Mystery Of The scrambled words

Mystery Of The scrambled words

In September 2003 , the following paragraph thundred its ways around the internet:

Aoccdring to scheearch at de uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are , the olny iprmoetn be a tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at  the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitill raed it wouthit a problem.Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itself but the wrod as a wlohe.

Like everyone else, i remain amazed at how esy it is to read this paragraph.It certainly is a testament to the flexibility of the human mind.But the paragraoh's main point-that we use only the
first and the last letters of a word when reading and that we read by recognizing wloe words-are actually false.Here's why.


For one thing, the letter tansformations in the paragraph are not random.If te rs are moved anfurther from thier original location, the words beceome much more difficult to read, as we can
see in the following line.

Anidroccg to rcraeseh at Cgdirbmae utisreviny

As for recognizing words by their shapes, the letter transformations in misspelled words ussually alter the pattern of ascending and descending leters and thus their
shapes.If anything, the scrambled paragraph suggests that the word shapes are not important, because we can still readily recognize the tranformed words despite
chages in their shapes.In fact, the consensus among psycologists who study reading is that we recognize words not by their shapes but by looking at letters within a word
in parallel.

   
Sadly, the scrambled paragraph has now entered the realm of urban myth and continues to circulate online.Should anyone send it to your way in the future,
you can confidently reply are just as scrambled as the text.