The wodners of lagnauge

[mahnmut]

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.

Comments

[terminator44.livejournal.com]

They might have a point. I could read your post just fine.

[ghoststrider.livejournal.com]

Thsi si odl nwes.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, when I see a sentence like that I am usually about half way through before I realize it, but have just one word like taht in the middle and it jumps out.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

The new 1337speak?

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I think it's close to true, but not quite. Its very true that we don't read all the letters and in fact are looking at patterns both in word forms and in the order of words (we expect certain words to come next and gloss over one we recognize as fitting), for instance 'ltteers' makes sense mainly because of context, the wordform itself is messed up and would be hard to make sense of without that context.

'lsat' is actually hard to read because there's lots of things that could contextually follow. 'pcleas' also is vague in context and the wordform doesn't give a good indicator.

[hannahsarah.livejournal.com]

I think it only took me a fraction of a second longer to read that, than if it were in the proper order. My daughter is 7, and it's fascinating watching the process of her learning to read "fluently". Every now and then, if she doesn't know the word exactly, she'll substitute the nearest word in her vocabulary that has a similar sound.

"Frank was 21 years old when he murdered Janet."
"Murdered?" I read over the page. "No honey, MARRIED. Nobody gets murdered!"