When you raed a sencente, the oerdr of the ltetres in a word dsnoe’t mteatr as long as the fsirt and lsat ones are in the rhgit pcale. Last fall, a widely circulated e-mail written in a similarly garbled fashion reached Denis Pelli, a professor of psychology at New York University. He set to work figuring out why this trick works. When a reader focuses on a word, Pelli says, the eyes take in both central and peripheral views. The eye’s periphery can’t focus as narrowly, making it difficult to identify the letters in the middle of a word, so the brain recognizes the word as a unit based on the first and last letters, as well as key features such as dangling g’s and tall d’s. If the intervening letters are scrambled, the reader can still identify the word fairly quickly. Faster readers do this using sentence context. Pelli finds that when the whole sentence is scrambled to remove contextual information, slow and fast readers comprehend individual words, scrambled or not, at nearly the same rate.
