Getting tired of this...
Mar. 10th, 2005 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rabidsamfanI'd like to debunk the following rumor... You may have seen it floating around LJ.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg!
The Phaonmneal Pweor of the Hmuan Mnid
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht 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 awlyas toguhht slpeling was ipmorantt.
As I pointed out to another soul who put this up, spelling is important. There are three things going on here which are being neglected by the facile conclusion that letter order doesn't matter. The first is that you are a literate person already, and a fairly good reader, who is unjumbling words rather than understanding them with the ease which you read properly constructed English. The second is that you are reading words within the context of a sentence, where every unjumbled word eases the way for unjumbling the next word. If you took all the words in the paragraph above and made a list of them, altered the order of the list, and then had someone try to read the words, they'd be slowed down considerably. The third consideration is that none of these words have letters omitted or added. If they did, you'd be far more bollixed than you are.
We don't read words as a whole -- that fallacy has been the basis of several disastrous attempts to teach children to read without learning phonetics -- but we are very fast unscramblers of scrambled words when the first and last letters are in their correct places, particularly when the word is within the context of a sentence or paragraph. At least, we are once we've had a great deal of practice at reading!
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg!
The Phaonmneal Pweor of the Hmuan Mnid
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht 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 awlyas toguhht slpeling was ipmorantt.
As I pointed out to another soul who put this up, spelling is important. There are three things going on here which are being neglected by the facile conclusion that letter order doesn't matter. The first is that you are a literate person already, and a fairly good reader, who is unjumbling words rather than understanding them with the ease which you read properly constructed English. The second is that you are reading words within the context of a sentence, where every unjumbled word eases the way for unjumbling the next word. If you took all the words in the paragraph above and made a list of them, altered the order of the list, and then had someone try to read the words, they'd be slowed down considerably. The third consideration is that none of these words have letters omitted or added. If they did, you'd be far more bollixed than you are.
We don't read words as a whole -- that fallacy has been the basis of several disastrous attempts to teach children to read without learning phonetics -- but we are very fast unscramblers of scrambled words when the first and last letters are in their correct places, particularly when the word is within the context of a sentence or paragraph. At least, we are once we've had a great deal of practice at reading!
