Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in 
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht 
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.

42 responses total.

I understood the text of the post, but I ended up reading it slower than I
normally do. Couldn't comprehend the title, till after I read the post. 

Yeah, I think the text is a bit contrived.  Like uinervtisy has the "t" in
about the right place.  utsverniiy is much harder to read.  Shorter words
however do seem to wrok almost any way you type them, and there are enough
shorter words in most texts so that it becomes easier to guess longer words
from context.  That's what makes the title hard to read - not enough context.

Riigd cofidicatoin of sleplnig ruels is a rletaivley reecnt deevolmenpt
in the hitsroy of the Ensilgh lungagae aynawy.

That I did not know. I thought rules were always rigid, but spelling changed
slowly as the oral language chanfed.

This item, agora 226 (Summer 2003) has been linked to language 123.

This response has been erased.

This response has been erased.

I have a lex program that filters for this.  It was in 7, but cannot just ide
it (like censor in YAPP?).

I shared this with my son, who observed you can also drop all the vowels,
even after the first operation:

ccdrng t rschrch t n lngsh nrvts, t dn't mttr n wht rdr th lttrs in wrd r,
th ln prmtnt thng s tht frst nd lst lttr s t th rght pcl. Th rst cn b ttl
mss nd y cn stll rd it wtht prblm. Ths s bcs w d nt rd rv lttr b tslf bt
th wrd s wlh. 

The dropped vowels don't work as well as the approach in #0. I've noticed that
you can drop vowels in frequently used words, or words that have few vowels
and the meaning won't be lost. In less frequently used words that have too
many vowels, this approach is harder to comprehend

N dbt bt t.

My totally unscientific opinion is that it's the *shape* of a word that gets
recognized, perhaps with recognizing the first letter.  I don't believe the
last letter is that important.  After a while the combinations of letters in
a certain shape become a pattern to be recognized, not a molecular formula
to be decomposed.

Re #4: Nope, spelling actually varied a lot until the first English
dictionaries were published.

Yet another testimony to the stubborness of language.

(Drift, but concerning Slelnlipg: my 4 year old granddaughter, who likes
to be read to but has shown no apparent interest in the words in the books
or their spelling, and her parents have had some concern about her not yet
reading, asked from her car seat in the back of the car, while being
driven to school, "why are there two o's in zoo?".)

Tmbn hy q decr q ls rsltds d l nvstgcn n s plcn ncsrmnt . n lng cm spnl.
Mlecazr tood lsa ltreas ed als plbraas epsalnosa prbloablmeeent csaua prblmeas
snigfianctes pro al cpreonsnio dle ttxeo.

(Hint, the above text is written in Spanish. Perhaps munkey or another native
spanish speaker would like to tell us if this works in Castilian?)

Really?  Spanish!  It's perfectly parsable in English too!

The ability to spout words like "parsable" does not one a linguist make.

Fortunately.

I bet you don't know what it says in English.

Fortunately.  (Or you'd be embarassed you wrote it.)

Bzzzt! Wrong, but thankyou for playing.

(wow.  the first words that occurred to me while trying to read the first
paragraph of resp:16 were Spanish words, but I'd managed to convince myself
that it was supposed to be in English, based on the rest of the item. 
bravo!)

(data point:  I haven't had any problem reading any of the entries with
transposed letters, but I found that losing vowels slowed my reading
considerably.)

Re 8: The cmoanmd to hdie a rocpsnee in Psapcion is "ergapxtue."  Or if you
use Fanltrotk, you can jsut type "hdie."

I'm tiryng to keep wrod sehaps arppemixloaty ccerort in tihs rocpsnee.

What's that command in Picospan again? Somehow, I find it more difficult
reading this response than #0

Word scrambler from Greg Cronau:

#include <stdio.h>
main(){int i,j,l;char c,*b,*d,*e,f[2<<9],g[2<<9];srandom(time(0));while(b
=fgets(f,2<<9,stdin)){do{for(d=g,e=b;isalpha(*d++=*b++););if((l=((d-g)-1))>
3){for(c=g[1],i=2;(i<(l-1))&&(g[i]==c);i++);if(i<(l-1)){while(strncmp(e,g,l
)==0)for(i=1;i<(l-1);c=g[i],g[i]=g[j=(random()%(l-2))+1],g[j]=c,i++);strncpy
(e,g,l);}}}while(*(b+=*--b?1:0));fputs(f,stdout);}}

D-

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skipping the vowels is okay ..but you beter keep the first vowel in words
which begin with vowels ..like arnd , annyms , antnyms 
.( beter = better ) 

I'm surprised to note at this point that no one has mentioned that the 
primary element of readability in longer words is the syllable.  
Multisyllabic words with the first letter in correct position and the 
rest scrambled are far easier to parse if the letters which compse each 
syllable are grouped in the correct order of syllables, and scrambled 
within that smaller range.  This is hinted at by the comments on word 
FORM in #2 and #12.

'Nuff said.

I am skacitepl of Eirc's atoissern taht sbalylle oderr pevtoresrain
is carnetl to rildaibeaty.

Scrambling without regard to syllables, in my experience since first 
reading about this, has significantly increased the time required to 
parse longer words correctly, despite context.

The syllable scrambling aids in larger words - 3 syllables or more. For two
syllable words it doesn't matter.

I tried reading #0 out loud and think it is considerably less intelligible
that way. There must be something to the "modular" word recognition
hypothesis. The mental processing of reading seems quite apart from the mental
processing of speech (not surprisingly). 

Visual (and even tactile, as in the case of Braille) processing is a much 
lower level, and therefore faster, brain function than speech processing.

This is predicated on the earlier development of the sensory functions.

I think it is also that one quickly rescans fixed visual inputs, which one
cannot do with auditory input. 

Jdeigert (Jim) who is dyslexic tends to just look at the first and last letter
of a word and guess the middle.  Often the guessed word turns into something
edible.  Fresh eggs turned into fish eggs, for instance.

O Mother.

#0 is pretty darn eadabkle .. out loud, it sukxx .. the disemvoweled
words are harder.

..you're one to tlak.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss