I hope you’re ready to travel back in time.
The year is 2003.
You’re on MSN messenger, chatting to your friends after class, and suddenly, there’s
some action in your Hotmail inbox.
You received a forward with this attachment:
Wait – hold the flip phone.
It’s a total mess and you can still read it without a problem.
Mind blown!
It took this vintage email forward for a lot of us to recognise that the way your brain
consumes information and makes sense of language is really cool.
This meme, if you will, led to the introduction of the term Typoglycemia – The brain’s
ability to decipher a misspelled word if the first and last letters of the word are correct.
Now, you are likely to be familiar with 30,000 or more words and you can recognise most of
them within a fraction of a second – whether they’re written like this, this or this.
So… why?
An early model of why we can read good proposed that we combine letters to recognise them
as words, and then we successively recognise words as sentences.
Though in the 1970s, researchers found that words with 1, 4 or more letters generally
took the same amount of time to read.
And some words with more letters may be faster to read than some words with fewer letters.
They proposed a new model of reading – suggesting that we bring our prior knowledge and priming
effects to the page.
For example, a word like pepper is more easily recognised when it comes after salt.
But, really, the psychology of reading combines both models, it’s interactive – the text
on the page, our prior knowledge and the context interacts with our long term memory for us
to understand word meanings, story structures and specific text.
Our word recognition is so fast because words can be perceived by processing just a few
features.
We read in units rather than individual letters: It’s thought that you recognise small letter
groups – like “tr” or “ace” and you use these perceptual units to access the
word “trace”.
The shape of entire words also contributes to how fast we read.
It’s easier to read these words, in a familiar shape, than… – tO rEaD tHe CaSe MiXinG
iN tHe rEsT oF tHiS sEnTeNCe.
This case-mixing disrupts how we process words rather than how we process the individual
letters.
And, relevant to that vintage email forward, you use more than the first and last letter
of a word to read it – obviously we all need to tell the difference between salt and
slat.
Because no one wants slats on their dinner.
I mean, you wouldn’t even be able to access your food.
It’s thought we can read this sentence easily because function words remain the same, as
do units of words, like “or” “ers” and “ng” Basically, these words were arranged
in a meaningful way.
Though, not all jumbled sentences are.
Can you decipher this sentence?
What about this one?
I jumbled those words completely at random using an online generator, rather than grouping
units of the words in a particular way.
However, it’s likely your brain still unscrambled them in a fraction of a second.
Your ability to recognise language and decipher puzzles is really quite phenomenal.
So, would you like to buy a
t-shirt?