I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg...
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I was awlyas tlod taht slpeling was ipmorantt.
True ... but I couldn't read your post as quickly as if it were correctly spelled (well under 5% of the usual speed).
ReplyDeleteI would normally take in the meaning of that post in one chunk (if speed reading) or seven (if reading deeply for full meaning); the jumbling forces me to do it in 35 separate chunks, each one of which is slowed down by decoding delays
There is sufficient redundancy in language (including spelled English) to allow disruption, but that redundancy does also underpin efficiency of communication.
There is also a penalty in meaning, as the same set of letters can mean different things in different orders. For example, this sentence can have four separate meanings depending on how it is read for letter order, only context supplying the intended one:
"I fele closer to my dgo"
Should you understand that I feel/flee closer to my god/dog?
This is, of course, a phenomenon exploited to great marketing effect by French Connection UK, aka "FCUK" :-)
As an amusing follow up...
ReplyDeleteThe Captcha password offered to me by Google, when I posted the previous comment, was "sessin".
What my subconscious speed reading program fed to my touchtyping fingers was "session".
Interesting observations Felix. However...!
ReplyDeleteMy post states that the first and last letters of each word need to be in the correct place in order for this to work. Obviously this means 3 letter words such as Dog or God would need to be spelt correctly and four letter words could only ever be rearranged in one possible way (as in the French Connection adversiting logo).
When i 'skim-read' this text i seem to get the meanings of the words almost as quickly as i would otherwise - i dont know if this has something to do with reading styles (if such a phenomenon exists!) or just how our brains interpret the information we see. But either way, i found it intreauging!
Tahkns for cmmoneintg.
Pitons teakn!
ReplyDelete:-)