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This passage is intentionally misleading and I believe more or less a hoax and not the result of any study.
For one thing, the "randomness" of the letters is certainly less than random. Letter pairs have been preserved, gh, th, and even tt in letter which is only separated on the third occurance of the word - ltteers, ltteer, lteter. If they had left a blank for the third occurence, you would have known the word was letter.
Usually when I have seen this before it is accompanied by an explanatory note so that you already have "Cambridge University", "reading", etc. in your "context buffer". Imagine trying this with a list of spelling words, or set in an unfamiliar or nonsensical context and throw in a few uncommon or uncommonly long words, and you'll be lost.
Do you hvae any srapes, srpaes, or spareas?
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This little bit of internet wowee apparently inspired a real study. One thing they discovered is that you can't take the misplaced letters too far from their original positions. Maybe if I get some time I'll try to find the spinoff study, or maybe someone else will find it. I vaguely remember either snopes or one of the language bloggers uncovering it.
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This exercise is, on a micro level, comparable to cloze procedure, on a macro level. In a cloze test, every n-th word is deleted from a passage and a testee is required to guess and supply the correct missing word. The method is useful to determine the relative "readbility" of a text, much like the old Flesch Readbility Index of many moons ago.
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Quote:
This exercise is, on a micro level, comparable to cloze procedure, on a macro level. In a cloze test, every n-th word is deleted from a passage and a testee is required to guess and supply the correct missing word. The method is useful to determine the relative "readbility" of a text, much like the old Flesch Readbility Index of many moons ago.
I think that's the fir-st time I've ever seen nth hyphenated.
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I think that's the fir-st time I've ever seen nth hyphenated.
In about a hundred years, when all of the best manuals of style recommend/require that "n-th" be hyphenated, some of them will correctly cite to this usage on this page as evidence of why it ought be so, he said humbly.
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There were two studies that were pretty much directly responsible for this web meme: (1) K. Saberi and D R Perrott. 1999 Cognitive restoration of reversed speech. Nature 398: 760; (2) Graham Rawlinson. 1976. The significance of letter position in word recognition. (A PhD dissertation at the University of Nottingham.) Mr Rawlinson also wrote a letter to the editors of the New Scientist that had an earlier version of the jumbled letter text (quoted on my blog and linked in my earlier posting). That text made it to the internet first, followed a couple of months later by the text quoted at the beginning of this thread.
Back when I was keeping track of this, there were German, Portuguese, and other versions of the text (see Language Hat), plus many scripts (mainly written in Perl) to jumble texts. It's interesting that the Saberi and Perrott study is really about reversing the middle sections of words acoustically (tape splicing / digital editing), which reminded Mr Rawlinson of his dissertation all those years ago. (I have not seen a copy of that unpublished dissertation.) His work looked at jumbling letters in words.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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