Interesting Research Revisited
Last month, when I posted the paragraph whose words had the interior letters jumbled; I did not try to verify its authenticity since it was obviously true, at least for that example. To refresh your memory, here is the paragraph:
Aoccdrnig to 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 total 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. P.S. So sotp cmoplaiinng auobt my dyslexia. Since then my son referred me to an informative article on snopes.com at: http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp which has a lively discussion on this topic with a number of links to other web sites. The one I found most interesting was Dr. Matt Davis' from the Congnition and Brain Sciences Unit of the University of Cambridge at: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/. Dr. Davis gives an analysis of the phenomenon, examples in other languages, and examples of increasing difficulty of comprehension. It appears that this phenomenon goes back to a 1976 British PhD dissertation. He also gives links to web sites and programs that will scramble the letters for you. He also mentions research in scrambling the sounds in the middle of words and the affect on auditory perception. If you are interested in oddball stuff, like I am, you can spend days reading about and playing with this interesting phenomenon. Jim Anderson