Firstly, according to Cambridge cognitive neuroscientist Matt Davis , there's no evidence that scrambled words have been the subject of research at Cambridge University. The passage appears to have made its first appearance in the letters section of New Scientist magazine in , when Graham Rawlinson wrote a letter about a study concerning the effects of reversing short chunks of speech, which was mentioned in a previous issue.
Rawlinson wrote: "This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University , which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid readers noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text.
As Matt Davis notes in his analysis of the text, it's essentially correct when it says "the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole. It's true that people do not read each letter in a sentence individually, but this paragraph isn't the best illustration of that effect.
For example, in the sentence: " This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe ," 10 of the 19 words are completely unchanged. Short words which link the sentence together and give it structure, such as 'and', 'by', 'a' and 'is' do not change, because they're too short to be rearranged.
This keeps the sentence understandable, even if some of the words are misspelled. What's more, many of the letters in some versions of the text look like they may have been jumbled in a way that keeps the words easily understandable - for example, ' porbelm ' for 'problem' is easier at first glance than ' pleobrm '. While this meme has made the rounds online, citing a study from Cambridge University, we've discovered this study doesn't actually exist — and the meme isn't very accurate, either.
However or should we say "hwovere" , there is some applicable commentary on the topic from Nottingham University. In a May letter to New Scientist magazine in , Nottingham University grad Graham Rawlinson posited that randomizing the letters in the middle of words had "little or no effect" on the ability of readers to understand the words, so long as the first and last two letters of the word were correct. This is probably the kernel of truth behind the meme. Other than that, the meme is rife with inaccuracies.
For starters, letter order does matter. It greatly affects the readability of text. One small study tracked eye movements of 30 college students as they were presented with sentences that had transposed letters. Researchers found the jumbled letters decreased reading ability by 12 percent for letters that were switched in the middle of a word. If letters were transposed at the end of a word, the reading rate dropped 26 percent and if the mix-up occurred at the beginning of a word, the reading rate plummeted by 36 percent.
Our ability to extract meaning from words jumbled in the middle is related to our ability to infer context. There is evidence to suggest that ascending and descending elements play a role, too - that what we're recognising is the shape of a word. This is why mixed-case text, such as alternating caps , is so difficult to read - it radically changes the shape of a word, even when all the letters are in the right place.
If you have a play around with this generator , you can see for yourself how properly randomising the middle letters of words can make text extremely difficult to read. Try this:. The adkmgowenlcent - whcih cmeos in a reropt of new mcie etpnremxeis taht ddin't iotdncure scuh mantiotus - isn't thelcclnaiy a rtoatriecn of tiher eearlir fidginns, but it geos a lnog way to shnwiog taht the aalrm blels suhold plarobby neevr hvae been sdnuoed in the fsrit plcae. The acknowledgment - which comes in a report of new mice experiments that didn't introduce such mutations - isn't technically a retraction of their earlier findings, but it goes a long way to showing that the alarm bells should probably never have been sounded in the first place.
Soaesn of mtiss and mloelw ftisnflurues, Csloe boosm-feinrd of the mrtuniag sun; Cnponsiirg wtih him how to laod and besls Wtih friut the viens taht runod the tahtch-eevs run. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.
0コメント