Slashdot Mirror
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."
So d__s t__s m__n t__t we d_n't n__d t_e m____e l____s at all?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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
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
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
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.
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.
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