lsat letter.

Only part of the answer....

[Mattcelt]

Understanding a language is only 50% comprehension. The other 50% is being able to predict what will come next based on previous experience. This is especially important in spoken language, because the brain simply does not have the power to parse each word separately in real time.

So while it is possible to understand words that are not spelled correctly, it can still take a while to understand if the nxet few wdors are not qieut waht you epcext. It is aslo mcuh lses pbatldicree wehn you use lgenor wdros.

I hpoe tihs was an imuilntinag eplamxe!

Mclettat

Re:Only part of the answer....

[MMaestro]

True. I've tried this before when I was younger with my parents, who did not learn English as their first language (their first language was Chinese) and they were unable to read the scrambled words. I doubt anyone who learned English as a second language would be able to read the scrambled words as easily as most Slashdotters.

Not entirely accurate

[StewedSquirrel]

The "consonant pairs" seem to always be still paired in these words.

If I type

sllpenig it's clear I'm typing "spelling"

but, if I type

slpenlig it's not so clear anymore.

What about: according

Aoccdrnig (as in the article) is ok but...
aocdrncig is not nearly as clear

There's a limit to how far your brain can stretch it. Some consonant pairs your brain DOES intepret much like a single letter, because it's an irregularity in english.

Words that use such consonant pairs and triplets like "tch" are much harder to distinguish when those pairs and triplets (which really sound like a single letter) are split.

Stewey

Ha!

[vDave420]

Not surprising. Your brains does lots of strange things.

Please go and feed the the cat.

Bet ya didn't see that, did ya?

Re-read it slowly.

-dave-

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[inertia187]

I noticed that compression is worse using scrambled text:

[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ ./scrmable.pl genesis.txet
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ gzip g*
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ ls -l
total 304
-rwxr-xr-x 1 anthonym staff 63830 Sep 15 16:33 genesis.text.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 anthonym staff 84945 Sep 15 16:36 genesis.txet.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 anthonym staff 1396 Sep 15 15:56 scrmable.pl
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ gunzip g*
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ zip genesis.zip g*
adding: genesis.text (deflated 70%)
adding: genesis.txet (deflated 60%)
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$

Interesting. Anyone have an explaination for tihs?

This is old news, here's the original

[thejackol]

This is so darn old... I thought Slashdot was bleeding edge! Here is the original forward FYI:

Titled: Do Spellings Matter?

"... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and
reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon.

Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel
prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang"

And if you liked *that* one so much, you might like this one too:

Read the sentence below carefully:

"I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness".

This is a sentence where the Nth word is N letters long.

e.g. 3rd word is 3 letters long, 8th word is 8 letters long and so on.

And if you like that one too, here is another one you can try to kill your boredom...

While sitting, draw clockwise circles on the ground with your right foot. While doing that, try drawing the number "6" in air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction.

Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate?

[Xthlc]

My parents are both teachers, and one of the most tiresome quarrels in education is Phonics vs. Whole-Word debate. Do you teach someone to read by teaching them how to sound out syllables (phonemes)? Or do you teach them to recognize whole-word patterns by rote?

Experimentally, a pure-phonics approach has proven to have the highest success rate. However, these results would suggest that whole-word approach *does* map onto some important cognitive structure . Perhaps this means that, once past the basic level, whole-word techniques would prove to be valuable in turning beginning readers into advanced readers.

Re:Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate?

[Vaughn Anderson]

Don't the number of exceptions to the phonics generalizations hamper it greatly as a tool?

I am no reading expert but a good friend of mine is. From what I gathered from him is that the actual act of "decoding" a written word into a spoken word is the very first step in reading.

If you don't know what the sound the letter "P" makes you can never ever read the letter. So the basics of reading _is_ phonics. Phonics is not some kind of "method" of teaching how to read, it is a process that every single person reading this text right now has to go through in order to decode the imagery into a sound.

Then once the person get's good enough at it they no longer have to focus concious attention to the decoding process as it becomes automatic.

But even I as a very skilled reader when I run into a very new, large or complex word I _have_ to sound it out, or attempt to, because that is the only way a human being can read.

Decoding visual symbols to auditory symbols = phonics.

Then after the steps of decoding comes comprehension, which is totally seperate from decoding. (I am sure I have the order of events wrong here...) A child can sound out the sentence-

"Frank went to the market to buy a german shepard"

-but they still need to understand what they decoded. Whole language is a guessing game based on assumptions and values that are not concretely 100% based on a system of the intetional ordering of the letters in relation to their auditory equivilants.

As adults we can use whole language easily in the sense that we can guess words based on previous knowledge of the word (written and spoken) but not so for a small child that has never decoded any words.

As an example my daughter likes to guess words because that is how they started in Kindegarten, with sight words ( a huge mistake ). So she started with the habit of merely memorizing shapes of words without even considering the auditory values of the letters of those words.

After teaching my daughter some very basic decoding skills based on help from my friend, my daughter learned to read words she's never seen before. She read the word "giraffe" all by herself using her new found decoding skills. I gurantee you that no skills of the "whole language" idealogy would come close to providing this kind of reading ability in a 6 year old kid.

Can you explain in detail, step by step how you know how to read the word "giraffe"? In whole language you don't have steps to parse the sounds out and recombine them.

Here's the logic.
1. "g" sounds like G as in "Great"
2. "ir" sounds like "er" as in "Her"
3. "a" sounds like "a" in "hat"
4. "ff" sounds like "f" in "fast"
5. "e" sounds like "e" in "see"

Then the child comes initially with the word "geraffy" when it should be "jeraf"

The child at age 6 knows many thousands of words, and does not recognize "geraffy" so...

1. Child recognizes the silent "e"
2. Over compensates and makes the "a" sound like "a" in "bay"
3. "g" can sound like "j"
4. Now has word "jerayf"
5. Reverts the "ay" to "a", considers it a mistake, and gets-
6. "jeraf" which is the correct sound, at which time the child jumps up and down with glee.

But even easier is reading the word in a sentence. "I saw a giraffe at the zoo today"

As competent readers we automatically do all the calculations that this child does when we find a new word. After a number of times reading a word, the decoding is either automatic and extermely fast or as I like to view it in my own mind, there is a pre-rendered cached version of the word "giraffe" sitting in my mind, so when I see the word in it's whole, I know it's meaning without having to completely parse the word a single block at a time (by letter) but by the whole word itself.

Some of this is my opinion and the rest is raw fatual data.

Bit of a simplistic article...

[quinkin]

The best example I can think of for comprehension failure with jumbled text is with ordered interdependant phonemes. For instance - "eau", or "ough".

Turhgoh = Through

A topic that does not seem to have had much coverage in this article is the actual iconic visual recognition that our brains appear to use in word recognition.

Obviously each word approximates a patterned rectangle (serif fonts emphasize this further) with occasional outliers (ie. t, y, l, and any other letters that protrude above or below the base rectangle).

People with poor eyesight rely on this fuzzy but fast recognition frequently. In fact there is a classic psych experiment based around displaying a word that iconically is very similar to another word, while simultaneously presenting a context that implies the second word, and asking the subject to record the word. The subject mis-records the word roughly 90% of the time.

Q.