How does this work scientifically?

[Robin Hood]

We push phonics, then we have the ability to read something like this that is not phonics nor sight reading.

 

Olny srmat poelpe can raed this.

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed this psas it on !!

 

Just wondered how and why it is so EASY to read mixed up. The explantion leaves me clueless.

[nancypants]

It's funny because I can read that very easily. But when I think about sitting and trying to type that out on purpose, my brain hurts! LOL Go figure! :tongue_smilie:

[mcconnellboys]

Letters are symbols. Your brain learns them so well and the patterns for words, too, that you don't actually need to have all of the letters, all of the time, in order for the brain to see what it "thinks" it should be seeing. This is one reason it's tough to catch your own mistakes when proofreading, too, especially if you've looked over the manuscript multiple times. That's why you're told to put it down a while and come back to better be able to see mistakes.

[Myrtle]

I had my dyslexic son read that and he did it perfectly with the exception of,

 

", but the word as a wlohe"

 

which he read as "but the world as a whole"

[Whisperlily]

It's because learning how to read is different than the reading most adults/established readers do.

 

In the early stages, we learn how to decode. Once we've mastered decoding, we've begun to memorize words. Our reading becomes mostly memorized words in context somewhere along the line.

 

An established reader sounds like a beginner when unfamiliar, technical terms come into play. At that point we revert to decoding again. If it were unfamiliar words in that passage, that we had to decode, we'd say them phonetically. ;) Instead they use only slight misspellings in a context where the "intended" word makes sense.

 

Without phonics, we couldn't read words that we hadn't yet memorized.

 

It's kind of like memorizing math facts. We want them to understand the process before memorizing the facts. Once they can do that, the memory work takes over to speed up the process.

[Claire]

It's easy to read because the test is highly predictable. It wouldn't be readable if it were, say, technical text containing many unfamiliar words.