Well, it interested me, anyway....

[venta]

Just received this in a bit of junk email:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh 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 is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a
toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we
do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Ceehiro

Anyone got any thoughts?

(No, I don't really imagine it's the result of serious research anywhere)

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

It might well be based on actual research, there has been a reasonable amount done on that kind of thing (information theory). Worryingly, it made perfect sense to me ;)

[venta.livejournal.com]

You mean the writing made perfect sense ? Yes, to me too. i read it through with no problems at all. That's what surprised me.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I agree with bibliogirl. Empirically, the above passage is easily readable, and as such the theory must hold some water.

Mind you, I am very used to re-sorting the letters in the words as I read them, so it could be just me.

[venta.livejournal.com]

re-sorting the letters in the words

Illiterate friends, or merely a lifetime's overindulgence in Scrabble and crosswords ?

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Ths shld prbbly ls mk prfct sns - tkng th vwls ot f nglsh wrds ds nt ffct th mnng mch. Thr s lts f rdndncy whch mns tht y cn dlt lttrs nd stll b bl t rd t.

(On the other hand, deleting the consonants makes it unreadable - o e oe a, eei e ooa ae i ueaae.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ths shld prbbly ls mk prfct sns

It did, thought it was considerably more effort to read than the muddled paragraph above. I had to think a few times, whereas I just read the other like plain text.

o e oe a, eei e ooa ae i ueaae

Aaaaargh, it's a banshee....

[elethiomel.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... perfectly legible to me. Only word that made me pause for thought at all was 'mses' - I inserted a vowel and read it as Moses which confused me.

Although that does bring me onto my point - I've heard that the same research is true of eliminating vowels.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Yup. If you have all the letters but in the wrong order, you have more information than if you're actually missing some of the letters. The first and last letter stuff is interesting, but I think it'll also work if you have some kind of consistent re-ordering - ekil fi uoy etirw gnihtyreve sdrawkcab, rof ecnatsni.

onder f hat'll appen f ust eave ut he irst etter f very ord? ow oes hat ffect omprehension?

I'm going to stop attempting to type in non-standard-English about now, it's making my head hurt ;)

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've noticed before now how much I only focus on certain letters in a word - to the extent that my brain often picks a random word which has (for example) that first and last letter and is about the right length.

I only spot this cos sometimes it picks words that make no sense or would be very unfortunate in the context given.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the one word I had to pause on there was "ls", which adds extra weight to the idea that the first and last letters are the most important to have.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Indeed. One of my cousins (when small) read from the fascia "Boots - the disappearing chemists". And we've called it that ever since :)

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

As I commented in dennyd's LJ on the same topic, this kinda makes sense. I know they've studied people's eye movements when reading, and found that people don't scan a line smoothly; they jump from point to point instead and fill in the gaps. 'Node points' or something they called them. The node points tend to pick up on just the most important parts of the written language, such as major punctuation like full stops, and of course the beginnings and end of words.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Also possibly because it's one of the words where there were at least two possibilities ('else' and 'also' spring to mind).

[nevecat.livejournal.com]

onder f hat'll appen f ust eave ut he irst etter f very ord? ow oes hat ffect omprehension?

It's understandable, but sounds like someone is speaking with badly fitted false teeth. Possibly whilst accidentally spitting small gobbets of well-chewed granary bread onto the clothing of the hapless listener.

Uh, for suitable values of 'sounds' anyway...and don't ask me why *granary* bread. It just *does*!

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Surprises me slightly because hand wave hand wave blah recognise /shapes/ of words mutter hence mixture of upper and lower case easier than all caps um er destinations on road signs yes.

[thegreenman.livejournal.com]

You read junk email?

You need to get out more. Oh...hang on though, you do get out more.

[(Anonymous)]

Research be damned. It's typial of any copy sent to a local weekly paper by a village correspondent who can't touch-type.
It is so easy to decipher, it gives you the key to "speed reading" - scan the shapes don't read the words.
Why does half the world always read "shopfitters" as shoplifters"?

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

Hang on, the moose said what?

I have a headache now.

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

1) it seems to work: I read that at about 80% of my usual reading speed. Taking out vowels or playing dialect tricks like Mesrs Banks or Welsh a prone to do usually knocks me down to roughly 20%.
2) what on earth were they selling and how were they using that fact to try and sell it?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

ow oes hat ffect omprehension?

The interesting thing (I found) about the rearrangement of letters was that I could skim-read it perfectly well without actually analysing what was going on. This wasn't the case for the missing vowels or the backward words - in both cases there were words in the sentence that I could only recover by consciously applying the rule to the letters I could see.

It's a bit debateable in the case of the missing first letter, since "I" was the only word it applied to.