I have this from an earlier discussion on another listtserve in 2/06. It gives an extensive discussion of the topic. Riki Koenigsberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) Matt Davis at Cambridge discusses this. _http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/_ (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/) Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Or rather... According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole. ---------------------------------------------- Further discussion: Is this as easy to read, and if not, why not? (from Jeremy at Snopes' Urban legends discussion) Iltnsegnetiry I'm sdutynig tihs crsrootaivnel pnoheenmon at the Dptmnearet of Liuniigctss at Absytrytewh Uivsreitny and my exartrnairdoy doisiervecs waleoetderhlhy cndairotct the picsbeliud fdnngiis rrgdinaeg the rtlvaeie dfuictlify of ialtnstny ttalrisanng sentences. My rsceeerhars deplveeod a cnionevent ctnoiaptorn at hnasoa/tw.nartswdbvweos/utrtek:p./il taht dosnatterems that the hhpsteyios uuiqelny wrtaarns criieltidby if the aoussmpitn that the prreoecandpne of your wrods is not eendetxd is uueniqtolnabse. Aoilegpos for aidnoptg a cdocianorttry vwpiienot but, ttoheliacrley spkeaing, lgitehnneng the words can mnartafucue an iocnuurgons samenttet that is vlrtiauly isbpilechmoenrne. Or, if you prefer: Interestingly I'm studying this controversial phenomenon at the Department of Linguistics at Aberystwyth University and my extraordinary discoveries wholeheartedly contradict the publicised findings regarding the relative difficulty of instantly translating sentences. My researchers developed a convenient contraption at http://www.aardvarkbusiness.net/tool that demonstrates that the hypothesis uniquely warrants credibility if the assumption that the preponderance of your words is not extended is unquestionable. Apologies for adopting a contradictory viewpoint but, theoretically speaking, lengthening the words can manufacture an incongruous statement that is virtually incomprehensible. ------------------------------------------- The order of letters in a word is important. What this example does not indicate is the context in which the words appear. Those of us who read this correctly were able to do so because we understood the context in which the words appeared from a grammatical standpoint. I bet you didn't read it very quickly the first time, but because we were curious we went back and read it again, but probably faster. It may be true that the eye does not attend to every letter, but it's also true that the eye does not attend to every word. In other words, we guess, a lot, and sometimes we guess wrong because of context. For example, I bet most of you would also be able to read this sentence and understand it if you do some guessing: Babe _______ hit the ______ over the __________. We can read this because we know the context in which it is written and we have the prior knowledge to fill in the missing words. But, what happens when we don't have that prior knowledge or we don't understand the context or recognize the grammatical structure. Obviously, we then attend to the word and all of its letters. That's what phonics teaches our students to do. How many times have you heard a student read something and use a word that was similar but incorrect? If so, he's probably not grasping the context or grammatical structure. Have you ever been reading something and gotten to the bottom of the page and despite the sentence being continued on the next, you read the first word on the next page before you've actually turned the page? I've seen students do it. By the way, it's "Babe Ruth hit the ball over the fence." ------------------------------ _1) A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir _ (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/1.html) _2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs_ (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/2.html) _3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur_ (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/3.html) All three sentences were randomised according to the "rules" described in the meme. The first and last letters have stayed in the same place and all the other letters have been moved. However, I suspect that your experience is the same as mine, which is that the texts get progressively more difficult to read. If you get stuck, the sentences are linked to the original unscrambled texts. Hopefully, these demonstrations will have convinced you that in some cases it can be very difficult to make sense of sentences with jumbled up words. Clearly, the first and last letter is not the only thing that you use when reading text. If this really was the case, how would you tell the difference between pairs of words like "salt" and "slat"? I'm going to list some of the ways in which I think that the author(s) of this meme might have manipulated the jumbled text to make it relatively easy to read. This will also serve to list the factors that we think might be important in determining the ease or difficulty of reading jumbled text in general. There is still a very real debate in the psychology of reading, however, about exactly what information we do use when reading. I don't know how much of this literature Dr. Rawlinson was aware of at the time of his thesis, but I do think that the jumbled text provides a neat illustration of some of the sources of information that we now think are important. I'm going to review some of the research that has been done to demonstrate this. ____________________________________ the rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm... the rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem This sentence is, like the rest of the demonstration, strikingly easy to read despite being jumbled. As you have seen above, not all sentences distorted in the same way are as easy as this to read. What is it that makes this sentence so easy? My colleagues and I have suggested the following properties: 1) Short words are easy - 2 or 3 letter words don't change at all. The only change that is possible in a 4 letter words is to swap the order of the middle letters which doesn't cause too much difficulty (see 4). 2) Function words (the, be, and, you etc.) stay the same - mostly because they are short words, see (1). This really helps the reader by preserving the grammatical structure of the original, helping you to work out what word is likely to come next. This is especially crucial for reading jumbled text - words that are predictable are going to be easier to read in this situation. 3) Of the 15 words in this sentence, there are 8 that are still in the correct order. However, as a reader you might not notice this since many of the words that remain intact are function words, which readers don't tend to notice when reading. For instance, when people are asked to detect individual letters in a sentence, they are more likely to miss letters in function words. Healy, A. F. (1976). Detection errors on the word The: Evidence for reading units larger than letters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 2, 235-242. 4) Transpositions of adjacent letters (e.g. porbelm for problem) are easier to read than more distant transpositions (e.g. pborlem). We know from research in which people read words presented very briefly on a computer screen that the exterior letters of words are easier to detect than middle letters - confirming one of the ideas present in the meme. We also know that position information for letters in the middle of words is more difficult to detect and that those errors that are made tend to be transpositions. McCusker, L. X., Gough, P. B., Bias, R. G. (1981) Word recognition inside out and outside in. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7(3), 538-551.
************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com ---
