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speling bee
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Randman
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Aug 25, 2005, 09:22 AM
 
Can you raed tihs? Olny srmat poelpe can.
cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde 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 be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

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Oisín
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Aug 25, 2005, 09:40 AM
 
Normally, I'm not for timelining things, but this one is just so old, and has been posted so many times that it really does deserve one.

Besides, as both I and others have pointed out in past instances of this thread, there are quite a few caveats to this. For instance, it only works with relatively short words, and doesn't work very well if you completely isolate vowels and consonants from each other. For instance: aaaaiiiilnnorsttttm <-- what word is that?
     
Randman  (op)
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Aug 25, 2005, 09:45 AM
 
When was the last one?

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Oisín
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Aug 25, 2005, 09:54 AM
 
Not sure, a month or two ago, I think. Or maybe that one was on another forum. It crops up from time to time on nearly all forums I frequent, and has done for the past three or four years or so.
     
Stradlater
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Aug 25, 2005, 10:05 AM
 
5 months ago...
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=207161

And most people realized that it's kind-of-bollocks:

90% of the words up there are 5 letters or less. When you take out the first and last letter, there's only 6 possible variations and each letter is only 1 spot away from where it should be. Once you start using a lot of long words (which is hard to do in a normal sentence), it's no longer understandable without a lot more concentration and conscious trial and error
1. Yes, obvioulsy reading comprehension is based on pattern recognition, as is nearly all human comprehension. That's why we can recognize words that are misspelled (unintentionally) and why we can read words we wouldn't be able to spell correctly if we had to. I question why this is news. It's crap science along the lines of discovering that head trauma is linked to Alzheimers or that child abuse leads to more child abuse.

2. That pattern recognition extends to the sentence level as much as to the word level, and scattering a few well-known longer length words among a sea of freebies proves nothing.

3. The longer words in that sample are not scrambled very well. For example, "uinervtisy" only has each syllable scrambled, and no letters have been moved outside their original syllable. The rest of the longer-than-7 words have their consonants maintained within a 2-letter range of their correct place. (and no I haven't done an exhaustive search so there may be an exception). I propose if all the interior letters of every word were in exact reverse order it would be more difficult to read, or at least a more interesting experiment.

4. What's the deal with "rscheearch" having an extra ch in it? It also raises the question of whether words with their letters replaced by unrelated letters in the middle, or with significant numbers of letters removed or added, would also be recognizable. Those would be better tests of the theory that only the first and last letter is important.
An interesting counter-example resulted:

"Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus emials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr."
I've gotten it before, and you know what? It's TOTAL ********.

A huge part of how we read (as evidenced by the disparity between reading a normal mixed-case text vs. an all-caps text) is the actual outline of the word -- the overall visual image of the word, its descenders, ascenders, and the "color" (read: overall darkness) of the regions of the word.

It IS true that good readers don't read by the letter, they read by the word. (Badly-educated readers, such as large numbers of Americans that went through the public school system, do read by the letter, and that shows in their speed and comprehension, both of which fall far short of where they should be.)

But switching around the letters doesn't work -- in the above example, most of the words are extremely short, and the longer words do not have all the internal letters scrambled, they were moved in chunks. Besides, it would also not allow for differentiation between words such as "silt" and "slit".

...

Another reason it doesn't work is that words are not constructed arbitrarily in English, they are built from building blocks.

For example, pluralization:

hamster +s = hamsters
which when scrambled, results in, for example,
hsametr -> htsermas

This breaks a pluralization rule (to which I must preface that ALL human languages are spoken first: writing only comes second, if at all) that in English, plurals are made generally by appending the "zzz" sound (spelled s), but that if the last sound in the word was voiceless, then the plural is made by adding the "sss" sound.

Another example:

"untimely", which breaks down into
un+time+ly

the un negates, time is the root, and ly creates an adjective

But then i have to add this in: the un and ly can't just attach to anything!

"un" can't attach to nouns
"ly", on the other hand, must.

so the breakdown is

time+ly (N->Adj)
un+timely (negation of adjective)

it cannot be:

un+time (impossible negation of noun)
untime+ly (N->Adj)


Here's a cooler example: unlockable

it can break down into either:

un+lockable (negation of Adjective; "unable to be locked")

or
unlock+able (V->Adj; "capable of being unlocked")
( Last edited by Stradlater; Aug 25, 2005 at 10:16 AM. )
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wdlove
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Aug 25, 2005, 10:45 AM
 
Desperately in need of a good spell checker.

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." Winston Churchill
     
turtle777
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Aug 25, 2005, 10:47 AM
 
^^^ what strad posted.

-t
     
FulcrumPilot
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Aug 25, 2005, 02:32 PM
 
elts ese htis loucd eb urte if ouy nca edar sith thoutiw nya roplmeb i nkow taht I nca od ti os nac ouy I poeh! fficeus ti ot yas taht hawt ouy aisd si tuer nlyo orf hawt thores ritew nad nto fi ouy riwte fro ouyrelfs. os ni yaw hits cloud eb a ywa ot ekep a oujrnal taht ouy ontd nawt therso ot dear os silyea.
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rickey939
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Aug 26, 2005, 08:30 AM
 
Originally Posted by FulcrumPilot
elts ese htis loucd eb urte if ouy nca edar sith thoutiw nya roplmeb i nkow taht I nca od ti os nac ouy I poeh! fficeus ti ot yas taht hawt ouy aisd si tuer nlyo orf hawt thores ritew nad nto fi ouy riwte fro ouyrelfs. os ni yaw hits cloud eb a ywa ot ekep a oujrnal taht ouy ontd nawt therso ot dear os silyea.
Let's see, I think I recognize that language...French?
     
Oisín
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Aug 26, 2005, 08:47 AM
 
Originally Posted by rickey939
Let's see, I think I recognize that language...French?
Actually, I think it's that rare combination of Welsh with a heavy Serbo-Croatian accent.
     
Millennium
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Aug 26, 2005, 09:04 AM
 
The text is indeed readable, but it's at far from normal speed, because the reader has to mentally sort out all of the errors. If anything, this highlights the importance of good spelling; although badly-misspelled words are technically readable, even the strongest readers can appreciate not having to constantly apply this mental correction. For weaker readers, the problem is even worse.
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Randman  (op)
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Aug 26, 2005, 09:08 AM
 
It's also why you can see a typo here and there in a publication now and then. You would hope the checks and balances would catch it, but it usually tends to be the easiest words that get spelled incorrectly and slip through the cracks, only to jump out at you the next morning.

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