Debunking the Jumbled Words Myth

[drwex]

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.')

Comments

[msdaisy.livejournal.com]

I too am really glad to hear someone has done this research and determined that there is a cost. I do think it's neat that one can read a jumbled sentence, but of course there's a cost! My perception is that I can read it, but reading it becomes a cognitive task rather than an associative task.

[bridgetminerva.livejournal.com]

I soooo agree with the crap part. I thought that because I did read it with no problem that it pointed to a problem in my brain. (given my difficutly with words)

I wonder if there is any data about people who spent the same cognitive energy on both Jumble and plain text?

Sometimes I have to read things 3 times to get the whole idea. I read very fast. It doesn't matter if I slow down and read it aloud. It had to do with understanding.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

There's totally a cost -- if there wasn't, we wouldn't even notice it. And I for one get really annoyed when someone can't take the time to proofread their work. I mean, 1 or 2 errors, sure. But glaring errors every other word? It bothers me. And that's a cost right there.

Concur

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things that drives me nuts, because every time I hit a spelling error it's like shifting from overdrive to first gear; it's jarring as Hel and interferes with the smooth functioning of my brain [as smooth as it ever gets], which I hate.

Do you suppose some people aren't bothered by spelling errors because they're already having to work at reading, whereas the zoomalong types like me have to go *screeee* *back up* *go past that again more slowly*?

Hm.

I don't get so cranky about it when it's in an email, but when I see it in a book, I know the publisher was too cheap/lazy to spring for a real proofreader and just threw a spell-checker at the manuscript. Sadly, that's becoming more and more common.

Re: Concur

[drwex]

I agree that things you're more sensitive to can interrupt your cognitive flow than things you're not. I know font geeks who get upset when historical movies use fonts that weren't invented until after the purported date of the film. Yes, really.

That said, I wouldn't place too much faith in human copyeditors. Back in The Day I used to be friends with Lew Shiner, who had several fiction books published and one year I got him a rubber stamp that said "STET" on it because he got tired of undoing all the "corrections" that human copyeditors made to his MSs.

Re: Concur

[coraline]

... http://www.ms-studio.com/typecasting.html ...

Re: Concur

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

I understand your first point, too. I can deal with bad characterization or bad acting better than technical screwups. I remember I stopped reading a novel because when the orbital plane's jets that had been blasting for too long (a "trapped in orbit" scenario novel) cut off, everyone was jammed against their seatbelts. Apparently when you cut off a jet, the air/spacecraft comes to a jolting halt. *sigh*

And we won't even discuss the movie that showed the hero (whose name I won't mention except to say it starts with "Ram") firing an RPG from inside a helicopter, then flying away with all his epidermis and passengers intact...

Human editors are at least likely to catch basic errors of usage like their/there/they're.

Anecdote

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine went to see "The Net" and, being the tech-type she is, came out of it complaining to her (date? friend?) that it really irked her the way people misportrayed her industry.

Her (date? friend?), a private investigator, gave her an ... interesting ... look.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

I thought the jumbled word theory was thoroughly debunked shortly after it was initially publicized -- the "jumbled" text was insufficiently jumbled, and truely jumbled words were much, much harder to read.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm remembering the revelation of the original as a hoax, not academic work on the subject.

[drwex]

Was it in fact shown to be a hoax? I looked on Snopes and didn't see anything there, but perhaps I didn't use the right search terms?

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

It's in the introduction of the article you cite.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

How sad is it that I was most amused by the non-medical use of the word 'scut', which I had previously only encountered in a medical context? (I've seen numerous 'definitions', the most common being the acronym 'Some Common Unfinished Task').

That said, yay for people doing the necessary scut work. It's intuitively clear that there would be a cost, but it's nice to see that demonstrated using that 'scientific method' I've heard so much about.