Letters Gone Haywire Aoccdrnig to a 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 toatl 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. The chances are good that you can read the above paragraph despite the fact that the letters have been jumbled randomly within individual words. The only caveat to the experiment is that the first and last letters must remain fixed in place. The experiments taking place at Cambridge University in London are trying to show that readers only visualize the word as a whole, not in units like letters. English seems to permit this random lettering more than some languages, due to the redundancy of letters in English, like the ‘e’ in ‘care’ and the ‘gh’ in ‘through’. But are there some cases where reading a jumble is more difficult? Take the following sentence. “A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur.” Some words may come out clearly, like ‘dootcr’ for ‘doctor’ and ‘deid’ for ‘died’. But what about ‘tageene’, ‘magltheuansr’, ‘blendur’ or even ‘hatospil’? Here’s the sentence translated into correct English. “A doctor has admitted the manslaughter of a teenage cancer patient who died after a hospital drug blunder.” This sentence presents several problems that the opening paragraph did not. For instance, ‘tageene’ doesn’t seem to easily derive ‘teenage’. Could it be because ‘teen’ and ‘age’ are two different words joined together to make a compound? In fact, when the two original words are unlinked and randomized according to the rules above, one ends up with the unshocking ‘teen age’. Take ‘magltheuansr’. The units ‘man’ and ‘slaughter’ make up the word ‘manslaughter’, but in the randomizing, the letters of the units seem to be too far apart to comprehend the jumble. For instance, the jumbled word starts with ‘ma’, but then the finishing ‘n’ is eight letters away. The ‘gh’ of ‘slaughter’ is silent, so separating them may make the reader try to unite them phonologically, like the ‘gh’ of ‘rough’. ‘Blendur’ is difficult to decipher, because phonologically, something spelled similar to ‘blendur’ exists in English. So we have three principles blurring the notion that words can be quickly read despite internal jumbling: compounding structures (‘teenage’, ‘manslaughter’), adjacency requirements (‘magltheuansr’) and phonological superiority (‘blendur’ may be understood as ‘blender’ before ‘blunder’). But since the opening paragraph can essentially be read as quickly as when the words are not rearranged, something must be happening during reading that views words as phonological wholes instead of discrete letter-to-letter strings. Think of when you write ‘you’re’ instead of ‘your’, or the trio ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’. We all know the homophones mean different things, but people consistently make these switching errors. This, too, shines more light on the legitimacy that bundles of words in the brain may be grouped by sound over function or visual appearance. Acknowledgements to Matt Davis at Cambridge University, whose full report can be accessed at www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~matt.davis/Cmabridge. J. Everett R.