What do you think of this? Research on reading

Big fat question:

Did they try this out on folks with dyslexia?

Didn’t think so.

You have to be *making* certain connections to spoken langauge to make taht transition from nonsense to meaning that our human brains are so good at.

In fact, it kind of turns my stomach because this is the kind of thing that whole language advocates seize and cite with a vengeance. *GOOD* readers, with *ALREADY DEVELOPED* skills can do this with *SIMPLE* *HIGHLY PREDICTABLE* text.

Now, try doing that to something from Huck Finn. Oh, perhaps you might lose a little something, you think?

So if you have a less than fluent reader, OR if they haven’t arleady gone through a good reading program (or been a natural) and learned the way the langauge *should* be structured, OR the text is a little more complex… then your ability to get its meaning suffers mightily.

If you’re dyslexic and trying to read your Biology textbook, thinking letter order doesn’t matter doesn’t make a whang bit of sense.

I know, show my true feelings next time :-)

Good grief! What absurdity! Of course I could read it, but definitely NOT with the same fluency that I can read normal text. Glad my tax money didn’t pay for that particular wonderful bit of research!

Janis

It’s a joke, people! I’ve heard it before. No way that is research.

Beth/OK

A joke is more like it!

Joke or not, there actually is something going on here. There is a function in the human brain, very poorly understood, that attempts to put incoming information in some kind of order or pattern.

One example of this is the “blind spot fill-in” illusion. This is very weird and will surprise the socks off you when you try it on yourself the first time. It was in Discover magazine a few years ago and you can find it in most texts of physiological psychology. (Look up optical illusions and/or blind spot) There is a pattern on the page with a repeated pattern, usually a checkerboard, and a fairly large hole in the design. You are instructed to close one eye, hold the page up to your nose, and then move it away slowly. At a certain distance, the hole in the pattern suddenly disappears and you see the checkerboard filling the whole page. Move the paper or open the other eye, and the hole comes back. As I said, truly weird sensation. What happens is that you have a spot on the back of your eye where the optic nerve comes through the retina to make the connection eye to brain. This leaves a small “hole” in your visual field. But we would be constantly distracted if we always had a black spot in our field of vision. So the brain “fills in” the space and makes you think you are seeing a a complete pattern even when you aren’t. The optical illusion occurs when you move the break in the pattern into the blind spot — your brain just completes the pattern for you.

Another classic example is the supposed “canals” on Mars. An Earth-based telescope has enough distortion from the atmosphere and other sources that you cannot quite get a clear picture of the Martian surface; it’s always just a bit out of focus. So when humans look at it, the brain automatically tries to (literally) make connections and people who try to draw the Martian surface tend to (literally) connect the dots and end up with a pattern of “canals”. I read a report of a little casual study that was brilliantly thought-out. The experimenter put a modern detailed map of the surface of Mars, from satellite photos, in the front of a classroom and asked the students to draw it. The students in the front made quite accurate drawings, while those in the back who could not see the details started to put in “canals” just as did the pre-space-age astronomers.

The point is that when you see a bunch of letters on a page — or any shapes that you think are letters — your brain starts its automatic pattern-formation programming.
**IF**, repeat **IF** your brain’s pattern-forming function is firing on all eight cylinders and **IF**, repeat **IF** you have already absorbed the visual patterns of English words deeply into your subconscious, then you will see the mixed-up words and form them into something meaningful.

Of course, the two “ifs” above are exactly the *problem* when dealing with dyslexia, aren’t they?

I have interesting personal experience with this. As a child, I was a dead zero on figure-ground puzzles (find the bunny in the mosaic etc.), on detail puzzles (where’s Waldo, find all the mistakes in the picture, count the triangles, etc.). I was also a dead zero on the unscramble-the-letters to make a word and unscramble-the-words to make a sentence, and word search type of puzzles. I don’t mean just weak, I mean didn’t even know where I was supposed to start. Luckily I was an excellent reader, having been taught by my mother phonetically, so I didn’t need to play guessing games.
Then in my late teens I got glasses that finally did something about my astigmatism, studied art fairly seriously and learned to look at detail and whole and part again, overcame my hand coordination problems and taught myself to do a number of arts and crafts, worked hard on learning to ski at an advanced level and developing my balance, and generally got my physical act much more together.
Suddenly — and I mean literally overnight — all of these pattern-recognition problems stopped being impenetrable mysteries and started being ridiculously easy. I can remember the shock of looking at a find-the-bunny puzzle in a paper and seeing the bunny pop out at me visually. I can also remember the shock of seeing a scrambled-letter puzzle and immediately forming a word in my mind.
Apparently, I am told, these skills just develop “naturally” in most children, somewhere in the elementary school years, and these puzzles are amusing to kids exactly because they test newly-developing skills.
I am living proof that this mental pattern-forming skill can be learned and taught, and can be learned even in early adulthood. So those of you working with your dyslexic kids, keep plugging away at it. It does come.
Because of this experience, I am particularly interested in reports by Linda F and others on vision therapy and Interactive Metronome, which hit on the same issues. I await the next installment of the kids’ development with great interest.

Back to the sample given, I can read it. I can read it quite quickly and could probably read it aloud with few hesitations. Hey, I’m an experienced teacher and I can read seventh-grader’s handwriting, too.
I just run my eyes over it without really focusing and let the brain go to work filling in the blanks.
The question is whether this is a good or a bad thing, and whether it is a skill that should nbe taught. Personally I chime in with an absolute NO. It is one thing for a check, now and then, on how good a person is at pattern-making and at reading with poor-quality input, and it is another thing to depend on guesswork for communication (very, very, very bad, especially in the sciences.)
Also, a standard rule of pedagogy is to teach the regularlties before the irregularities and the rules before the exceptions, and to relate everything possible to a system of organization. Giving kids something like this scrambled writing and telling them they can and shoud read by filling in the blanks could set back their reading habits for years.

I think I may have found the source of this meme…

http://blogs.salon.com/0001092/2003/09/15.html#a464

My meme experiment

By now, you’ve probably read the “Aoccdrnig to rsereach…” meme floating about the web. I talked about it last Friday. Since then, the meme has exploded on the web, and further propagated by Slashdot today.

What I didn’t mention the other day is that I was using this as a very informal experiment. I originally received the paragraph by email on Friday. But then I changed it to post to my site. The original version I received was:
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. ceehiro.

But then I changed on Friday to:
Aoccdrnig to 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 a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

On Monday morning I changed it in my post to:
Aoccdrnig to rsereach 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 ltteres are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Apart from the fact that the original contained some grammatical errors and there were misspellings, I wanted to see how this paragraph propagated in blogspace in different versions.

Before I posted my version, I checked that there were no versions on the web that began precisely with “Aoccdrnig to rscheearch”. I also checked on my second rewrite to confirm it didn’t yet exist. So now I can use Google to see how far my versions have propagated.

At time of writing, my Friday version is found by Google on 106 sites. The Monday version is not yet found anywhere else. So basically, this shows that my Friday version spread pretty quickly through blogspace when it wasn’t yet floating all over the web but the latest version which has only had a day to propagate in an already saturated web, hasn’t made any impact, presumably because everybody already knows about it or people are just linking to the entry without copying the text now.

Like I said, it’s not a scientific experiment, but still an interesting one to see how memes spread.

[Update: Tuesday morning - google now finds 206 copies of my Friday version, 8 copies of the Monday version.]

I doubt we’ll find any legitimate research from an English University.

To me, it actually shows that good readers really do look at every letter and that they then search lightning-fast for an internal pattern that makes sense, even if they know it will be a mixed up one. And once you figure out that gimmick, the paragraph is easy to read. If you replace a correct middle letter with an incorrect one here and there, you’ll probably stop more to look at those words, which seems like proof that you are looking at every letter. This thing must be making the rounds—I got the exercise from a friend in astrochemistry! :roll:

http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000060.html

If you look further down, the author of the dissertation wrote down that he did this work.

Enjoy.

I received this as a (joke) email–I don’t believe it is researched based :)

The brain has the ability to fill in the missing spaces.

It is able to under the right circumstances (knowledge of the code and the no. of syllables). Compare “raed” and “udner” with “ioeueltqcnainslny”. There were also “rules” apparently that didn’t shift the letters too much like the above by grouping consonants together and so on.

—des

There apparently is some research behind this recent e-mail circulating the internet. Here is a copy of a letter to New Scientist in 1999.

“Reibadailty
New Scientist vol 162 issue 2188 - 29 May 1999, page 55

 You report that reversing 50-millisecond segments of recorded sound does not greatly affect listeners’ ability to understand speech (In Brief, 1 May, p 27).

This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which 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.

This is easy to denmtrasote. In a puiltacibon of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi’s work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work.

The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.

This was not easy to type!

Graham Rawlinson
Aldershot, Hampshire”

Scott,
If you can believe it I just got this version from someone on a poet writer’s email list I belong to!!!!

>léanlo sin detenerse.
>”Sgeun un etsduio de una uivenrsdiad ignlsea, no ipmotra el odren en el que
>las ltears etsan ersciats, la uicna csoa ipormtnate es que la pmrirea y la
>utlima ltera esten ecsritas en la psiocion cocrrtea. El rsteo peuden estar
>ttaolmntee mal y aun pordas lerelo sin pobrleams. Etso es pquore no lemeos
>cada ltera por si msima snio la paalbra cmoo un tdoo. Pesornamelnte me
>preace icrneilbe…”

This little “goodie” is certainly making the rounds. The other day it was on the off topic section of an aquarium forum I’m on!!!
Not surprised that there is a “French version” as well. :-)

—des