> What mechanism is happening here ?
LOL, yeah, I’ve seen that in several different manifestations and never had any trouble reading them.
I don’t know for certain, but I believe I read somewhere once that your mind only picks out certain letters and fills in the rest of the word, first and last letters being most important. The only time your mind reads the entire word is if it never saw it before.
We read words the way the Chinese read ideograms. Once you are familiar with a word, you recognize its pattern, and common words are easily read, even if distorted. We all sight read. Phonics, or sounding out, is a bridge, it allows us to quickly “decode” new words, and is the main advantage of a phonetic alphabet over ideograms, we can more easily recognize and assimilate new or unfamiliar words.
Try the trick above using unfamiliar words like “extirpate”, or “ineluctable” and the results will be quite different.