FSACNIATNIG (Peploe can raed bteter tahn you mhgit tinhk tehy can)

National Review Online ^ | September 16, 2003 | Jonah Goldberg

[Timesink]

FSACNIATNIG [Jonah Goldberg]

From a reader:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Posted at 05:55 PM

[Our man in washington]

Well done!

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

pnig!

[PBRSTREETGANG]

Thanks.

Your're right about longer words, though. I would think this would be particularly tough on chemists.

[January24th]

Deos tihs wrok whit wrdos lkie aitcatiolrun?

I dnot tihnk so.

[headsonpikes]

Sudons lkie bl*sulht.

[The Thin Man]

Colo! I lveo thsi psot!

Waht posislbe raseon do yuo hvae fro pniigng to tihs? I'm srory my dveouis plto fialed ysetready! :-)

[dansangel]

I'm srory my dveouis plto fialed ysetready! :-)

I'll jtsu bte yuo aer! :-)

[new cruelty]

bmup

[TheBigB]

Hey, can I write fcuk you to someone now without it being pulled??

[aruanan]

Thanks for this serious response. You could teach a young child to "recognize' the words as they are spelled in the original post. Problem is that he would not "know" what the word was IF it was later spelled correctly.

Did the author of the original post understand that?

Yes. They were talking about the process of mature, active reading, not the process of learning to read. The former presupposes a familiarity with a word with a specific spelling--that is, a particular configuration. It's not that the other letters but the first and the last are not important, they're just not as important as the size of the word in relation to the text and the initial letter and final letter. Actually, it's not just the initial and final letter of each word that is so important, I think, as the final letter of a word and the initial letter of the succeeding word. I'd bet that these letter pairs are also as much a cognitive unit as the others.

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are several different things going on in fluent reading: 1. The reader's own familiarity with the subject matter facilitates reading. 2. The reader's familiarity with the characteristics of the written rather than the spoken form of his language facilitates reading. 3. The reader's familiarity with the language's figures of speech and standard phrases facilitates reading. 4. Once the reader has an idea of what is being said, he is able to predict by the usual syntactical order of his language's grammar what type of word will follow other words. 5. He is also able to predict, because of the context of the sentence, the likely word that will follow other words. 6. Based on all these, the fluent reader uses just enough visual clues to confirm his prediction.

So, what the researchers are talking about presupposes 1-5 in order to make 6 happen. If you read, "You wouldn't know historical fiction if it bit you on the---," you'd predict "ass. " The shortness of the word together with the beginning letter would be enough to confirm your prediction. But if you saw a word this length, "a_ _ _ _ _ _", you'd know it wasn't "ass" and would slow a bit to see what it was and to think that the writer was an ass for not knowing the proper phrase to use.

[MattAMiller]

Vyre Igetrnitse. Btu I tkinh teh lneght of teh wdor mtretas as deos teh etxnet of teh mxingi.

[B-Chan]

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy”

YUO A RASICT

[ThomasMore]

tehsee gyus a'ernt dnigog it rhgit! Tyhe're sppuose to mkae srue taht the fsrit and lsat ltteers are the smae! Tihs is srot of fnaintisag!

[RightWhale]

Ncie aicltre. At lsaet snoced traehd toady.

[cjshapi]

yoka, so tehy nac reed. Butt cna tehy spel?

[jennyp]

Aphlaebitc wiitrng (and radenig) has all the avdnagtes of wlhoe wrod or iedoagrms raednig and mroe.

Good ponit.

(Oops, that should have read "Good". No, wait...)

[Timesink]

Ncie aicltre. At lsaet snoced traehd toady.

Smeonoe pstoed a dtuilcape teahrd? Werhe?

[RightWhale]

See? Dfretnefit ttlie.

[Timesink]

Articulation.

[jennyp]

Btu I tkinh teh lneght of teh wdor mtretas as deos teh etxnet of teh mxingi.

I noitecd taht too. The fatherr you mvoe the lteters, the hdraer it is to raed. For eaxlmpe:

• rbcalipeun
• rlbpaceiun
• rpebuilacn