Super cool psycho-linguistic discovery:

[Dookus]

"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."


http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/15/2227256


wow! I majored in linguistics and find this fascinating. I read the paragraph with no trouble.

[patdem]

1. No wuhnder we have troble telling the durnks form the lehs durnks

onsline? That is amazing! Whoda thought?

[youngred]

2. that is incredible

had no problem reading that. very cool

[radwriter0555]

5. Nooo. taht is iedrnclbie!

I had no pberlom rianedg taht eheitr!

The srhot wdors are hrad tugohh!

[SpiralHawk]

3. Total BS: Wabfari Beebool redig frednich

Narfon hibbireena redooley -- you know what I mean?

[Dookus]

4. heheh...

nope. Cuz those ain't real words with the first and last letter intact.


Npoe. Cuz tohse ani't rael wrdos wtih the frsit and lsat ltteer ictnat.

[Dookus]

6. An interesting thought...

if there are any educators here, I'd love to hear an opinion.

What does this mean for the whole-language vs. phonics debate? It seems to me that we're using a whole-language approach to reading these misspelled words and doing so with little trouble.

Do even phonics-trained children switch to a whole-world approach at some point?

[inthecorneroverhere]

13. I think they start phonetically and then switch

I think maybe they do at about 3rd or 4th grade. I believe that phonics is the best way to teach children from K-2nd.

As mentioned in another post, I think that reading handwriting samples is a terrific exercise for 3d and 4th graders. This is sort of like a whole-word approach, and it uses very simple materials that are easy to obtain.

My father was a reading teacher who taught Army recruits during WWII and did a lot of remedial English instruction in a lower-income school in California.

[Dookus]

15. cool...

that was my suspicion. Thanks!

on edit:

Do you think that switching from a phonics to a whole-word approach around 8-10 years old would be a worthwile way to continue teaching reading?

Also, is phonics a stepping-stone toward whole-world? In other words, is phonics required in order to get a basic ability, and then it switches over to something else? Is there any INHERENT advantage to phonics other than as a stepping-stone?

I really don't know much about reading education, but I think it's an interesting subject. My father, twin sister, brother, sister-in-law and brother-in-law, as well as my favorite cousin, are all educators.

[inthecorneroverhere]

24. Nat the fat cat....

I tend to think that phonics is rather necessary at the beginning stages e.g. ages 5 or 6 up to 8 or 9 or so. I think that once the child is proficient with a few hundred phonic words and knows his or her diphthongs (those two-letter combinations like th and ph) well, maybe whole-word is OK. I don't really see a reason to emphasize it, though. Once the children are doing well with phonics, they can practice and develop speed, and then, well, they're reading.

As mentioned before, I think that exercises like reading different folks' handwriting are a great idea to teach reading speed, since they help the child to recognize words quickly, although one letter in the word might be a little bit illegible.

It's been a mystery to me, honestly, why some liberal-wing educators defend whole-word for children just starting to read, and why phonics is a 'conservative' thing. I don't see phonics as _either_ conservative or liberal. It's just a method that works for young children who are starting to read. I think that the children need to learn the letters and letter combinations really well. Meanings come easily to children, since children already know the meanings of lots of spoken words.

The books I used to read involved Nat the Fat Cat that Sat on a Mat. They were effective. I was taught to read at home. Many of my 2nd and 3d grade classmates had a lot more trouble with sounding out the words in their readers.

[Dookus]

26. Thanks....

I've never understood how reading education became politicized. Similarly, we ended up with a goddamned statewide initiative on bilingual education here in California a few years ago.

I think education ought to be left to educators.

Unfortunately, phonics vs. whole-word has become politicized, too. I honestly don't remember how I learned to read. I know I started reading at age 4, when my grandmother (who lived with us) would pay me a quarter for every "Little Big Book" I read. I also remember that at age 6 I could read better than my grandmother (who, god bless her, never went past grade school and married at 14).

[inthecorneroverhere]

31. mechanics

My father had a set of readers that involved Nat the Fat Cat. Nat sat on a mat. I really don't remember the rest. (Yes, I asked Daddy why we couldn't have a cat, too). LOL.

Once I had read the first couple of readers, my father bought me a 'fun' book. One of the books was about space. This was kind of like the reward for getting through the reader. Then, we'd go through the next reader. Then he got me another 'fun' book about animals or something.

We did our reading on the couch in the living room. My dad loved Vivaldi and other baroque era music. Usually we'd listen to a side of an LP and then do some reading. TV and radio was off when we did the reading. The TV played only about an hour a day or so. When I was little, radio was the classical FM station.

The method he used was effective. I don't mean to brag, but I did great in spelling and went to DC for the National Spelling Bee, although I bombed out rather early in the national. Got to shake Rosalynn Carter's hand.

Didn't do so well later in school and college with the creative part of writing.

[rucky]

28. Hukt on fonix wurkt fer mee

:crazy:

[rock]

7. Knocked me on my ass

Linguistics is a hobby of mine. I had no idea such a principle existed.

[Dookus]

8. *high-five*

Linguistics is just so damned fascinating, and it's always a pleasure to meet others that share the interest.

This is really a tangent of linguistics. It seems to have a lot to do with brain function, pattern recognition, dual processing and lots of other really fascinating fields.

Psycho-linguistics was my favorite class.

[Dookus]

11. Here's another interesting tidbit...

when the first TWO letters are left intact...

randomising letters in the middle of words 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."

[inthecorneroverhere]

16. implication for language learning

Yo pienso que este resulto de investigacion tiene relacion de proceso mental de adquieremiento de idiomas extranjeras. Cuando persona sabe doscientos o trescientos de palabras extranjeras, se puede leer una frase, y 'pensar' que significa una o dos palabras nuevas en la frase.

I think this result has implications for the mental process of foreign language learning. When someone knows two or three hundred foreign words, they can read a sentence, and 'think' about the meaning of one or two new words in the sentence.

However, I think this result is pretty much limited to languages of Indo-European structure, as opposed to languages such as Mandarin that are based on character recognition/memorization and tones.

[radwriter0555]

19. Yeah? Try doin dat in CHINESE!

HAH!

But you're right, I can always muddle through italian, spanish, and french quite easily...

[Dogmudgeon]

23. Interesting enough (non-Indo-European languages)

I've been studying Basque; which, as you might know, is a non-Indo-European language. In fact, it's quite different than even languages like Finnish and Hungarian, which are also non-Indo-European. Many lingusts think Basque is the sole remnant of a language family wiped out by Sino-Asiatic nomads and early Indo-Europeans around 5000 BC.

I tried the word-scrambling trick with some elementary Basque text, and was astonished to find that I was able to understand nearly all the words, in spite of still having a very small Euskara vocabulary.

Basque is polysynthetic, meaning a lot of words are combinations of smaller words, with suffixes carrying the meaning that "particles" (small words, e.g., of, the, from, this) do in English or French. You'd think that scrambling such a word, but keeping only the first and last letter, would make it harder to recognize, relative to English.

Nope. It worked as well in Basque as in English.

It's an interesting observation.

--bkl

[inthecorneroverhere]

32. interesting

Interesting!

Is Basque difficult to learn? I am a little weak on memorization, so Chinese would be really hard for me, since I think it's necessary to know at least 500 or 1,000 characters to read or understand anything.

I do OK with languages where you can memorize a core of maybe a few hundred common words and then learn others by reading sentences and 'guessing' the unknown word or two. As long as the language has an alphabet, this works i.e. it works in Russian as well as in Spanish. For example, this is the idea (in English): "I took my calico uzhasno to the veterinarian to get a rabies shot, and it hissed at the vet." Well, I would guess that 'uzhasno' means 'cat' or something rather similar in this sentence.

I think I've heard that Arabic and Hebrew have the vowels as dots (I don't know what the proper name is) above the letters. I wonder if it would work in Arabic or Hebrew?

No hblao Esukara preo qiuazs (quizas) pedue uasr copnecto (concepto) en epnosal.

[Interrobang]

37. Hebrew? No.

I know enough about Hebrew (not a lot, mind, but enough) to tell you that if you scrambled Hebrew letters in words, you'd most likely wind up with other words, not just semi-recognizeably scrambled words. This is partly because in Hebrew, vowels are written as diacritics ("points," you called them "dots") around (below, above, inside) the letters; and partly because Hebrew has a very high letter entropy rate -- there are only 24 letters, and some of them represent the same "letter," only at the end of the word (as in nun sofit and pe sofit), and there are many letters that make the same or similar sounds -- tet/tav/tzade, samech/shin, he/chet/kaf/qof, alef/ayin/yod... In fact, you can have two words in Hebrew that look exactly the same when printed (unpointed, usually) that are completely different words ("Hannukah" and "hannukiah" spring to mind).

Another language this completely wouldn't work in is Japanese. Switch around letters in Japanese, and you're likely to have new words again.

I hypothesize that any language using a syllabary, a logogrammic/ideogrammic character set (or set of sets), or which omits phonemes in its grapheme set or expresses them as diacritics (as in Hebrew or Arabic) would not be amenable to moderate scrambling.

Personally, I'm a little suspicious of the methodology in this study. I'd like to get the original paper and read it for myself. I suspect that there were other conditions at work here of which I/we are not aware...kind of like those papers I was reading on metaphoric versus non-metaphoric computer interfaces, every single one of them forgetting completely that ALL modern computer interfaces (even command lines!) are metaphor sets! D'oh! (In other words, I'm waiting for the "D'oh!" factor here.)

(By the way, take it from a hyperliterate that scrambling DOES impair reading speed -- it knocks mine down by at least a ninth, or 100 wpm or so. Yes, I read English at 900 wpm, what of it?)

[inthecorneroverhere]

39. try ths?

Intrstng. I wnt and read up on Hbrw and Arbc. I dn't thnk that scrmbling would wrk. But, try this?

But, if I drp sngly-occrng mddle vwls frm wrds tht are at least four lttrs lng, I thnk it's undrstndble. In othr wrds:

1. Nvr drp a bgnnng or endg vwl.
2. Nvr drp any vwls frm wrds lss thn 4 lttrs lng.
3. Nvr drp two vwls that occr nxt to each othr.

Ths is knd of lke shrthnd, srt of.

Edt: spllng LOL :silly:

[inthecorneroverhere]

9. scramble

I believe that I was trained in phonics, but learned a sort of a whole-word approach when it came time to learn how to read handwriting. I had an aunt who had perfectly good handwriting (as far as adults go), but she wrote so quickly that some of her vowels resembled each other. When I was really little, however, it was hard to read her writing, because I confused some of the letters. My dad, who was a reading teacher, actually _wanted_ me to read her handwriting, because it taught me how to read faster, by recognizing the whole word.

I don't think the whole-word approach is the correct one to teach children when they are first learning to read. I like phonics for first and second grades. But, once the children can read a couple of hundred words, I like the idea of presenting handwritten samples to the children so they can build their recognition skills.

I msses my mind up too mcuh to wirte and jmblue the indsies (insides) of wrods. But I can raed it jsut fnie.

[Wickerman]

10. Very cool

I was skeptical, then, I couldn't figure out Cheerio. As I got it I figured out its because I don't use it, don't see it, wasn't expectign it. That cmenetd the cnpocet for me.

[Dookus]

14. Yup...

Cheerio threw me for the same reasons.

I would also suspect that phonemes expressed with two letters (sh, ch, ph, th, etc.) when split up, make it harder to understand. That would be an interesting theory to test.

treachery

tareechry

vs.

tacrehrey

[Zuni]

12. It seems to be true

although most words were phonetically similar and there were some words spelled correctly that guided the reader along.

Nevertheless, still cool.

[dofus]

17. The crucial thing here is

"skilled readers".

I am personally opposed to teaching a "whole language" approach to teaching reading. Something like 85 percent of all English words are spelled phonetically. We just have a somewhat more complicated set of spelling rules than does Spanish or Italian, or even French.

If you start out with whole language, the reader has no good way to figure out unfamiliar words. If you start with phonics, there's no end to the words you can figure out on your own. Switching to a "whole language" approach is not a very meaningful thing to do.

What makes people think "whole language" is a good way to learn, is that skilled readers can gulp up entire words, phrases, or even short sentences without stopping to asses every letter and syllable. But the sounds of the letters and syllables are still important.

Two other friends emailed me a slightly different version of the scrambled words, and I still contend it doesn't take into account words that are already very similar, where scrambling internal letters would create genuine confusion. But I don't feel like trying to figure out some of those examples.

I fear people will use this research as an excuse not to spell correctly.

(I'm an old maid English teacher at heart)

[Dookus]

18. thanks, dofus

first... prepare to be called "doofus". Happens to me all the time :)

Second, thanks for your input. I wasn't in any way endorsing one method of reading-acquisition over another. I'm simply not qualified to even have an opinion, although I've been interested in the subject for a long time.

Believe me, I'm as much of an old-maid English teacher as you - I started reading William Safire's "On Language" books at 15 and by the time I was in college, I'd read all the popular works on grammar and usage. In college, I majored in Italian and Linguistics.

I hope nobody will take this as license to misspell. I think it does, however, have a lot of bearing on cognitive linguistics and language acquisition. We should take the lessons that are there at face value. From these examples, it seems clear to me that at a certain point, we don't read phonetically.

(I sure hope I didn't misspell anything in this post.) :)

[inthecorneroverhere]

27. processing information

I think the real test would be to see if a child learning to read understands things like:

The Crae Braes are gnoig to scoohl.

It is my guess that this would be difficult for a 6-7 year old to figure out, but easy for a child aged 9-10.

The reason is that I think that the 6-7 year olds are sounding the words out using phonics while the older children are recognizing and remembering entire words. You can still use a phonics approach with older kids, but by the time the kid has learned several hundreds of words, it's pretty much superfluous, although it's useful for spelling.

To make it an adequate test, the researchers would need to scramble passages of text that are at the precise reading level of the child. In other words, older children would get more difficult scrambled passages than younger ones. Since words need to be at least four letters to scramble, it might be difficult to test children who have been reading less than 6 months or so.

I believe that the test gave insight into how adult readers process information, but perhaps doesn't show much about how people are thinking when they're just learning.

[unblock]

20. uabbceefiiiikllnnrve!

abellostuy ibcdeilnre!
geeiulnny aiiohnnsstg!
rarkblamey icallnetlettuy santumilitg!


i think the innards have to be "random" in a particular way. it's NOT the case that any old randomization will work.

the key is that if the innards have a recognizable pattern of their own, that pattern jumps out. processing that pattern, realizing that it doesn't make sense, then finding a second pattern that's different from the first one, processing THAT pattern, and finally acheiving understanding can really slow you down.

the obvious strategies are:
1) alphabetise the innards
2) group all the vowels, then all the consonents.
3) group all like letters together (the 4 i's in a row in the header don't shed much light on the word)
4) if you can form a new word out of the innards, so much the better, and you earn scrabble points, too!

oh, and context helps too, of course. only giving 2 or 3 long words makes it a lot harder

...

[Dookus]

21. ummmmm.....

I agree (I think).

From what I read, it was a true randomization of letters between the first and last letters.

I'd like to see it done to a full chapter of a book. I need to track down the perl script referenced in the original article.

[inthecorneroverhere]

25. hree

Taht prel sicprt is hree:

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl

:-)

[Dookus]

22. bump....

this is cool, dammit! ummm... or...

raed tihs! it's pterty dman asoweme!

[inthecorneroverhere]

29. Regarding foreign languages

Spanish is a quite phonetic language. My father had the opportunity to teach a lot of students whose first language was Spanish. He brought samples of students' writing home with him, and I often got to read them. :-) (This was years ago).

What was an interesting discovery for me was that some of the students for whom Spanish was the first language were quite good writers in English. These students were literate in Spanish, and obviously transferred their literacy into English. Others, who were also probably less literate in Spanish, were in the remedial classes, along with a rather large number of students whose only language was English. Some of the writing samples from the kids who only spoke English seemed worse than the remedial-level bilingual samples. Other samples of writing by native English speakers were quite good, but what baffled me were the samples that were terrible. My theory on this was that because Spanish is more phonetic than English, it is easier to learn to read and spell in Spanish than in English. So, I figured that weak students who learn to read in Spanish might get to fourth or fifth grade level a little quicker than weak students who learn to read in English.

Also, there are some things that make more 'sense' (at least to me) in Spanish than in English. For example, adjectives are pluralized. Las iglesias viejas y las mujeres bonitas.

Ach, traurig für die armen Deutschen mit ihrer schwierigen Sprache! (sorry for the Germans with their difficult language!)

In high school, I studied Spanish. Took Russian in college. Father wanted me to take German in h.s., but it wasn't offered. He would have rather I studied German than Russian in college. I only took up German later, and it is more difficult for me than Spanish, and even a little bit harder than Russian. I speak and read a lot less of it than I do Spanish or Russian. I think this is because I was younger when I learned Russian.

[Booberdawg]

30. itnersetnig!

jsut us inosmincas up now

[Dookus]

33. Bwoboeidg!

Wlocem!

[Booberdawg]

34. It's a lot easier to read than it is to type!

I had to type it all out right first and then swap the letters around.

Hi Dookie! :hi:

[GoddessOfGuinness]

35. Anzamig!

Tulry anzamig!

[FloridaJudy]

36. Houkt on Fonix Wurked four Mi

'Nuff sed.

[Interrobang]

38. Are you scoffing at phonics? I hope not...

If you are, I dare you to learn a foreign language without learning phonics...

Go ahead... I dare you. I double-dog dare you...

I don't think you can. I'm working on languages four through seven right now, and I've learned phonics for every single one of them. The only reason that phonics is such a contentious issue among English-language educators teaching English-speaking children is because those kids are native speakers. Most people absorb the phonics of their native language without too much trouble (except in English we usually need a little help, because English phoneme-to-grapheme match is approaching zero!), but a foreign language is harder. (Insufficient phonics training usually leaves the speaker with a terrible accent!)