Onfeet

I’m thinking technology is getting too personal. Hello “his cellshoe rings” Mr Jones this is mary with Nike onfeet we just got a call that you stubbed your toe, is everything ok? No!!! …we just got a signal that you are running…do you need assistance….yes…i…was….jogging….in…the…. mountains……..i’m…running…from…. a….mountain……. lio……AAAAAHHHHHRRRGGG. sir, do you need assistance, sir are you there!? Onbike, this is jane speaking, your mom said not to jump over curbs.

Revelation!!!!! I just figured out why we can’t figure out women!!! God is chinese.

I had a dream the other night, a reoccurring one i might add. You see when i conclude my prayers for the night they end with something like, and PLEASE!!!!!, GOD!, help me understand women! Well in this dream a guy dressed like confucius comes to me and says “my son, i have the answers you seek”.  Being born catholic my mind says: “ stay away from that eastern mystic stuff”.

Well the other night i decided to talk to this guy,this mystic, which one of my questions is he got the answer for, see what he had to offer. He said and i quote: “here is instruction manual i give to Adam when i create Eve”. The title was “How to operate the not man like you in 256,00 easy steps”

I could hardly contain my enthusiasm, and crack open this bad boy. Ok, here we go, chapter 1, ” 389 step for Removal of leaf of fig tree”.  Ok a little lengthy, (and since nothing else i’ve tried has ever worked), but directly to the good stuff, and since it usually takes me a minimum of 2000 steps to get to the good stuff, i’ll try anything a couple hundred times!

Step 1. Must first make not unhappy person of opposite genitals.  Step 2. Be ability to make run if unhappy of the person of opposite genitals. Step 3. Be ability to duck if person of opposite genitals have rock in hand. Step 4. Is better to have something not smell bad in hand like flower. Step 5. Never to remove leaf of fig tree of own selfs genitals before making it to Step 69. OOOO….K, that sounds familiar.  So i figured like most guys, i don’t need to read this whole thing, i’ll just skip to chapter 69, i’m not understanding it anyway. Needless to say the web of confusion got worse, besides there’s this loud ringing in my ears, damn!!! alarm clock!! I’ll let you know if i ever get to finish it in another dream.

Opencarry.org – a few words

Opencarry. org  http://opencarry.org/  is a web page, with a real “my kinda girl” on the page (and if she reads this i hope she e-mails me, I’d like to get to know her). They advocate using the law as written in many states, that allow you to carry a gun on your hip. Way to go, i am 100% behind any exercise of the second amendment. Only problem i see is that like the old west, jackasses also have the same right to carry a gun on their hip. You can see the problems that would ensue, gunfights at the Iberville corral …etc. Still if enough good guys carry, and they outnumber the bad by 100 to 1, then the net result is law and order.

Green Death or the last environmental train ride!!…

.. or bite the bullet -nnooo- thats lead, bad for the enviroment!

.. or kick the bucket -nnooo- you don’t know what’s in the bucket!

.. or taking a dirt nap -nnooo- graveyards are gonna get banned as eyesores and land hogs!

.. or going to the great beyond  -nnooo- can’t think of anything for this one yet!

The train pollutes but i gotta call it something!!

Look, I’m for not polluting and destroying what we leave our children. BUT. Can’t i even friggen die in peace. It’s not enough that Al Gore and his ilk are trying, and succeeding i might add, to put the government into every aspect of our everyday lives, now they are trying to run your death as well. They couldn’t get into our pockets any more than they are right now. Now they want you to have a “Green Death”, no more wasteful funerals, with all the pomp and circumstance that the funeral people shove down your throat at your most vulnerable time. Don’t want to look like a cheapskate, the guy will say, and bury your dad in an old refrigerator box. (yes I’ll need a REFRIGERATOR box, not the standard washer/dryer box, not the regular refrigerator, the side by side kind of box), bring the big hand truck. They don’t want you to use any more precious resources when you die. An article in “National Geographic Magazine” wants you to use bio-degradable coffins and wrap you in biodegradeable clothing (“newspaper” I’m thinking), then stick you in a giant oven to be cremated, the family will have to go chop wood or bring a bag of charcoal from home of coarse, and who will get my carbon credits, do i need to put that in my Will too. Why not save more and bring that casserole from home and shove it in there as long as you pull it out before it burns. Or better yet plan your death around Thanksgiving or Christmas and do the turkey or ham while you’re at it, that’ll save you a bundle on your utilities. I’ve always said that i want to be pickled if they can find a big enough jar. Everyone knows i plan to have a twenty one barbecue pit salute, with the air force flying over with one big gas guzzling jet for every year i didn’t die, a twenty mule team drawn coffin, and lots of naked dancing girls …etc, i figure if i don’t get up and chase them, then I’m really dead and you can go on with the services and cremate me.  Whoever is gonna be responsible for my funeral better start saving.

I dno’t udrnetnsad waht yuo siad

I srated dnirnikg aingan so fi tihs is hrad ot raed tehn so eb ti. Tihs si hrdaer tahn ti lkoos. I hpoe my pcntuitaon si ko. Ok i sobered up …not really, i found this great article from Cambridge Univesity.  And i know this post is monsterously long but if you like language or know someone who does there are some interesting tidbits down the page. Oh, and you have no idea how much this screws with the little spell check dog in your computer!! It took 45 minutes when i hit the spell check icon, my computer spit out some smoke then threw the mouse at me, that could be just the alcohol hallucinations though.        

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 toatl 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.

Or rather…

According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

This text circulated on the internet in September 2003. I first became aware of it when a journalist contacted a my colleague Sian Miller on 16th September, trying to track down the original source. It’s been passed on many times, and in the way of most internet memes has mutated along the way. It struck me as interesting – especially when I received a version that mentioned Cambridge University! I work at Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, UK, a Medical Research Council unit that includes a large group investigating how the brain processes language. If there’s a new piece of research on reading that’s been conducted in Cambridge, I thought I should have heard of it before…

I’ve written this page, to try to explain the science behind this meme. There are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect. I’m going to break down the meme, one line at a time to illustrate these points, pointing out what I think is the relevant research on the role of letter order on reading. Again, this is only my view of the current state of reading research, as it relates to this meme. If you think I’ve missed something important, let me know.
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Other languages:

My colleagues and I are also aware of versions in Spanish and French which I’ve appended below. There are, no doubt, versions in many other languages as well. If you know of any others let me know and I’ll add them to the list. I would be especially interested by versions of this text in languages that (to my knowledge, at least) work very differently in their written form from English. For example:

1) semitic languages (such as Hebrew or Arabic) where vowels tend not to be written in text

2) agglutanative languages (like Finnish or Turkish) where words are dramatically longer than in English

3) languages such as Thai which do not (conventionally) put spaces between words

4) logographic languages such as Chinese in which complex symbols represent a whole word or concept.

Update (7/10/03):

Looks like at least one of my predictions seems to be correct. Thanks to Peter Eskolin and Ari Ruottu I’ve had a couple of suggestions for Finnish versions of the text. Both Peter and Ari suggest that the resulting scrambled text is very difficult to read. Their names are linked to their suggested scrambled versions of the text.

One interesting possibility (thanks to R? Viredaz, and others that mentioned this) is that one thing that makes these scramblings difficult to read is that the jumbled-letters often move across morpheme-boundaries. One way of making polymorphemic words easier to read when scrambled would to keep letters in a position close to their original location. This is apparent in some of the German versions of the text.

I’ve also received a Hebrew version of the text, which apparently could not be read when scrambled. However, I couldn’t read the characters, sorry! If any of you can help with converting Hebrew text into graphics files, let me know.

13/10/03:

Thanks to Samuel Wazana and John Sutton, I now have a Hebrew version of the original and scrambled text. Samuel suggets that the scrambled text is "a REAL mess.. you can not understand it at all". This may reflect a interesting property of the Hebrew writing system. Since vowels are not written in the text, there is a lot less redundancy in written Hebrew. It may be that readers are already using some inference processes to work out what words are written, the extra load added by jumbling letters creates an additional, excessive level of difficulty. It’s also possible that written words are more confusible in Hebrew – that is, many more words are like "salt" and "slat" in which letter transpositions create other words.

Thanks to all of the various readers who offered to help with getting a Hebrew text online.

Spanish:

Sgeun un etsduio de una uivenrsdiad ignlsea, no ipmotra el odren en el que las ltears etsan ersciats, la uicna csoa ipormtnate es que la pmrirea y la utlima ltera esten ecsritas en la psiocion cocrrtea. El rsteo peuden estar ttaolmntee mal y aun pordas lerelo sin pobrleams. Etso es pquore no lemeos cada ltera por si msima preo la paalbra es un tdoo.

French:

Sleon une ?ue de l’Uvinertis?e Cmabrigde, l’odrre des ltteers dnas un mtos n’a pas d’ipmrotncae, la suele coshe ipmrotnate est que la pmeir? et la dren?e soit ?a bnnoe pclae. Le rsete peut ?e dnas un ds?rde ttoal et vuos puoevz tujoruos lrie snas porlbl?. C’est prace que le creaveu hmauin ne lit pas chuaqe ltetre elle-mm? mias le mot cmome un tuot.

(note that the letters are jumbled and that the accents have moved with their associated letters).

Dutch:

Vlgones een oznrdeeok op een Eglnese uvinretsiet mkaat het neit uit in wlkee vloogdre de ltteers in een wrood saatn, het einge wat blegnaijrk is is dat de eretse en de ltaatse ltteer op de jiutse patals saatn. De rset van de ltteers mgoen wllikueirg gpletaast wdoren en je knut vrelvogens gwoeon lzeen wat er saatt. Dit kmot odmat we neit ekle ltteer op zcih lzeen maar het wrood als gheeel.

Thanks to Sander Jonkers for passing this on, and to the people at Onzetaal for linking to this site.

Danish:

En viskdenbaleig unsdelr?e lavet af et untivseriet i Enlgnad har vist, at desrom de to f? og de to sisdte botsvgaer i alle oredene i en tekst er ritgigt pledsaret, spllier det inge rolle hvkilen r?kkelge de ?e bosgvtaer i oredne kommer. Tektsen er fuldt l?ar selv om de adre bogastver kommer huilbtertlulter! Det er, fordi vi ikke l?r hvert eneklt botgsav, men ser bildeler af ordet som en hehled.

Thanks to Randi Starrfelt for sending this to me.

You’ll notice that a couple of these translations state that the research comes from an “English University” (which is correct), rather “Cambridge University”.

German:

Die Bcuhstbaenrehenifloge in eneim Wrot ist eagl

Ncah enier nueen Sutide, die uetnr aerdnem von der Cmabirdge Uinertvisy d?hgeft wrdoen sien slol, ist es eagl, in wlehcer Rehenifloge Bcuhstbaen in eneim Wrot sethen, Huaptschae, der esrte und ltzete Bcuhstbae snid an der rhcitgien Setlle. Die rsetclhien Bshcuteban ken?ttoal druchenianedr sien, und man knan es tortzedm onhe Poreblme lseen, wiel das mneschilhce Gherin nhcit jdeen Bcuhstbaen enizlen leist, snodren das Wrot als gnazes. Mti dme P?nemn bchesf?ein shci mherere Hhcochsluen, acuh die aerichmkianse Uivn?ritt in Ptstbigurh. Esrtmlas ?as Tmeha gchseibren hat aebr breteis 1976 – und nun in der rgchitien Bruecihhsetnafoelngbe – Graham Rawlinson in sieenr Dsiestraiton mit dem Tetil "The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition" an der egnlsicehn Uitneivrsy of Ntitongahm.

Thanks to Hermann Schwarting for email this to me. This appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 24.09.03. You’ll notice that this is greatly extended and includes a correct reference to Graham Rawlinson’s thesis.

There’s also the following translation – which is much closer to the English original (from Robert Fuchs):

Luat eienr Stduie der Cambrdige Unievrsti?speilt es kenie Rlloe in welcehr Reiehnfogle die Buhcstbaen in eniem Wrot vorkmomen, die eingzie whctige Sahce ist, dsas der ertse und der lettze Buhcstbaen stmimt. Der Rset knan In eienm v?egen Duchrienanedr sein und knan trtozedm prboelmols gelseen wreden. Gunrd ist, dsas das menchsilche Ague nicht jeedn Buhcstbaen liset.

And a cartoon on the subject from Der Spiegel (from Raymond No?

Czech:

 

Thanks to Vaclav Janca for passing this on. You can also download the czech text.

Icelandic:

Svmkma?rnsan?? vi??abrigde hk??a ?iir ekki ml???? r?tfiar ???eru, ? enia sem stikipr ml?er a??tsyi og st???tinaurfn s??t?m sat??illr hniir sfitarnir gtea vire??a?gu rlgui en ?r smat lsei????vuledlgea. ???n fiyrr ?r a??nashgrniuun les ekki hevrn satf friyr sig hleudr oir??em hiled.

Thanks to Suzanne Buerger for forwarding this.

Portugese (Brazilian):

De aorcdo com uma pesqiusa de uma uinrvesriddae ignlsea, n?ipomtra em qaul odrem as lrteas de uma plravaa et?, a ? csioa iprotmatne ?ue a piremria e ?a lrteas etejasm no lgaur crteo. O rseto pdoe ser uma ttaol b?ana que vco?doe anida ler sem pobrlmea. Itso ?oqrue n???lmeos cdaa lrtea isladoa, mas a plravaa cmoo um tdoo.

Thanks to Z? do Rock for sending this to me.

Swedish:

En vestenkalpig unsdern?g gjord vid ett untivseriet i Enlgand har visat att utfiall de tv? f?a och de tv?ista botskev?a i alla orden i en text ?ritkigt plessarade, spelar det liten roll i viklen orgnindsl? de ?ga boskv?ena i orden kommer. Tetxen ?fullt l?ar t.o.m. om de andra bokest?na kommer hullorebmuller! Detta eftorsem vi inte l?r varje enkisld botksav, utan ser bidlen av ordet som helhet.

Thanks to Hakan Kjellerstrand for passing this on. Apparently this was first posted on the 1st September, here. Like the Danish version, this actually has the first and last two letters fixed – which is more similar to Graham Rawlinson’s PhD thesis and the letter he wrote to New Scientist. It wouldn’t suprise me if this switch from two to one exterior letter being fixed was a relatively late change to the meme.

Bahasa Indonesia:

Menuurt sbeauh penilitean di Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, tdaik mejnadi maslaah bgaimanaa urtaun hufur-hufur di dlaam sebauh kaat, ynag palngi pnteing adlaah leatk hruuf partema dan terkhair itu bnaer. Siasnya dpaat brantaaken saam skelai dan kmau maish dpaat mebmacanya tnpaa msaalah. Hal ini kerana oatk masunia tdaik mambeca seitap huurf msaing-msaing, tatepi kaat kesuleruhan.

Thanks to Frederik Rotty for emailing this to me.

Russian:

 

Thanks to Anastassia Kerr for passing this on to me. If you’d like, you can also download the Russian text as an MS-Word file.

Albanian:

Saips nj?iumtdi t?? nga nj?tsveneiirt algenz,p?lxmeiin e fajl? nuk ka r?? rjtnidea e srjahknove.Maotfjn q?kojnrha e par?he e fnduit t?en??ndeet e trye.T? tejrat mnud t?en??j?regrullim t?olt?he ne mnud t?oxejm?a polebrm.Kjo spese turri yn?uk i loxen srojahknt nj?ga nj?or fajl?si t?olta.

Thanks to Ymer Mulakaj for sending this.

Hungarian:

 

Thanks to Tamas Szepes for forwarding this to me. You can also download the Hungarian version as a rich text file.

Italian:

Da uno stdiuo dlela Camrbidge Urnievristy, l’oridne dllee letetre in una paorla non ha ipmotranza, la sloa csoa impoanrtte ?he la pimra e l’ulmtia sinao nllea pozisione corttreta. Tttue le alrte letetre pososno esesre totamletne diosrdiante e tu sarai sepmre in grdao di legegre sezna prolbemi. Quetso ?ovtuo al ftato che il cevrello umnao non lgege ongi letetra ma la paorla glolabmnete.

Thanks to Alberto Castelnuovo for emailing this.

Irish (Gaellic):

De ri?tdgaihe ag Osllocil Cmabrigde is cmua cen tord at?r na lriteahca i bhfacol m?ho? an cha?ltiir augs an liitr dhreineaach san ? chaert, augs an chiud elie ina bpairseach. Is fi?r an ta? a thiucsint gan dua, ??ud ?o l?n an itninn gcah fcoal ina imoli?, n?iitr i ndaiidh litearch. Inotach.

Thanks to Sean O Conaill.

Polish:

 

Thanks to Hanna Burdon for passing this on. You can also download the Polish text in MS-Word format.
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aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy… According to a research (sic) at Cambridge University

There are a number of groups in Cambridge, UK doing research on language. There is the group where I work (Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), there are also groups in the Department of Experimental Psychology most notably the Centre for Speech and Language (where I used to work). There are also language researchers in Phonetics, English and Applied Linguistics, and at Anglia Polytechnic University.

To my knowledge, there’s no-one in Cambridge UK who is currently doing research on this topic. There may be people in Cambridge, MA, USA who are responsible for this research, but I don’t know of them. If you know different, please let me know.

Update:

I’ve found a www page that tracked down the original demonstration of the effect of letter randomisation to Graham Rawlinson. Graham wrote a letter to New Scientist in 1999 (in response to a paper by Saberi & Perrot (Nature, 1999) on the effect of reversing short chunks of speech). You can read the letter here, or in a link to New Scientist, here. In it Graham says:

This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), 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 reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text.

It’s possible that with the publicity offered by the internet, that Dr. Rawlinson’s research might be more widely read in future. For those wanting to cite this in their own research the full reference is:

Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK.

Update 2:

Graham has very kindly sent me a summary of his thesis work.
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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… it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place

This is clearly wrong. For instance, compare the following three sentences:

1) A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir

2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs

3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur

All three sentences were randomised according to the “rules” described in the meme. The first and last letters have stayed in the same place and all the other letters have been moved. However, I suspect that your experience is the same as mine, which is that the texts get progressively more difficult to read. If you get stuck, the sentences are linked to the original unscrambled texts.

Hopefully, these demonstrations will have convinced you that in some cases it can be very difficult to make sense of sentences with jumbled up words. Clearly, the first and last letter is not the only thing that you use when reading text. If this really was the case, how would you tell the difference between pairs of words like “salt” and “slat”?

I’m going to list some of the ways in which I think that the author(s) of this meme might have manipulated the jumbled text to make it relatively easy to read. This will also serve to list the factors that we think might be important in determining the ease or difficulty of reading jumbled text in general.

There is still a very real debate in the psychology of reading, however, about exactly what information we do use when reading. I don’t know how much of this literature Dr. Rawlinson was aware of at the time of his thesis, but I do think that the jumbled text provides a neat illustration of some of the sources of information that we now think are important. I’m going to review some of the research that has been done to demonstrate this.
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the rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm… the rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem

This sentence is, like the rest of the demonstration, strikingly easy to read despite being jumbled. As you have seen above, not all sentences distorted in the same way are as easy as this to read. What is it that makes this sentence so easy? My colleagues and I have suggested the following properties:

1) Short words are easy – 2 or 3 letter words don’t change at all. The only change that is possible in a 4 letter words is to swap the order of the middle letters which doesn’t cause too much difficulty (see 4).

2) Function words (the, be, and, you etc.) stay the same – mostly because they are short words, see (1). This really helps the reader by preserving the grammatical structure of the original, helping you to work out what word is likely to come next. This is especially crucial for reading jumbled text – words that are predictable are going to be easier to read in this situation.

3) Of the 15 words in this sentence, there are 8 that are still in the correct order. However, as a reader you might not notice this since many of the words that remain intact are function words, which readers don’t tend to notice when reading. For instance, when people are asked to detect individual letters in a sentence, they are more likely to miss letters in function words.

Healy, A. F. (1976). Detection errors on the word The: Evidence for reading units larger than letters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 2, 235-242.

4) Transpositions of adjacent letters (e.g. porbelm for problem) are easier to read than more distant transpositions (e.g. pborlem). We know from research in which people read words presented very briefly on a computer screen that the exterior letters of words are easier to detect than middle letters – confirming one of the ideas present in the meme. We also know that position information for letters in the middle of words is more difficult to detect and that those errors that are made tend to be transpositions.

McCusker, L. X., Gough, P. B., Bias, R. G. (1981) Word recognition inside out and outside in. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7(3), 538-551.

One explanation of this property of the reading system is that it results from the fact that the position of an exterior letter is less easily confused with adjacent letters. There is only direction in which an exterior letter can move, and there are fewer adjacent letters to ‘mask’ an exterior letter. Both of these properties emerge very naturally from a neural network model in which letters are identified at different positions in an artifical retina.

Shillcock, R., Ellison, T.M. & Monaghan, P. (2000). Eye-fixation behaviour, lexical storage and visual word recognition in a split processing model.Psychological Review 107, 824-851.

The account proposed by Richard Shillcock and colleagues, also suggests another mechanism that could be at work in the meme. They propose a model of word recognition in which each word is split in half since the information at the retina is split between the two hemispheres of the brain when we read. In some of the simulations of their model, Richard Shillcock simulates the effect of jumbling letters in each half of the word. It seems that keeping letters in the appropriate half of the word, reduces the difficulty of reading jumbled text. This approach was used in generating example (1) above, but not for (2) or (3).

5) None of the words that have reordered letters create another word (wouthit vs witohut). We know from existing work, that words that can be confused by swapping interior letters (e.g. salt and slat) are more difficult to read. To make an easy to read jumbled word you should therefore avoid making other words.

Andrews, S (1996) Lexical retrieval and selection processes: Effects of transposed-letter confusability. Journal of Memory and Language, 35(6), 775-800.

6) Transpositions were used that preseve the sound of the original word (e.g. toatl vs ttaol for total). This will assist in reading, since we often attend to the sound of the words even when reading for meaning:

Van-Orden, G. C. (1987) A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound, and reading. Memory and Cognition, 15(3), 181-198.

7) The text is reasonably predictable. For instance, given the first few words of the sentence, you can guess what words are coming next (even with very little information from the letters in the word). We know that context plays an important role in understanding speech that is distorted or presented in noise, the same is probably true for written text that has been jumbled:

Miller, G. A., Heise, G. A., & Lichten, W. (1951). The intelligibility of speech as a function of the context of the test materials. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 41, 329-335.
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Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe… This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself by the word as a whole.

There are two ideas that are being suggested in this sentence. Essentially, the author is correct, people do not ordinarily read each letter in a word individually – except in a relatively rare condition following brain injury known as letter-by-letter reading, as described in the following:

Warrington, E.K., & Shallice, T. (1980). Word-form dyslexia. Brain, 103, 99?112.

There is also evidence to suggest that information in the shape of an entire word plays an important role in reading. For instance, "CaSe MiXiNg" substantially slows down reading:

Mayall, K., Humphreys, G.W., & Olson, A. (1997). Disruption to word or letter processing? The origins of case-mixing effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 23, 1275?1286.

However, since “word shape” includes information on the position of internal letters (especially where they contain ascending and descending elements), word shape will be disrupted by transpositions.

Following brief presentations of written words, people are often better at guessing what word they saw, rather than guessing individual letters in that word (the “Word Superiority Effect”):

Reicher, G. M. (1969) Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 81(2), 275-280.

However, this demonstration does not imply that reading does not involve any process that occurs at the level of individual letters. A recent paper in Nature presents a new piece of evidence for letter-level processes in word reading:

Pelli, D. G., Farell, B., Moore, D.C. (2003) The remarkable inefficiency of word recognition, Nature, 423, 752-756.

In this paper, Pelli and colleagues show that when reading words that have been distorted by presenting each letter in visual noise (like an out of tune television), readers do not perform as well as an ‘ideal observer’ who can recognise words based on their shape alone. Instead, their participants only perform as well as they could if they were recognising words based on their individual letters.

Clearly, the debate about whether we read using information from individual letters or from whole words is far from over. Demonstrations of the ease or difficulty of reading jumbled texts seem likely to play an important role in our understanding of this process. For instance:

Perea, M., & Lupker, S. J. (2003). Does jugde activate COURT? Transposed-letter confusability effects in masked associative priming. Memory and Cognition.

Another extremely relevant paper that just caught my eye is this:

Perea, M., & Lupker, S. J. (2003). Transposed-letter confusability effects in masked form priming. In S. Kinoshita and S. J. Lupker (Eds.), Masked priming: State of the art (pp. 97-120). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

What Perea and Lupker did was to present words for lexical decision (is this a real word?) and measure response times to press one of two buttons (yes/no). These target words are preceeded by very brief presentations (50msec) of another letter string, which is masked, and so invisible to participants. However, the influence of this masked word can be shown on response times. For instance, response times are faster if USHER is preceded by "uhser" than if preceded by "ushre". That is, middle letter transpositions "prime" a neighbouring word more than extrerior letter transpositions. The same phenomenon that is at the heart of the earlier demonstration.

I would be grateful for any comments and suggestions that people have on this page, whatever your level of expertise. I will try to update this page with more information on the internet meme, and on related work on reading, if people are interested. Maybe one day, there will be a group of researchers at Cambridge University who will make a scientific break-through by studying the reading of jumbled text…
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Other comments:

1) Ted Warring posted a link to an algorithm that is much better than humans at deciphering scrambled text. This is perhaps unsurprising – I’m sure I’m not the only person out there who has used a computer program to solve a particularly taxing anagram.

2) Bruce Murray from Auburn University, Alabama, USA points to the following quote as representative of a line of research showing that misspellings (and letter transpositions) do disrupt the reading process:

“Regardless of semantic, syntactic, or orthographic predictability, the eye seems to process individual letters … Disruptions in adult readers’ eye movements indicate that the visual system tends to catch the slightest misspelling.”

(from Adams, M. J. (1990) Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 101)

There’s an interesting issue here which is that the subjective impression of difficulty that one gets from reading a jumbled text may be quite different from a more objective measure of reading difficulty obtained using an eye-tracker (a device that measures the pattern of eye movements made when people read printed text).

Bruce also pointed out that the original text and some discussion has been been posted on the “Urban Legends Reference Page”.

3) Peter Hebels has made a Visual Basic program for generating jumbled texts. As he says:

I’ve made a nice open source program in Visual Basic, this program can do the letter randomiztion automatticly for you. It randomizes only the middle letters of a word, it doesn’t change the place of the first and last letters, also special characters like commas and periods arent affected. You can download the program and source here:

http://home.zonnet.nl/hebels13/letterreplacer.zip

You’ll need the Visual Basic runtime files to be on your system if you want to run the executable, the installation for this files can be found here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/vb60pro/install/6/Win98Me/EN-US/VBRun60.exe

4) Clive Tooth has found what may be most ambiguous jumbled sentence (using words like “salt” which becomes “slat” when transposed)

"The sprehas had ponits and patles"

This might come out as…

The sherpas had pitons and plates.

The shapers had points and pleats.

The seraphs had pintos and petals.

The sphaers had pinots and palets.

The sphears had potins and peltas.

Clive lists some of the more obscure words in this set of possible readings:

palets: paleae (a part of a grass flower)

peltas: shields

pinots: grapes

potins: copper alloys

sphaers, sphears: both old form of ’spheres’

5) Stephen Sachs has written a CGI script to jumble text. Simply enter your text into the www page and press the button for a newly scrambled text.
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Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Maarten van Casteren, Kathy Rastle and Tim Rogers for comments and suggestions on this page.
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Last modified 30/10/03, Matt Davis
rsity.

Dawn

Since she is partially the reason i stopped blogging and at the same time one of the reasons i still blog now, so i should talk of her. I was trying to think of some stories to tell you, so i just started typing hoping thoughts would flow as i went along. You would look at her and think she was a fitness nut, though like most of you girls out there she thought her butt was way too big. Other than that she was thin, not unhealthy thin, but too thin, at least that’s what i thought. The cigarettes were one of the reasons for that, she had such fantastic will power in most other parts of her life, but those damn cigarettes, she just couldn’t let go of. Truthfully i thought that would be what took her from her kids too early, and i used that argument with her in hopes of making her quit. I told her of the family members of mine that were taken too early, like my grandpa, uncle buddy and others. There was only one other part of her life that she sometimes showed a weakness in, that was her need to be loved. Micky, the boys biological father, was to the best of my knowledge her longest solid relationship. They were both young, stubborn, and had not good examples in their lives for how a man and woman should act together. So destiny and dysfunction took over and doomed their marriage from the start, she was very angry at him, and she showed that in so many ways, i think somewhere deep inside she knew what was needed for her boys to be happy. And was mad at herself for not being able to figure it all out and mad at Micky for the same reasons, she wanted to have the ideal family but struggled with the mechanics of it. She did the best she could, quite admirably i might add, but unfulfilled none the less. She laughed and smiled and put on the happy face. But those times when we were just sitting there in solitude with a daiquiri or some other spirit, telling stories and just shooting the breeze, i would feel a longing in her voice and hear a desire to have that perfect life in the words she spoke. A comfort to be able to talk to someone and wear those feelings on her sleeve. I really miss her, I’m still pissed at her for leaving too soon and don’t know when I’ll stop being mad. I will never stop missing her and remembering those times when we’d just sit and talk and open up to each other, other than my ex’s, i think no one knew me more than her, it was therapy for both of us and now I’ll have to pay for that now, in more than one way.

Credit Fairy

Ok i know it’s “only a commercial” but there seems to be some glaring social similarities in this little farce. Women are in general, not every woman before you make a comment, are really bad at picking Mr. right. I do not know who taught you but, picking a man who believes in a “Credit Fairy” is a sign that you need some intense therapy. If the psychologists are to be believed, a girl will pick a man very similar to her father. HHHmmmm!! Maybe your mom should be the one seeking professional help, or maybe your grandparents should seek help, how far back does this foolishness go, when was the first instance of someone seeking the credit fairy. Maybe it started in this family with the tooth fairy, Santa, the Easter bunny and Walt Disney in general filling all these impressionable minds with  this junk. This could be that the tree of “fairy-ism” is beginning to bare fruit, confusing, deceptive fruit. If a youngster is brought up in the public school system and can’t read any word over three letters or do simple math without taking off his shoes and can’t “carry the one” without pulling down his pants, and couldn’t find the United States on a map of ONLY the United States, then it should be no surprise that so many believe in the credit fairy. We should not find it such a stretch that this kid believes in the “Credit Fairy” well into his adulthood. So in conclusion, raise your standards ladies – don’t date a public school graduate ( I being the exception don’t believe in Santa ), that seems to be the root of all evil.  

UPDATE: 7/2/08 … I hope i never meet those two idiots, you know the husband and wife, cause i will go to jail for murder. I don’t know if it’s just me up late on the computer, but that commercial comes on at least 27 times a night within an hour program. Either it’s the most effective commercial ever or there are an unbelievable number of idiots that believe in the credit fairy. I am gonna have to take blood pressure meds because of that crap.

Pregnant Man Pt 2

I got an affirmative comment on my blog from a woman. It made me think that i was so blind in a rage over this freak, and calling for all “men” to be outraged, that i forgot to call for a rally of women. Yes men should be outraged, however as much as this is an attempt to push male uniqueness aside it should also be seen as an attack on the even more uniqueness of the female. All i can say is that if i (an average male who can only bow down to the strength of your average woman who joyfully and with a smile puts up with us and that curse thing)  were born a woman, i would have killed myself after my first menstrual period, i am not the type to handle that inconvenience for the next 25 to 30 years. We should put women on pedestals just for being willing to endure this thing, and us men, just for the privilege of bringing new life into this world. I know we men contribute but, that is the one and only fun part, then it’s the woman’s problem from there on. To my knowledge no man has ever died in child birth, unless he is standing too close to his wife during labor, and seeing as he talked her into the “natural, no meds approach”. I can see a strong woman chocking the life and any future children (if you get my drift) out of that man. I have often said that the world revolves around approximately 12-15 square inches of real estate. Let’s face it, the girls have us by the shorts, figuratively and sometime literally. Everything we do is to get a girl to sleep in the same room and if were lucky the same bed as us. And everything you girls want, we are willing to get for you with one, and only one favor in return. So for these nuts to say a man can have a baby mocks and minimizes the struggles and sacrifices and pains women endure monthly for that thing that makes the world revolve.

Pregnant Man

OK most of the people who read my blog are of the higher IQ type, so you can read on if you will but, do not take it to heart on what I’m about to write, it is meant for the isolated idiot who may stumble onto my page. With the hope that his/her light will go on in that empty head and expose the tons of cobwebs in there.

Listen up you maladjusted, poorly educated, social engineering, haven’t left the 60’s, left wing red diaper doper/crack babies. IT ISN’T A MAN. It (and by it i mean the thing that is female calling itself a man) is a woman. It is biologically a woman. I am sick and tired of the media showing “the pregnant man cutting it’s grass”, “the father to be just glowing” etc. What type of idiots are we raising in this country when there is no uproar from normal people calling this stupidity what it is, an attempt yet again by the gay and lesbian Mafia dominated media to normalize freaks who would allow their lives to be put on display. P.T.Barnum must be rolling over in his grave so fast that we could hook a generator to his feet and power all of the U.S.’s electrical needs, forever. He has to be trying to talk Saint Peter into letting him go on the grounds that, he was robbed of the correct time period to be on earth, why else would the greatest promoter of freaks not be allowed to be here now, when there are so many more (freaks) than when he was alive.

The fact that they keep trying to drive home the point that it is a pregnant man ought to piss off a lot more men. They have been, and succeeding on too many fronts, i might add, trying to minimize, marginilize and feminize the male in the this society. We are fighting Al Quida all wrong, we should let them in and two senerios come to mind, one the is muslems would not tollerate this crap from hollywood and they would handle the freaks there like they do in other countries or the media would drive the Al Quida to suicide, either way we would have to fight only half of them then.

 

Blogging Again

I’ve been in a fog as of late and havent blogged lately. I went out with a friend of mine to a metairie nightclub to listen to a band. I think it was “the best cover band ever” or something of the like, they wetren’t bad, they were good all things factored in ( like alcohol and really big speekers amd powerful amps). I am really buzzing right now so if there are a bunch of typos then it’s on you if you continue reading as i refuse to use spell check causde the alcohol won’t let me press the correct keys. any way i have found otu that im can stioll hang with the party croude. i am not sure if tits the alcohol talking or what but i fully intend to start tro blogging again as soom as i sober up. god save the queen and damn the torpedosfull speed ahead. give me liberty or give me death. man who gets laid in grass get piece on earth. oh romeo oh romeo where forth art thuogh. OK now i’mjust rambling. SORRY. Giood night oil.

I apparently wrote the above when i got back home from a night out with “dumbass” at a local bar, then saved it and either forgot i did it or just didn’t remember even doing it at all (i know same difference). (gonna leave it as it was done at the time, 5/3/08, you may think “that poor bastard was really drunk” judging from the syntax and grammar, but keep in mind i went to public school, you can let your minds wander, thank god for spell-check, huh?.) I have had some difficulty reckoning with Dawns death. As you may or may not know i had a bout with the vicious form of the flu from the day before Mardi Gras and running on about 4 or 5 weeks later, but never felt really healthy till just lately. I’m not sure what exactly was wrong but if psychological stress can manifest itself into physical problems, lack of sleep, no energy, weird pains, a laundry list of crap. Won’t bore you with details but, whether it was the virus, the struggles with her death, and that time in you life when you reach an age were you contemplate your own mortality or a combination of some or all of the above, the fact remains that i haven’t been able to put more than three words into a coherent sentence, and for your sake kept the keyboard quiet but, i now am feeling better, still not 100% but, not the 5% i was at all this time. Not sure this is even relevant to you or this blog but, it had to be said.