Debunking the Jumbled Words Myth

Everyone remember the fad claim that the order of letters in words wasn't important? Emails went around containing texts like "IF YUO CAN RAED THIS YUOR BRIAN WROKS" - true, but that's all you can tell. More annoying were claims of the form:

In fact, sentences in whcih lettres aer transpsoed (or jubmled up), as in the setnence you are now raeding, aer no more difficult to raed tahn setnencse in whcih teh lettres aer in teh rihgt oerdr.

Variants on this claim made statements about things like "as long as the first and last letters are correct..."

My intuition, as a cognitive scientist, was that these claims were crap. And now, thank ghu, someone's done the psycholinguistic scut work to prove it. Rayner et al [1] tested people on sentence reading using no jumbled letters, jumbled letters, and letter substitutions. And, hooray for backing up intuition, they show that reading words with jumbled letters always costs more (in cognitive processing terms) than reading normal text.

[1] Rayner, K., White, S., Johnson, R., Liversedge, S. (2006). "Raeding Wrods with jumbled Lettres; There is a cost." Psychological Science 17(3), 192-193.

(For the record, trying to spell-check an entry like this is an exercise in futility. Just sayin.')

Debunking the Jumbled Words Myth

Everyone remember the fad claim that the order of letters in words wasn't important? Emails went around containing texts like "IF YUO CAN RAED THIS YUOR BRIAN WROKS" - true, but that's all you can tell. More annoying were claims of the form:

In fact, sentences in whcih lettres aer transpsoed (or jubmled up), as in the setnence you are now raeding, aer no more difficult to raed tahn setnencse in whcih teh lettres aer in teh rihgt oerdr.

Variants on this claim made statements about things like "as long as the first and last letters are correct..."

My intuition, as a cognitive scientist, was that these claims were crap. And now, thank ghu, someone's done the psycholinguistic scut work to prove it. Rayner et al [1] tested people on sentence reading using no jumbled letters, jumbled letters, and letter substitutions. And, hooray for backing up intuition, they show that reading words with jumbled letters always costs more (in cognitive processing terms) than reading normal text.

[1] Rayner, K., White, S., Johnson, R., Liversedge, S. (2006). "Raeding Wrods with jumbled Lettres; There is a cost." Psychological Science 17(3), 192-193.

(For the record, trying to spell-check an entry like this is an exercise in futility. Just sayin.')