(classical music)
- Hey Brain Stuff, it's me, Ben.
I had a pretty funny intro about typos,
but our producer made me cut it.
Let's cut to today's question.
Does letter order matter?
You have probably seen the meme
going around about this.
(playful music)
You might have read about this online
and see it cited as a study
from Cambridge University.
however, or should I say, hwovere,
there is no such study.
It does not exist, full stop.
This meme is one of those innumerable
things masquerading as
a fact on the internet,
but unlike, say, the idea that
Nazis escaped into some underground
kingdom and built UFOs, the concept of
letter order does have some truth to it.
Dennis Norris, a researcher at Cambridge's
Cognition and Brain Sciences unit,
did manage to track down some earlier
research on word order
from Nottingham University.
A fellow named Graham Rawlinson
showed that randomizing letters
in the middle of words had little
to not effect on the ability of
readers to understand the text,
so long as the first and the final two
letters of the word are in the same place.
This was never actually published in a
scientific journal, just sent as
a letter to a magazine
called New Scientist
in 1999, but that's probably the grain
of truth that lead to the meme.
And the meme itself has
a few wild inaccuracies.
First, letter order does matter
in that it affects the readability
of a phrase or passage.
One study measured the eye movements
of readers as they peruse sentences
with transposed letters.
You know, like switching
the E and the A in sweat.
They found the reading
rate decreased by 11%
for words with internally
switched letters,
by 36% if the switch was at the beginning
of the world, and by 26% if it was
at the end of a term.
Second, the legibility of a jumbled
word or phrase heavily depends
on whether two, three, or four-letter
words are also jumbled.
Stuff like at, you, soul, go, hold, etc.
So if we hold to Rawlinson's first
proposed rule, that the first and last
two letters must stay the same,
then we see that some words simply
cannot be jumbled.
The are un-jumblable,
a word I just made up.
Side note, while we're talking
about new or made up terms,
you might hear this ability to read
jumbled phrases called "typoglycemia."
That is buzz word, not a legit
scientific term, and as of this recording,
you are not gonna read it
in any medical journals.
End side note, back to main note.
Your brain takes in information
continually, and the emphasis is
always on speed, like
Sandra Bullock in that bus.
So, when you're reading, your brain
gathers just enough information to
know what word you're looking at.
In Dennis Norris's example, you might
be reading the letters R-E-A-D,
and not be sure whether they
go in the order "read," or "raed,"
but now there's no point.
"Eureka," screams that creepy genius
in your head.
"If it's a word, it must be read.
"All the pieces are there."
Marta Kutas over at the Center for
Research in Language at the University
of California San Diego believes
context is the primary factor here.
When we have a context, we use it
to pre-activate areas of our brain
corresponding to what we expect
to happen next.
If we scan someone's brain while
they hear a sound that leads them
to expect another specific sound,
we'll see that person's brain acting
as if it's already
hearing that next sound.
This works with letters and words, too,
but it's not perfect.
Your brain processes all of the letters
of a word at once, using them as a
context for each other.
It's looking at the forest instead
of individual trees, but that's also
why you can read words with numbers
in place of letters.
The letter-like appearance in context
overrides their actual status as numbers.
So boom, there you have it.
The ability to read jumbled words
is not rare, and your brain is more than
up to the task.
However, it takes a little bit longer
to suss things out.
Research on cognition and reading
continues today, and who
knows what we'll find?
I mean, honestly folks, we could all
soon be communicating entirely in emoji.
It's a brave new world.
