Smlarbced Wrdos?

Several different websites have been posting recently about some research (apparently by Kourosh Saberi at UC Irvine and David R. Perrott at Cal State Los Angeles) about the decipherability of English texts made up of words that have had their letters scrambled (except for the first and last).  Hogwash, you say?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Bet you didn’t have too much trouble reading that, did you?  (Also note that the “Elingsh uinervtisy” mentioned appears to be a perpetuation of an incorrect source.)

Posted Monday September 15, 2003 in News by Chris Curtis

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Comments

That’s creepy.  Of course, I have superb training in recognizing horribly dyslexized type from the dozens of emails I get from my boss every day.  His are much more difficult to read because you take the bad spelling/typing from above, and then mix it with bad or improper grammar, handfuls of on-the-spot non-standard abbreviations, and missing words.

By Derek Jones on September 15, 2003 at 04:52pm link

The reason I started looking at Saberi was that his name appeared in an earlier version of the scrambled letter text. I’ve started looking at some online papers in cognitive science and psycholinguistics that deal with visual word recognition. Also, the whole idea of semantic priming: i.e., words are more quickly recognized (or recovered) when the subject has been “primed” with words in the same semantic field, or in the case of this text I think the words become easier to recognize as the sentence winds to its close.

By jim on September 15, 2003 at 05:59pm link

I am having trouble finding some of the online papers in cognitive science and psycholinguistics that deal with visual word recognition. If it is not too much trouble, would you please put a couple of the better references on this site?  Thanks!

By Chris on September 17, 2003 at 12:09pm link

Chris:

I really don’t know anything about this field of study, so I don’t have any sources to which to point you.  My suggestion would be to start at the websites I link to above since at least Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey and LanguageHat both appear to deal with linguistics.  Perhaps their webmasters would be able to help you more.

Good luck!

By Chris Curtis on September 17, 2003 at 12:14pm link

You can create your own texts more easily with this tool: http://www.wordmix.com

By Mark on December 30, 2003 at 04:40am link

I tnihk yuo heva a vrey godo pinot trehe,
but who fuchin’ cares?

By maup on July 11, 2005 at 12:35pm link

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