Internal word information is just as important as the shaps, study finds

Doubtless you, the reader, have been exposed to the following ‘graf over the past couple of years:

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.

The point, of course, being that we derive enough recognition from the mere shape of words that if the word is deliberately scrambled to preserve its shape (e.g. Cambridge becomes Cmabrigde, with the ascenders and descenders in the correct spots) that such shuffled spellings can be as readily decoded by the eye and the mind as the same words spelled exactly correctly.

While it seems to have s certain logic to it, skeptics have questioned this, reasoning there must be some hit to comprehension made necessary by the extra time–however brief–required to first recognize the shape, then recognize the word from its altered spelling.

Kevin Larson at fontblog brings us the results of a study performed by the Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Durham. Led by researcher Keith Rayner, the study found that reading comprehension is indeed degraded by shuffling words about: when jumbled in the style of the infamous paragraph above, reading speed declined from 255 wpm to 227 wpm (about 11 per cent) whilst shuffling the two initial letters of words in a sentence dropped the rate to 163 wpm (a 36 per cent decrease).

The conclusion we draw here is that, far from being secondary, internal word information–the spelling–is far from secondary in importance to deconding wordforms, and while word shapes are doubtlessly important, they don’t on thier own facilitate efficient communication.

Does that consign this to the curiosity shoppe of urban legends? We don’t know yet, but we do note that Snopes has a file open on the subject.

(via Microsoft Typography)