Share via

Rscheearch Shmecsearch

  • Article

In September 2003, the following paragraph thundered its way around the internet, and has been an urban myth ever since.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Like everyone else, I am amazed at the ease with which I can read this paragraph. It certainly is a testament to the flexibility of the human mind. But it does not indicate that we only use the first and last letters of a word, nor does it demonstrate that we read by whole word recognition.

The letter transformations used in the myth are not random, they were carefully selected. If the letters move further from their original location, it becomes much more difficult to read. The below example with reverse-ordered internal letters is much harder to read:

Anidroccg to rcraeseh at Cgdirbmae utisreviny

The pace at which we can recover the actual words in the myth is so fast that it seems instantaneous. It only takes a couple hundred milliseconds to recognize a correctly spelled word, so a 10% or even 100% increase in recognition time would not seem like much. But it does take people longer to recognize words when they are misspelled than when they are spelled correctly.

It’s also surprising that this would be used as evidence that we recognize words by their word shape and not by letter recognition. These letter transformations break up the pattern of ascending and descending letters that are supposedly used when recognizing word shapes. If anything the myth suggests that word shapes are not important because we can still readily recognize the words despite their change in word shape.

Reading psychologists have come to the consensus that we use a parallel letter recognition model to recognize words. Hopefully people put more trust in this easily referenced body of research rather than research by elusive researchers who believe there are two h’s in the word rscheearch.

Kevin Larson

Edit: update broken link

Edit: update image reference

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 16, 2005
    Pretty cool article, Kevin!

  • Anonymous
    November 18, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2006
    I’ve previously talked about the Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy hoax. The study described...

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2007
    In particular, I don't. Lots of times other developers come over to me and look confused as they see

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2007
    I was doing just fine reading the entirety of this page having trouble only with the uncommon words until I had to look the translation for "practiced"... above you have "pectacred", which has an extra "e", and is missing an "I". I must add that I think I am dislexic, as when I type I usually transpose lettrs, combine words, (hte, adn, withe), even when I write, I will write the first lettr of the next word before finishing the previous word. Maybe, jsut maybe, this brain/hand misfire I'm having actually helps me with reading 90% of the above example.

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2007
    PingBack from http://www.grim-planet.com/?p=25

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2008
    PingBack from http://blowery.org/2005/11/16/dbeunknig-teh-mtyh/

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2008
    I thought this was quit interesting articles, it just goes to show that writers should be precise in what they want to convey to the reader. If the messages are not clear then the information,take on another meaning.  I mentally, and on paper tried the excerises.  

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2008
    This was a little comical.  These excerpts just goes to show how important it is for the writer to check what leaves his or her desk.  Many times the writer, assumes that the reader know what he or she means.  

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2008
    This was a little comical.  These excerpts just goes to show how important it is for the writer to check what leaves his or her desk.  Many times the writer, assumes that the reader know what he or she means.  

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.hilpers.org/283933-the-power-of-the-human

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2010
    Why is there an extra ch in the word research? rscheearch??? Of all the translations i hav seen all have translated it as research but what about the extra "ch"? did it gt anything to do? or is it not the word research?? can someone plz clarify me asap...

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2010
    Hello, I love your article. This is a great site and I wanted to post a little note to let you know, nice job! Thanks

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2010
    I had no trouble with the internal reversing. It may be harder for some, but not for all.

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2010
    Snopes FAIL stop clogging my internets with extraneous information!

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2010
    Thank you for sending this out.  I knew that this was false and I have seen it a few places.

  • Anonymous
    December 27, 2010
    rscheearch??? i thought it is researcher....................and i found out that it is research because of the artticle that say something about the technique to read it

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2011
    I wrote this little Firefox extension after reading this article: addons.mozilla.org/.../confuscator makes it easy to test this theory for different languages as well ...

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2012
    The comment has been removed