Neil Schneider wrote:
Paul G. Allen wrote:
Here's some spelling for you. How many people can read this?
I don't know how many, but I can. As soon as I realized the words were
mispelled for some reason my brain just adjusted and I could read it.
May be because I read it before.
In part, yes. But the brain apparently has the ability to unjumble the
spelling in most cases as long as the first and last letters of each
word are in their normal place and all the other letters are in the
middle somewhere jumbled up, but no extras nor absentees.
Obvious exceptions are particularly large words and especially words
that have a dipthong (or other multi-letter combinations) before the
jumble and are jumbled in such a way as to form a different dipthong.
An example would be a word that has an "s" and a "th" before, and has a
"t" and an "sh" after. The brain automatically tries to link them and
keep them together before trying to unjumble the rest.
You maen lkie in the avobe two snetcenes werhe yuor non-santadrd
sleplnig ifniltced whilpsah on my eeys.
The brain tries to keep "wh" together, which in this case actually
helps. But since the dipthong "sh" was split apart, and did not form
another dipthong, it did not add difficulty. If, however, the "p" had
appeared as the second to the last letter, it would have been quite a
bit harder for the brain to reconstruct it.
If the jumbler were given a tendency to form dipthongs (or other
multi-letter combinations) wherever possible, especially common
combinations (like ch, gh, ph, sh, th, wh, ck, ng, ie, ei, ou, ea, sc,
ain, ly, and so on) that did not previously exist in the word, the brain
would have a much *much* harder task.
One thing that helps the brain to do it is that the size of the average
word used is about seven letters, and the two letters on the ends are
anchored. On average, the brain would only need to figure out the
proper sequence of the remaining five and has the contextual clue of the
beginning and ending letter to point in the right direction.
I tihnk taht msot eevn moedrtaley ltiretae poelpe hvae cretian
"meertdoaly" is much harder than "moedrtaley" because of the "ee", the
"eer", the "oa", and the "ly". These four things, the brain has the
tendency to want to keep grouped together, but still not as strongly as
dipthongs.
exepctations not olny of how wrods are spleled, but aslo of how tehy
*look*. Mcuh of the way we rcogeinze wrods is bsaed on the word's
sahpe
and szie. Chnagnig not olny a word's sleplnig, but aslo its szie and
sahpe is lkie rnadmoly plcanig real loonikg, but nnofnutcoianl cras in
the mliddle of the frweeay.
By the tmie the raeder sees the wrod, he's arlaedy run oevr and psat
it,
and sitll wnodrenig "Waht the hlel was taht!" wehn, dsironeited, he
has
to sotp, bcak up, and tkae a sceond look.
I don't see eiffcieicny in scuh sleplnig, ecxpet in creatin cnotxets.
I
see isntaed eihter lzaniess or igornnace or btoh.
Hweover, I can put up wtih yuor chnaegs a lot esaeir tahn the cmopelte
and utter lzay igornnace of tohse asasultnig me wtih a cmpolete lcak
[of] captiailaztoin (yes _ervey_ snetnece shuold strat wtih a captial
lteter). and a cmpolete igornnace of pnuctautoin (it's not a cnotset
to
see how mnay wrods you can fit itno ecah snetnece).
--
Ralph
--
I think Mark Twain would have been quite pleased with this jumbling.
--
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