Can You Raed Tihs? 997
An aoynmnuos raeedr sumbtis: "An interesting tidbit from Bisso's blog site: Scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place. Word of mouth has spread
to other blogs, and articles as well.
From the languagehat site: 'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.'
Jamie Zawinski has also written a perl script to convert normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are scrambled."
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this work for non native speakers? (Score:5, Interesting)
D
grammar still not optional (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally I would never post a comment about grammar, but it is kind of startling that in a block of text that jumbled the absence of 'the', and the swapping of 'is' for 'are' still jump out at you.
Re:Here you go (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Only part of the answer.... (Score:5, Interesting)
So while it is possible to understand words that are not spelled correctly, it can still take a while to understand if the nxet few wdors are not qieut waht you epcext. It is aslo mcuh lses pbatldicree wehn you use lgenor wdros.
I hpoe tihs was an imuilntinag eplamxe!
Mclettat
but try reading one word at a time (Score:2, Interesting)
done at the word level. jump you eyes randomly into
the text and try to read just one word in isolation.
as someone on cogling@ucsd pointed out, there are
also a bunch of non-scrambled key words that help
your brain figure out what the in-betweens should
be. anyhow, point being that it's not a feature
of word recognition that you can read it, but rather
a feature of higher-level reconstruction.
mt
Re:Does this work for non native speakers? (Score:5, Interesting)
You did not mention if she is a fluent reader/writer, speaker, or both? From what you describe I would say that when you said "fluent" you meant as a speaker.
Not entirely accurate (Score:5, Interesting)
If I type
sllpenig it's clear I'm typing "spelling"
but, if I type
slpenlig it's not so clear anymore.
What about: according
Aoccdrnig (as in the article) is ok but...
aocdrncig is not nearly as clear
There's a limit to how far your brain can stretch it. Some consonant pairs your brain DOES intepret much like a single letter, because it's an irregularity in english.
Words that use such consonant pairs and triplets like "tch" are much harder to distinguish when those pairs and triplets (which really sound like a single letter) are split.
Stewey
Re:Does this work for non native speakers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, since I'm not British, the final word of the canonical scramble threw me off:
Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.
I read the rest of the text correctly, but I had a devil of a time figuring out the reference to the Miyazaki film Spirited Away, also known as Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi [nausicaa.net]!
Re:Does this work for non native speakers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Excuse me for being a skeptic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bisso got it from languagehat. Bisso also cites a Nature article that may be related; however, the Nature article clearly deals with hearing time-reversal of segments of spoken sentences, not reading mangled written words. languagehat cites Avva, who languagehat admits doesn't give a source; I can't get to the Avva entry at the moment.
Ha! (Score:5, Interesting)
Please go and feed the the cat.
Bet ya didn't see that, did ya?
Re-read it slowly.
-dave-
Re:Only part of the answer.... (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience (Score:3, Interesting)
While at University I thought I'd take some Xhosa courses and eventually packed it in because I was struggling so much to read Xhosa, though I could speak it better than most of the other kids.
This leads me to think that once one builds a certain familiarity with any language, one can cope with the scramble.
To me, the most interesting part of this discovery/research is that it might find a way to help dyslexic kids. I sure hope so.
Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK? (Score:5, Interesting)
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ gzip g*
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ ls -l
total 304
-rwxr-xr-x 1 anthonym staff 63830 Sep 15 16:33 genesis.text.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 anthonym staff 84945 Sep 15 16:36 genesis.txet.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 anthonym staff 1396 Sep 15 15:56 scrmable.pl
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ gunzip g*
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$ zip genesis.zip g*
adding: genesis.text (deflated 70%)
adding: genesis.txet (deflated 60%)
[anthonym@uniblab scrbameld]$
Interesting. Anyone have an explaination for tihs?
This is old news, here's the original (Score:5, Interesting)
Titled: Do Spellings Matter?
"... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and
reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon.
Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel
prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang"
And if you liked *that* one so much, you might like this one too:
Read the sentence below carefully:
"I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness".
This is a sentence where the Nth word is N letters long.
e.g. 3rd word is 3 letters long, 8th word is 8 letters long and so on.
And if you like that one too, here is another one you can try to kill your boredom...
While sitting, draw clockwise circles on the ground with your right foot. While doing that, try drawing the number "6" in air with your right hand.
Your foot will change direction.
Re:Does this work for non native speakers? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's probably because she cannot read English directly. English is my third language, but I have been reading English-language texts for years, so now I can read it directly, without having to decypher or translate anything. So yes, I can raed toshe srbalcemd txtes wtohiut mcuh dtfcifuily.
(Funnily, it is very hard for me to actually understand what I'm reading if I'm reading it aloud. Probably the text-to-speech process takes resources that would be normally spent understanding the text ;-). That doesn't happen when I read Spanish or Galician (my two mother languages).
Re:ynlo gcramblins eht tirsf dna tasl setterl (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, this post was more readable for me than the article or many other posts in this discussion. I was quite amazed at how switching the bookend letters made the whole word look backward, but recognizably so, as if all the letters had been reversed. And reading a word backwards (at least for me) is an even easier task than reading the scrambled middle letters (which, I'll admit was suprisingly easy).
Jacob Fugal
Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Experimentally, a pure-phonics approach has proven to have the highest success rate. However, these results would suggest that whole-word approach *does* map onto some important cognitive structure . Perhaps this means that, once past the basic level, whole-word techniques would prove to be valuable in turning beginning readers into advanced readers.
Simpler Perl scrambler (Score:3, Interesting)
#!/usr/bin/perl -p
# scram: scrambles the innards of words
# Usage: scram <input-text >scrambled-text
# Craig Berry (20030915)
s/
([a-z]) # Initial letter
([a-z]{2,}) # Two or more middle letters
([a-z]) # Final letter
# Fisher-Yates shuffle
sub shuffle {
my @chars = split
my $i = @chars;
while ($i) {
my $j = rand $i--;
@chars[$i, $j] = @chars[$j, $i];
}
return join '', @chars;
}
Re:Does this work for non native speakers? (Score:3, Interesting)
My native tounge is not english, nor do I live in a englishspeaking country, but I had no problem what so ever reading the post.
I do, however, read a lot of english litterature and have been doing so for the last 13 years.
Common technique! (Score:3, Interesting)
However, it also makes reading out-loud difficult when you are used to skipping words when you read them.
Original research (Score:2, Interesting)
The original article that particular blog is based on can be found here [nature.com]
Abstract is here [nature.com]
and full text (HTML and PDF w/ images) for those without access to Nature is here [scienceforums.net]
However, this research was done on words that are reversed, not internally scrambled. I have been unable to locate research on the letter order within longer words, however the principle is accurate and I'm sure it exists.
funny you mention this (Score:3, Interesting)
We were trying to figure out why text messaging on phones is such a hit in Japan, and yet everyone over here thinks its rather clumsy.
The study basically pointed out, that to say something like, "I love you", requires you to "type" a lot of characters to convey that message. Using Kanji, one or two characters will suffice. I should've known, (being married to a chinese person), but after I thought about it, it makes a lot of sense. I have flashbacks of watching old chinese movies, and seeing the characters say a few characters, and the english subtitles would be a paragraph long.... And conversly watching english movies, and the guy rambles on-and-on, and the subtitles contains a handful of chinese characters...
Re:We use short words (Score:1, Interesting)
Is tihs an iommensurablnce paogicolenomenhl hesipothys or the mfestatioinan of the iilitteligibny of iiomatidc iividualistidnc icommunicationrntes?
Is tihs an isurablcommenne phenomenological hesipothys or the manifestation of the iigibilitlteny of imatiodic iistilduadivinc iationccommuniernts?
Is tihs an immensurablcone pologicaenmnohel hhesiypots or the mifestationan of the iibilitglienty of itiadiomc iividualistidnc intercommunications?
Is tihs an immensurablocne penomenologicahl hipothesys or the mnifestatioan of the iteligibilitny of iatimdioc iidualistindivc iommunicationcterns?
Is this an icommensurablne phenomenological hhesipotys or the matioanifestn of the ibilitielignty of iatidiomc istialidividunc intiorcommunicaetns?
Is this an imensurablcomne pologicaennomehl hesipothys or the mestatioifnan of the iiliteligibtny of itiamiodc ialistividundic iationtercommunicns?
Is tihs an ilommensurabcne phenomenological hothesiyps or the mestatiofanin of the inteligibility of iomatidic idividualistinc iationcommunicertns?
Is this an isurablmenmncoe penologicaenomhl hipothesys or the mtionifestaan of the iitbilnteligiy of iiomatidc ialistidividunc itioncommunicaertns?
Is this an icommensurablne pnomenologicahel hothesiyps or the mfestatioanin of the ilitibinteligy of iomatiidc iidualistividnc inicationntercommus?
Is this an irablmensucomne pgicaonomenolhel hypothesis or the mestatioanifn of the igibilitnteliy of iomatiidc ilistividuadinc intercommunications?
Is this an immensurablcone pnologicahenomel hisypothes or the matioifestann of the itlinteligibiy of idiomatic iistindividualc inotercommunicatins?
Ascenders, Descenders, & ALL CAPS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Only part of the answer.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just english? and for all words? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like a good way to confuse the ole word detector. Four variants spring to mind for an original word of n letters. In all variants, hold the first and last character constant and mix the interior letters. First, can a new n-letter word be formed. Second, can a new (n-1)-letter word be formed including the original first letter, but excluding the original last letter. Third, can a new (n-1)-letter word be formed including the original last letter, but excluding the original first letter. Fourth, can a new (n-2)-letter word be formed excluding both the original first and last letters. I suppose that if n is large (e.g. >= ~7), the pattern could be continued or multiple new valid words might be formed from the n letters.
The resulting false clues should tend to mislead the reader.
Another way to fool the old noggin would be to start with a misspelled original.
Re:ynlo gcramblins eht tirsf dna tasl setterl (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny, at first I thought all the words were just backwards. When I started to read them as such, it made a lot more sense.
An experiment like this might be better performed with single words instead of entire sentences, as the human mind excels at finding and deciphering patterns.
Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nit: Huffman coding is just a technique for taking a symbol alphabet with associated probability model and generating a minimal-entropy prefix-free binary code.
It is not a compression algorithm, though it often appears as the last step in a compression algorithm. In particular, it doesn't deal with the problem of how you generate the probability model, or what your symbol alphabet is.
The gzip algorithm, for example, uses "Huffman compression" just fine, but it still does poorly on scrambled text.
Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow! (Score:1, Interesting)
Korean pictogram based? I think not (Score:2, Interesting)
Chinese is ideographic, and Japanese combines Chinese ideograms ("kanji") mixed with phonetic syllable signs ("kana"). Korean has an actual alphabet ("hangul"), except that instead of the letters coming in a row as in Latin, Cyrillic, or Hebrew, each syllable is packed into a box. Korean used to be written with borrowed Chinese ideograms, but nowadays the alphabet dominates writing.
You can Read more about Hangul [wikipedia.org], but you may have to have Korean support installed on your OS to display the Hangul characters.
jwz did it in perl, I did it in PHP (Score:0, Interesting)
http://junglist.org/jumble.php
src @ http://junglist.org/jumble.php
too bad i am not cool like jwz
Re:jwz did it in perl, I did it in PHP (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:I downloaded the script - the copyright is no g (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, I'm not so sure about that -- is a license rendered invalid just because contains spelling errors? I strongly suspect not.
(Anyway, the copyright is enforcable because everything is copyrighted by default, even if it has no notice at all. The interesting question is whether the license I put on that thing actually grants you any rights. I think it probably does.)
Bit of a simplistic article... (Score:5, Interesting)
Turhgoh = Through
A topic that does not seem to have had much coverage in this article is the actual iconic visual recognition that our brains appear to use in word recognition.
Obviously each word approximates a patterned rectangle (serif fonts emphasize this further) with occasional outliers (ie. t, y, l, and any other letters that protrude above or below the base rectangle).
People with poor eyesight rely on this fuzzy but fast recognition frequently. In fact there is a classic psych experiment based around displaying a word that iconically is very similar to another word, while simultaneously presenting a context that implies the second word, and asking the subject to record the word. The subject mis-records the word roughly 90% of the time.
Q.
Errors and inconsistencies (Score:2, Interesting)
Examples from the paragraph I tested with are "worldview", "afterlife", and "humankind". I'm sure iterations that keep the halves partially seperate would be readable, but ones I came up with (like "wirovdelw") simply make no sense.
Other, larger words that I've noticed do not work are "consciousness" and "unenlightened", though I'm sure it wouldn't be too isn't unusual to expect large words to begin to obfuscate themselves too much.
This doesn't explain the shorter words that seem to obfuscate very readily, such as "religion" and "autonomous". Once letters and/or vowels become repitious and clump together, the word seems to be more difficult to readily decrypt. I can also confirm this is true from my experience of occasionally playing TextTwist [yahoo.com] on Yahoo! Games.
(end random paper-avoiding post)
Re:ok, like four PhDs here (Score:2, Interesting)
2. Does this work in other languages? I am guessing japanese (at least) would not work....
3. What implications does this have for cryptology, in that you can't look for strings anymore?
Big Bonus question:
4. If 2 is false, in that it doesn't work for other languages, is this intrinsic property of English the reason that English has become the language of global business or is it simply a by-product of English being spoken by those who sailed the world and conquered the world (British and American Imperialism)? ie because English is recognisable after mangling, is that the reason that it is so "popular"?
Inquiring minds want to know....
andy
Re:Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am no reading expert but a good friend of mine is. From what I gathered from him is that the actual act of "decoding" a written word into a spoken word is the very first step in reading.
If you don't know what the sound the letter "P" makes you can never ever read the letter. So the basics of reading _is_ phonics. Phonics is not some kind of "method" of teaching how to read, it is a process that every single person reading this text right now has to go through in order to decode the imagery into a sound.
Then once the person get's good enough at it they no longer have to focus concious attention to the decoding process as it becomes automatic.
But even I as a very skilled reader when I run into a very new, large or complex word I _have_ to sound it out, or attempt to, because that is the only way a human being can read.
Decoding visual symbols to auditory symbols = phonics.
Then after the steps of decoding comes comprehension, which is totally seperate from decoding. (I am sure I have the order of events wrong here...) A child can sound out the sentence-
"Frank went to the market to buy a german shepard"
-but they still need to understand what they decoded. Whole language is a guessing game based on assumptions and values that are not concretely 100% based on a system of the intetional ordering of the letters in relation to their auditory equivilants.
As adults we can use whole language easily in the sense that we can guess words based on previous knowledge of the word (written and spoken) but not so for a small child that has never decoded any words.
As an example my daughter likes to guess words because that is how they started in Kindegarten, with sight words ( a huge mistake ). So she started with the habit of merely memorizing shapes of words without even considering the auditory values of the letters of those words.
After teaching my daughter some very basic decoding skills based on help from my friend, my daughter learned to read words she's never seen before. She read the word "giraffe" all by herself using her new found decoding skills. I gurantee you that no skills of the "whole language" idealogy would come close to providing this kind of reading ability in a 6 year old kid.
Can you explain in detail, step by step how you know how to read the word "giraffe"? In whole language you don't have steps to parse the sounds out and recombine them.
Here's the logic.
1. "g" sounds like G as in "Great"
2. "ir" sounds like "er" as in "Her"
3. "a" sounds like "a" in "hat"
4. "ff" sounds like "f" in "fast"
5. "e" sounds like "e" in "see"
Then the child comes initially with the word "geraffy" when it should be "jeraf"
The child at age 6 knows many thousands of words, and does not recognize "geraffy" so...
1. Child recognizes the silent "e"
2. Over compensates and makes the "a" sound like "a" in "bay"
3. "g" can sound like "j"
4. Now has word "jerayf"
5. Reverts the "ay" to "a", considers it a mistake, and gets-
6. "jeraf" which is the correct sound, at which time the child jumps up and down with glee.
But even easier is reading the word in a sentence. "I saw a giraffe at the zoo today"
As competent readers we automatically do all the calculations that this child does when we find a new word. After a number of times reading a word, the decoding is either automatic and extermely fast or as I like to view it in my own mind, there is a pre-rendered cached version of the word "giraffe" sitting in my mind, so when I see the word in it's whole, I know it's meaning without having to completely parse the word a single block at a time (by letter) but by the whole word itself.
Some of this is my opinion and the rest is raw fatual data.
Regarding question two, I think. (Score:2, Interesting)
Modern English is the offspring of many different older languages (as you may know). These languages all had varying ways of representing different sounds with the alphabet given to them by the Romans. When English took all of these methods and combined them into one language. Thus, there are many different ways of creating the same sound, or phoneme [reference.com].
Therefore, English does not encode the spoken language into text exactly. Though there are some sounds that can only be created one way ('ng' and 'ch' come to mind), many can be spelled numerous ways. For example: whir, were, and work have the same sound in them, but are spelled differently. This makes spelling words in English more difficult, but makes identifying misspelled words easier. You could say English now comes with error-correction. This has no doubt helped it remain in existence, despite its lack of consistent grammar rules and general lack of user-friendliness.
Disclaimer: I blame any grammatical or logical errors on my lack of sleep. Now I'm going to bed.
Doesnt really work with German (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothin' in the middle matters, huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wll, wht abt vwls? Ths r nncssry mst f th tm, t. N fct, nc y gt rd f th vwls nd mddl lttrs, y cn s hw trly wstfl th nglsh lngg rlly s!
This reminds me of that old programming axiom:
Every program has at least one bug.
Every program can be reduced in size by at least one instruction.
Therefore, by induction every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.
How to raed (Score:1, Interesting)
Or, if you prefer...
Interestingly I'm studying this controversial phenomenon at the Department of Linguistics at Aberystwyth University and my extraordinary discoveries wholeheartedly contradict the publicised findings regarding the relative difficulty of instantly translating sentences. My researchers developed a convenient contraption at http://www.aardvarkbusiness.net/tool that demonstrates that the hypothesis uniquely warrants credibility if the assumption that the preponderance of your words is not extended is unquestionable. Apologies for adopting a contradictory viewpoint but, theoretically speaking, lengthening the words can manufacture an incongruous statement that is virtually incomprehensible.