How easily can you read this?

[maize]

Found this on Facebook and wanted to see what you all thought of it. How easy or difficult is this for you to read? I find it harder than normal text but only a bit--I think there were two or three words I couldn't make sense of right away. It does make me wonder how much mature reading depends on the actual letters in a word versus general clues like the shape of the word or first and last letters.

Edited August 16, 2020 by maize

[8filltheheart]

I read it without any problem.  But, when my dyslexic kids get really creative with spelling, I can't always decipher what it was they intended to write.  Looking at what you posted, every letter is included, just scrambled.  I suspect that is part of the reasoning behind our being able to read it bc our mind just unscrambles the letters to form the word.  But, spelling itself is still playing a role bc we know what the letters are supposed to form.  

[73349]

Not hard overall. I got stuck on "strange" for a moment.

[J-rap]

I could read it fine, maybe just a wee bit slower than usual.  Once I read that the first and last letters at least were in the correct spots, it somehow seemed super easy.  

[Ausmumof3]

It’s fine.  I guess it’s not that different to autocorrect and predictive text.

[maize]

4 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:

It’s fine.  I guess it’s not that different to autocorrect and predictive text.

I think our brains just autocorrect the text as we process it from our eyes.

[maize]

It does help me understand how reading languages that leave out most of the vowels like Arabic does could work.

Edited August 16, 2020 by maize

[Little Green Leaves]

It feels very easy to read. But I wonder if it would be harder to read a handwritten version?

I know when I was younger, I used to "check" my own spelling just by writing out a word and seeing whether it "looked" right. I can't really do that as well now. I think our eyes have gotten really used to skimming printed text.

[Wheres Toto]

I could read it just slightly slower than I normally read, but I'm usually a very fast reader.  I've seen other versions of this before but this was harder than the ones I usually see.

[LostintheCosmos]

It is neat that good readers can decipher this easily, but the current scientific understanding of reading is that even advanced readers still decode each letter in each word, just very very quickly. 

[LostintheCosmos]

15 minutes ago, square_25 said:

Well, but then why can we all read this? There must be something interesting going on given how easy this is for all of us.

I assume it's the same mechanism by which we interpret mispelled words and typos. All of us have years and years of experience reading now and have developed certain expectations around what letters will follow others in what contexts. Also, these are mostly short, common words, and there are contextual clues. If I gave this to my 7 year old, he would be lost even though he could read these words spelled correctly. And if I jumbled a passage from a highly technical journal article, I doubt we could decipher it so easily. 

You might find the work of Stanislas Dehaene interesting - even more up your alley, he's also done stuff on the cognitive basis of numeracy, though I am not familiar with that work. 

Edited August 16, 2020 by LostCove

[Farrar]

Not hard. I hate the way these things act like if you can do it, you're special. Nope... we're special. Or, nearly.

[ElizabethB]

15 hours ago, square_25 said:

Well, but then why can we all read this? There must be something interesting going on given how easy this is for all of us. 

I can't find the explanation, there is one other there, but it's not really whole word reading...we do, like Dehaene and other researchers have found, process every letter and letter team, just very fast; they are processed in the same area of the brain as spoken language is processed.

It only works with certain letter swaps in certain length of words, and not shape, but letter swaps in certain positions, and it can't be too many letter swaps, it's quite small the cases it will work for. 

[mellifera33]

I had no problem reading it, but my dyslexic 12 y/o found it difficult. He read the first couple of lines, slowly, then told me he was done. Then I got curious, and typed the passage with normal spelling and had him try it again. He read it fluently. I gave the scrambled passage to my 9 y/o. He read the whole passage, more slowly than he normally reads, but he got through it. He even read scrambled Cambridge, which surprised me because I thought that would be more context-dependent, and he's not familiar with the names of universities. 

[ElizabethB]

4 hours ago, square_25 said:

So the text says only the first and last letters matter, and having the correct letters. Is that in fact an oversimplification? I’ve never read this research, only these little snippets on FB!

We should experiment ourselves and see how much one can mix it up!!

Yes, it is an oversimplification. It doesn't work with shorter words because there are too many possibilities, and only certain letter swaps work in longer words.

[ElizabethB]

1 hour ago, square_25 said:

What's the paper showing how much you can mix it up? 😄

Here is one link, there are several others, I can't find the best one now, I didn't bookmark them.

https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

[ElizabethB]

12 minutes ago, square_25 said:

Fascinating, thank you. 

Quote from the article: 

Clearly, the debate about whether we read using information from individual letters or from whole words is far from over. Demonstrations of the ease or difficulty of reading jumbled texts seem likely to play an important role in our understanding of this process. 

So this kind of thing is evidence, if perhaps not the best or the most recent evidence! Very cool. The neat thing about science is that it keeps evolving...

Dehaene's book "Reading in the Brain" was fascinating.

He has a bunch of articles, #71 Illiterate to Literate is one that applies.

https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

[ElizabethB]

I also have a video playlist of reading in the brain, mostly Dehaene but a few others. His hour long video, #2 in the playlist, is especially fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYZBi_07vk&list=PLJLxBWdK_5l1u9v4FTXD3CXgCBIGeSZpM

[SKL]

Pretty fast.  Maybe a tiny bit slower than correct spelling.

But I have inherited some dyslexia, so I am kind of used to letters jumping around.  Somehow I was always a good reader (but not a fast reader) despite this.

[Scarlett]

On 8/16/2020 at 7:35 AM, OKBud said:

100% exactly the same as reading something normally LOL 

I think spelling is still important though 😄  We wouldn't be able to read any of this if we hadn't properly learned the words in the first place.

Ditto.  

[happypamama]

On 8/16/2020 at 8:35 AM, OKBud said:

100% exactly the same as reading something normally LOL 

I think spelling is still important though 😄  We wouldn't be able to read any of this if we hadn't properly learned the words in the first place.

This!