Learned Perception

Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry word is in the crorcet ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.

Tulry fnaatcsiing.

Hypothesis: The above would totally mess up a dyslexic. Could be wrong, but here's my reasoning, based on what's below. Average readers learn to read in a certain way. That way leads to the ability to read totally scrambled words, as long as the first and last letter are correct. Dyslexics clearly learn to read in a different way, which is why they have trouble with it in the first place. Hence, I'm guessing that they don't have the same ability to read scrambled words on the basis that part of their problem is scrambling the words in the first place.

From GrandMasterProgrammer:

Here's another interesting thing about gurus vs. beginners: Experienced chess players can memorize chess piece positions far more quickly than novices. However! If the pieces were placed on the board randomly, as opposed to being derived from an actual game, then their skill at memorization drops dramatically and in some cases is worse than a novice. Why? Chess experts see the game board as more than just the positions of pieces. Some players have described seeing pieces as having overlapping 'forces' or 'zones'. When the game board has not been derived from a real game, the forces or zones do not form a proper pattern on the board. This interferes with the ability to reconstruct the positions from memory. It's probably related to the memory phenomenon known as 'chunking'. Novices haven't developed this skill yet, and so they perform the same regardless of how the board was generated.

A related anecdote: if a native (ie Japanese) kanji reader and a westerner who's learnt kanji sit down together, and someone else slowly writes out a kanji character in the normal way, the Japanese person will recognise it first. However, if the third party writes the same character but with a different order of strokes, the westerner will probably recognise it first. For native readers, the stroke order is ingrained as part of the character, so they don't see the shape emerging; for people who know kanji more superficially, the shape is all that matters. This is apparently a good way to win beer in bars.

And the reason I pulled this Kanji thing into this page is that I wonder if there is any parallel between the scrambled word trick and Chinese characters or Japanese Kanji. In other words, do CJK readers have a similar ability, and how would it manifest itself, what kind of scrambling is possible?

Also see the quest for the origin of the veracity of the study itself: http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

This may be the primary reason some people succeed in ExtremeProgramming, but other do not. Success is achieved by the sequence and structure of the testing/coding. Experts seem to know what to do first, then proceed to the next highest priority, while forming in their head an emerging solution and the methods by which they will construct it.

CategoryNaturalLanguage