I tinhk you all hvae dailysex 
weh’res my pzrie?
Sorry, An Lú abú. No prize. Remember, the words have to keep their first and last letters in the same position.
I had also heard that we pay more attention to the top half of the letters during scanning than we do to the whole letter, and indeed, if you cover half of a line of type, you can still read it pretty quickly.
I think it points out the pattern recognition part of our brains, and somehow I find it interesting to correlate it to the detail that spelling was not real standardized until lately, yet we rarely have a problem reading the old stuff, even with the archaic letter forms, etc.
Of course… we DO see some of the same effect in other visual arts, where a few simple lines are all we need to visualize a forest or an animal, or how we can see ‘hidden patterns’ amidst visual noise, like Beverly Doolittle’s art or mediocre camoflague.
DAVEX, that made me laugh right out loud! Thank you!
Farglestabbeed, goes along with “gobsmacked” . I like it!
Actually, I wondered about that myself, so I sent it to a Taiwaneese girl I work with. She read it without any trouble. Though she has been living in the US for all of her adult life. Then again, she still has some trouble with the language, and confuses certain words. But interesting that she didn’t seem to have trouble with the OP.
dailysex?
dailysex=dyslexia but not necessarily blindness
Hmm, isn’t this like one of those myths we usually try to dispel?
The strange thing is (well, a strange thing; this thread has no shortage of strange things) I read it naturally as “dislexia” until I read your post. It wasn’t until I went back to check the first and last letters that I realized what it actually said (er… spelled).
Let me stress the point of other’s here as to the importance of context.
BTW, was it Dr. Matrix that had (has?) the sig “Is that a neutrino in your pocket or is it a hadron”?
The OP wrote: “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy…”
Just to mess things up even more…it seems to me that the word the OP was actually trying to jumble was “researcher,” not “research” (since one wouldn’t write “according to a research”).
Slightly awkward, but no more so than positing that the “a” was inadvertantly inserted, and that “According to research at an English university” is what was intended. (If I were editing that sentence, I would insert “conducted” before “at.”)
So there’s not just a misspelled jumble, but a mistake in the original word itself! Thus, this should have been rendered as “rherceeasr” or something similar.
Interesting that, after all these posts, no one has caught this! More evidence of how context can overwhelm individual words?
Yep, that was me.
I’m having trouble reading normally spelled words now. I saw the word “second” and it just didn’t look right. I had to spell it out to make sure it was correct.
When teaching literacy, we tend to avoid using all caps, or all lowercases in anything, because people read the shape of the word.
Another fun point,
Eiae Aeae->
Whats my maiden name? Impossible.
Lsbth Lxndr->
Whats my maiden name? Easy. Well, almost easy.
On a similar but not identical note to the OP, in Stephen Pinker’s excellent The Language Instinct, he writes;
Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xundxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn ‘x’ (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn’t vn kn whr th vwls r).
[sub]I wholeheartedly recommend the book, btw…[/sub]
Actually that’s a lot more similar to the post above yours, and still damn fascinating.
Dr. Matrix, I’m just thinkin more about that sig and I’m pretty sure I’ve never casually read the last word as “hardon” even though that’s what’s suggested by the context (sorta). Maybe it’s because “hadron” (which I would never guess to be a real word, what the heck is it anyway?) is easily pronounceable as is. I dunno.
I always thought that was a “diphthong” but now I see that that is actually for vowels only. Huh. I just fought my own ingorance!
squeallintney is sequentially
This is actually a misspelled misspelling. squeallintney has too many n’s. Perhaps that is why people had trouble with it.
It should have been squeallintey or squeallitney, which are much more recognizable as sequentially.
Has any cite been put forth for the so-claimed “Elingsh uinervtisy” study?
This is fscanitaing stuff (and like a good meme, racing thougrh the Itennret community - I’ve already seen it on other sites, and gotten it in email from my sister) but I’d like to know if there was ever any actual resarceh behind it.
As a Hebrew speaker, I get to do this every day, all day! (read without the benefit of vowels, that is) - so nothing really new here.
Dan Abarbanel
The duitficfly leis wehn the wtrier ocfuestabs.
Eapcelilsy if you dno’t hvae as bgbdionaagirn a vclauraoby as the otnogiriar of the txauetl ertny.
Wow!
Great entry.