Popular Science Australia - 01.04.2018

EYE GOT IT

Reading Isn’t Always

Straightforward

HUMANS ARE SMEARTR THAN THEY TNHIK.

Since the early aughts, Internet memes have hyped the

notion that the order of letters in a word doesn’t matter as

long as the irst and last ones are correctly placed. It’s true:

We are keen enough to decipher jumbled words.

But it comes at a cost, warns Rebecca Johnson, a psy-

chologist at Skidmore College. In a 2006 study, John-

son used an eye tracker to measure participants’ reading

speeds. A paragraph with fully scrambled words took folks

40 per cent longer to read than the original. Muddling just

the middle letters still held them up, but only by 11 per cent.

Johnson and others posit that the bookends have more

importance than just their placement. The irst letter often

corresponds with the word’s sound, which plays a key role

in how our brains identify written terms. A blank space usu-

ally follows the last letter, making it visually stand out.

In modern life, this means we have a better chance at

reading a hastily typed, scrambled text message than an

autocorrected one. We can decipher “I dn’ot” as “I don’t”

far easier than when the phone changes it to “idiot.”

by Mary Beth Griggs / illustration by John Kuehn

ny way we can

earleir? I'm starving

wnat food befroe the

vie

Perfect. Movie starts at

8, so let's meet at domnios

at 7:30

I can probably do

seomhtnig quick, like

pziza. Could mkae it

there a half huor early

Dominos? Sreuoisly?

Delivered

6:55 PM

89%

Details

Pete

iMessage

HeHeHeyy,an

mmmeemeete

anandw

mmovi

Messages

P/S/SSSCI

trip westworld

meter

real world

by Sara Kiley Watson

FINISHED

FILES ARE THE

RESULT OF

YEARS OF

SCIENTIFIC

STUDY

COMBINED

WITH THE

EXPERIENCE

OF YEARS.”

SEARCH PARTY

The Lost Words

COUNT THE F’S IN THE SENTENCE ON THE RIGHT.

Spot three? There are six. Don’t worry. Even David Rapp, a cogni-

tive expert at Northwestern University, couldn’t spot them all. Our

brains decipher more than we are aware of.

Brains that have mastered reading don’t necessarily read sen-

tences in a linear way, stopping at every word. Instead, our eyes

bounce through, skipping some terms and landing hard on others.

When scanning a sentence, we’ll skip high-frequency words

like “of,” “and,” or “the.” Linguists call these function words;

they have little meaning or importance, and require less process-

ing time for our grey matter. Ignoring them frees our noggins to

spend more time crunching so-called content words—terms like

“iles” or “scientiic”—which are better indicators of what this

sentence is about.

No amount of repetition would help us catch all those elusive

F’s. Perhaps the only way you might have found all six, Rapp

says, is if something forced you to read in a way that wasn’t rou-

tine. For example, if someone promised you a dollar—or 20—for

every F you found, that could shift your focus, and you might

earn yourself some cash. (Or if you were a sub-editor, because

we never mis a mistake.)

westworld

metertrip

real world