Intrepid reader, Roger Willcocks, has discovered the origin of the first jumbled text that mentions Saberi. A letter to the New Scientist on May 1, 1999, in response to a short item on the Saberi and Perriott Nature article (online at the New Scientist) site. The letter's writer, Mr Graham Rawlinson of Aldershot, Hampshire, also mentions his dissertation, written in 1976 at Nottingham University, where he "showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text". Roger also found this Usenet (alt.2600 group) posting (from June 7, 1999) that mentions the letter but gives no further details. I'm not so sure we'll discover the writer of the second and more recent text, but maybe. Thanks, Roger.
[Addendum 09/17/03: Rawlinson's dissertation is called The significance of letter position in word recognition. Found it in the University of Nottingham online library catalog. I'll try to find a copy on this side of the big pond.]
[Addendum 09/22/03: Snopes has added a newer article on "Sublexical units and the split fovea" by Richard Shillcock & Padraic Monaghan at the Universities of Edinburgh and Coventry respectively. I'm beginning to think that the newer scrambled text arose independently of the earlier one.]
Posted by jim at September 17, 2003 07:30 AM | TrackBackhttp://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=1517&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25
You might find the reaction from the artificial intelligence research people interesting. The implications to natural language recognition that can handle all of the typos and misspellings humans are prone to is significant.
Here is a page about a computer program that uses a similar approach to the one described in the original scrambled text. There is even a link to a free demo program does this.
http://www.ai-forum.org/topic.asp?forum_id=1&topic_id=9528
Posted by: Ribald on September 19, 2003 10:38 PMOh, thankyouthankyouthankyou.
This meme has been littering my LJFriends list and my inbox this last week and driving me bonkers. None of the propagators could point to anything even approaching a reference to support or even source the paragraph.
At first opportunity (today's peaceful AM) I started my own search with AlltheWeb, which led me first to fridgemagnet and thence to you and your tracing of the (probable) reference.
What you referred to as "unattributed texts" that "spread like folklore across the Web" is a concept that fascinates and irritates me at the same time.
Posted by: KGK on September 20, 2003 09:57 AMI call these urban legends that keep coming into your mailbox from friends and acquaintances, friendly spam. Glad to have been of service.
Posted by: jim on September 20, 2003 12:54 PMSo we have (what we could henceforth call) the "msesgae":
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe".
Even if it’s funny, this "msesgae" is an improper and excessive generalization, which conveys an extremely reductive vision. Moreover, whereas it should only remain what it is, i.e. a simple fantasist and entertaining text, it is taking worrying forms (we see it in mails, weblogs, chat-rooms where participants, absolutely amazed and amused, are venerating this "sensational discovery" and friends from everywhere (also excited) are forwarding it in different languages (apparently, this “hoaxmeme” (hoax + meme) is floating all over the web).
Let’s try to encircle the topic (not by haughty pedantry but just by anticonformism and anti-“simplistism”). If you were looking for a serious explanation of it, here is an “anti-hoaxmeme”:
Introduction
Reading is a complex activity that involves many aspects of knowledge, which are of various natures and various complexities (this is due besides to the fact that “writing” is complex). It's an activity, which implies cognitive processes but also, simultaneously, perceptive processes: reading, it's to perceive and to identify words.
Development
Many linguists worked on the description of the mechanisms’ evolution of the words’ identification and there are now many developmental models of reading. The principal models comprise three way of reading, which correspond actually to three chronological stages of acquisition (for this presentation, let's start with the second one):
- the alphabetical reading (second stage): the reader connects the oral examination with the writing (in other words, he learns how to make correspondence between letters and sounds (ex: the sound [k]can be written with 'c' (cot), 'k' (kiss) or 'ch' (chord)). At this stage of phonological mediation, there is a code training; the learner enriches its phonological knowledge and transfers it to new words (it’s a form of self-training). This stage is called an "indirect way" because the reader reads the words through a decoding process.
- the orthographical reading (third stage): the words are analyzed in orthographical units (orthography indicates here the sequence of letters forming the word). There is no phonological conversion; the words are read and recognized directly in reference to a memorized orthographical lexicon. This stage replaces gradually (but not entirely) the alphabetical one. The reader does not need to decipher anymore: he recognizes the words through a "direct way".
- the logographic reading (which is actually the FIRST stage in the reading training): at this stage, the reader uses various kinds of clues to 'read' the words, inter alia, those provided by the extralinguistic environment. The letters’ order and the phonological factors are not taken in account, but the visual clues are. There can be at this stage an instantaneous recognition of familiar words (or somehow ‘learned by heart’), and the riddles made on the basis of projecting visual clues allow the constitution of a first total vocabulary. The visual clues can simply be the length of the word or its "silhouette" (outline) or even just one letter. The classic example to illustrate this stage is the word: "Coca-Cola”, of which logo is easily identified by almost all children of 5-6 years old. If we change only one letter of the word: “Coca-Coca”, children will not notice the difference from the original word (adults neither sometimes, as some experiments proved it).
The most perspicacious of you may have already understood: what occurs actually when we read the "msesgae", it is that we, literate readers to whom reading and writing have been taught, use our competences, acquired and automated thanks to years of reading experience. In other words, we have developed "HABITS" of reading.
The "msesgae" experiment could let us think that we get back to a logographic reading, in which access to significance is carried out directly via the pictorial semantic system (with words treated like images-logos), but this is not completely true.
Actually, we continue to use the orthographical reading system (in which access to significance is carried out via the verbal semantic system). If we look at the "msesgae » more closely, we can notice that 34 of its 68 words (short and common by the way), are correctly spelled (50%, half of the text, and most of them are "grammatical words"). Added to a simple and common syntax (journalistic style of the “forma brevis”) and our capacity of anticipation and auto-reflex correction of more or less experienced reader (the system used is close to the "typing error" one, and anyway, teachers manage quite well to read our essays stuffed with spelling mistakes. In other words, you don’t have to be a Professor of literature to spot "what" in " waht "!!!), it gives many visual clues!!! (Moreover, there is a syllabic facilitation phenomenon, but I skip the details).
Conclusion
The proposition, which is conveyed through the «msesgae», is not completely false but it is very reductive, and completely incorrect when it affirms that only the place of the first and the last letter of the words do matter. Actually, it deals more with their "silhouette" (from which our (almost standard) system of abbreviations rises (another facilitating clue)). If we can read the "msesgae" without any problem, it is because we are good readers reading a text easily accessible in spite of its orthographic and spelling mistakes.
To prove it, if I give you the correctly spelled words "acetoxybutynylbithiophene deacetylase" or "carboxymethylenebutenolidase", dear expert readers, you will resort to an alphabetical analysis (second stage) and will use a grapho-phonological decoding for these unknown words (I suppose, this experiment may not always work if you are chemist, druggist or doctor... if it’s the case, sorry for this affront :-).
Another counterexample: if you read AT THE FIRST GO the following sentence as quickly and fluently as you did with the "msesgae", all my theoric explanation goes down the drain (or you are an innate champion of anagrams!):
“Nreuuoms pmeeononnhs peossss uiapocmltecnd etaaoilxnpn; nwttdtsniinoahg, the pdseuo-snfiiiectc spssliiimtm is not snfiiiectc and eieecndvs are oetfn mdanleiisg”*.
Guillaume Fon Sing,
(alias GUITCHUS)
guitchus@hotmail.com
Linguist
* “Numerous phenomenons possess uncomplicated explanation; notwithstanding, the pseudo-scientific simplistism is not scientific and evidences are often misleading”.
Please forward it, …it can teach sb a thing or two.
Guitchus: Your text shares much with the message it wishes to explain. First, I've seen it verbatim here and on Languagehat's site; second, it asserts without really quoting authority (cf. "research at an English university" with "Many linguists"). At first I took it for a joke. How to reconcile "not by haughty pedantry" with "simplitism" or "hoaxeme" or your text's self-righteous seriousness? Then I decided it wasn't a joke. It's conclusions were much in line with what I and Languagehat had written. So, I guess, you're agreeing with us. My part in all this has been to try to discover the germ of its conception, which I think I have. I have always been sceptical about it's "wow factor" or if you prefer "truth content". Take care.
Posted by: jim on September 22, 2003 08:35 AMI just talked to Graham Rawlinson on the phone(I'm writing an article about the phenomenon for a German paper). He says he and his fellow researches, back in 1976, took the thesis about the shape of words influencing readability and applied it on letter positioning. They had a computer that scrambled the words (i.e.: proper randomizing!) and tested their texts on "hundreds of people" in a research process of three years. Characteristic letter formations (like th or sh) didn't seem to make much difference, he claims, "though I'm not saying these things are just as easy". Good readers had less problems reading the texts than bad readers, but age was not an issue if the young readers had good reading skills. He comes across as someone who did that research long time ago for his PhD, who isn't passionate either way about what he found out and who quit academics without following up on the matter. He is fascinated with the boom his old diss subject experiences at the moment, esp. on the web, but also in newspapers (the Daily Mail had piece yesterday, he says). He thinks it's because the signs of the times are like that, with people interested in how the brain works, artificial intelligence, encryption, and with the internet speeding up communication. And he's got a new book out that he would like to plug... (http://www.dagr.demon.co.uk/)
Posted by: Bozo on September 24, 2003 04:54 AMI just talked to Graham Rawlinson on the phone(I'm writing an article about the phenomenon for a German paper). He says he and his fellow researches, back in 1976, took the thesis about the shape of words influencing readability and applied it on letter positioning. They had a computer that scrambled the words (i.e.: proper randomizing!) and tested their texts on "hundreds of people" in a research process of three years. Characteristic letter formations (like th or sh) didn't seem to make much difference, he claims, "though I'm not saying these things are just as easy". Good readers had less problems reading the texts than bad readers, but age was not an issue if the young readers had good reading skills. He comes across as someone who did that research long time ago for his PhD, who isn't passionate either way about what he found out and who quit academics without following up on the matter. He is fascinated with the boom his old diss subject experiences at the moment, esp. on the web, but also in newspapers (the Daily Mail had piece yesterday, he says). He thinks it's because the signs of the times are like that, with people interested in how the brain works, artificial intelligence, encryption, and with the internet speeding up communication. And he's got a new book out that he would like to plug... (http://www.dagr.demon.co.uk/)
Posted by: Bozo on September 24, 2003 04:54 AMI just talked to Graham Rawlinson on the phone(I'm writing an article about the phenomenon for a German paper). He says he and his fellow researches, back in 1976, took the thesis about the shape of words influencing readability and applied it on letter positioning. They had a computer that scrambled the words (i.e.: proper randomizing!) and tested their texts on "hundreds of people" in a research process of three years. Characteristic letter formations (like th or sh) didn't seem to make much difference, he claims, "though I'm not saying these things are just as easy". Good readers had less problems reading the texts than bad readers, but age was not an issue if the young readers had good reading skills. He comes across as someone who did that research long time ago for his PhD, who isn't passionate either way about what he found out and who quit academics without following up on the matter. He is fascinated with the boom his old diss subject experiences at the moment, esp. on the web, but also in newspapers (the Daily Mail had piece yesterday, he says). He thinks it's because the signs of the times are like that, with people interested in how the brain works, artificial intelligence, encryption, and with the internet speeding up communication. And he's got a new book out that he would like to plug... (http://www.dagr.demon.co.uk/)
Posted by: Bozo on September 24, 2003 04:54 AM... and I'm very sorry about porting this thrice.
Posted by: bozo on September 24, 2003 04:58 AMposting, for F#*!s sake (ha! that's another example for shape of word influencing recognition...F*#!, s#*+...)
Posted by: Bozo on September 24, 2003 05:00 AMBozo: No problem. Thanks for the info. Which paper will your piece be published in?
Posted by: jim on September 24, 2003 09:39 AMThe piece will be published in Frankfurter Rundschau tomorrow, September 26th. Online: http://www.fr-aktuell.de (as I said: in German).
Posted by: Bozo on September 25, 2003 09:03 AMThere also has been a short piece in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" newspaper (in German) on Sept. 24. The whole piece was written in jumbled text, which was very revealing...
Posted by: Peter Krieg on September 26, 2003 04:38 AM