Can you raed tihs?

I got this as an e-mail attachment yesterday. It's not the first time I've seen it, but for some reason it really got me thinking this time around:

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

In education circles, there's a lot of discussion about how people most efficiently learn to read. Do they learn best by learning the rules of phonics (sounding out letters and putting those sounds together to make words), or do they best learn by the rote memory of site words? Research seems to support phonics (which is why you hear commercials for "Hooked on Phonics" and not commercials for "Hooked on Memorized Words"), but this e-mail message makes it pretty obvious that as we become better readers, we tend to rely more and more on our memory of common and comfortable words to help us work quickly through a piece of writing.

I was able to find (via Snopes) a paper written by Matt Davis at (where else) Cambridge (or, if you prefer, Cmabrigde Uinervtisy) that addresses the claims made in this message. Interestingly, the article includes several translations of the original text in a sort of experiment to see if it works in other languages as well. While admitting that there is "a very real debate in the psychology of reading...about exactly what information we do use when reading," Dr. Davis explains that the main idea of this message:

...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. [...] 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"?

As to whether or not readers look at individual letters or entire words, Dr. Davis goes on to say that:

...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... 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. 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"). 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...show(s) 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.

Confused yet? I am. But I suppose the take home message is summed up as this:

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.