Word Wise

May. 2nd, 2005 01:04 pm
trickykitty: (Default)
[personal profile] trickykitty
I've seen this many times, but still get a kick out of it whenever I see it. I'd like to actually figure the thing out from a cognitive standpoint, but that is a task very low on my list of to-do items.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Here's a quiz. Take the word "ghoti". This word represents a common word in the English language and can be phonetically pronounced. What is it and why?

Yeah I never get tired of seeing that

Date: 2005-05-02 06:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] disgruntledgrrl.livejournal.com
I heard you can even read it faster than normal script.

Say, have you ever read anything by Masamune Shirow?

Re: Yeah I never get tired of seeing that

Date: 2005-05-02 07:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
I don't think I've ever heard of him.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-02 06:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] surreptitious.livejournal.com
I always liked that quiz. Of course, I think I have an advantage, being mildly dyslexic.

*giggle*

As for that other word...is it gaudy? I'm just guessing.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-02 07:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
No, it's not gaudy. Keep trying :)

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-02 07:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smokedamage.livejournal.com
i know. but i won't say here

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-02 07:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smokedamage.livejournal.com
i can read that simple because Pmac has typed like that since i've known him.

i wonder if it would work if you wrote it like that, as opposed to typed, because i have a suspicion that it is a visual thing only, and only because we are so used to reading the typed word.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-02 09:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
Well, to be specific on terminology, it can't be a "visual thing only." Visual effects tend to only cover things like line orientations, shapes and colors. These are the kinds of effects [livejournal.com profile] isotripy is working on. Anything involving context-relevant data is being processed at a higher cognitive level, the stuff I'm working on. Since we still have no idea what takes place when going from a letter reader to an automatic word reader, the best guesses right now have to do with gist representation (versus verbatim representation) in the mind of words and how certain connections of words form sentences. I wonder if it would still be easy to read if the words where also mixed up within the sentences.

I do think you'd be correct regarding if it were handwritten versus typed. Some people have horrendous handwriting even though the words are spelled correctly, but we can still for the most part read that.

My real curiosity would be if say a Chinese person could still read a paragraph of Chinese characters which have minor changes in them. It's my understanding that even minor changes can transform the symbol into an entirely different word which doesn't even resemble the original word's meaning.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 03:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smokedamage.livejournal.com
correct about the chinese thing.

consider this

preboulpy

changing the orientation of the letters in this case rotating them 180 clockwise has changed the word to where it is unrecognisable.

We recognise words as shapes as well as the sequence of letters. Even though the shapes are arbitrary we have come to recognise them as having meaning. STOP. GO. WALK. CD-ROM. without even recognising these words we recognise them iconically.

Order of the words will effect changes in the meaning of the sentence since english is heavily reliant of word-order unlike a lot of other languages.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 03:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
I may have to use preboulepy as a secret operative name some time. Pretty creative. I never knew that letters could be so twisted that way.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 06:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
No its not just typed, but yes it is a visual thing. I write like that, but my writing cannot be read by anyone, even me, even if the letters were in the correct order.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 06:53 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
Scrap that 'it is visual' , you confused me. I didn't confuse my self....
no it was definately you.


[insert comment to indicate silly mood here]

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 10:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smokedamage.livejournal.com
you write with letters out of sequence?

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-04 02:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
Yup, when I'm writing fast I write the next letter before the one that comes before alot.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-04 08:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smokedamage.livejournal.com
is that only at the start of words? i do that sometimes.

have you ever done it in the middle of a word?

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 01:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
Normally only in the middle of words, it happens usually during lectures when I'm taking notes but not looking at what I am writing. There is a whole field of psycholinguistics devoted to speech errors, apparently by looking at errors you can unveil the procesesses underneath our performance. This angle is taken alot with perception too with visual illusuions.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 03:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
That's kind of what we're doing with the dyslexia research. We're looking at the error rates of normal readers versus dyslexics. If we can understand the error rates, then we can understand the processes causing them.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-06 02:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
What do you think of the magnocellular deficit theory of Dyslexia, the only theories I'm familiar with posit higher level sensory deficit (ie auditory - phonemic parsing and/or visual deficit of low spatial frequecies perception). But apparently there is alot of evidence inconsistent with these theories.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-06 04:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
I will start getting more into reading up on the prior research regarding dyslexia once I'm done writing up an educational paper that's well-past overdue. What little I do know is based on a couple of slightly older books which concentrate on the behavioral side rather than neural side. The research is based on a strong hunch of my post-doc advisor who's done a lot of studying in this area.

The second part of my research will be to integrate our findings in a neural network with known brain areas. I think at that point I'll be able to get more involved with the magnocellular ideas because we will more than likely have to see if they too can be integrated with the model. It's a fine line, though, to make sure that we don't confound the model. At the moment I can't say either way, but since I'm a neuroscience-based person, I wouldn't discount the possibility that the problems are mostly cellular based. As for why, that remains to be seen.

The summer research problem, although we will be using neural substrates, is mostly behavior-based in an effort to label what the brain is actually doing and create better testing and teaching methods. If it leads to further research on the neural level then I will be happy.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 04:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
In my neural networking class last semester we studied a few optical illusions in conjunction with the networks used to "explain" them. In one of my homework assignments I had to create a neural network to explain the Muller-Lyer illusion.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 04:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
P.S. This (http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/sze_muelue/) is my favorite web site regarding the Muller-Lyer illusion. I though you might enjoy it.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 08:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smokedamage.livejournal.com
interesting.

i might go troll the web for some reading.

Cheers

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 12:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
fish!
gh - enough
o - women plural
ti - gumpTIon!
wo ho those cog sci lectures actually came in handy for something :)

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 12:56 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
WOOT!

Yeah, it's a favorite among linguistics.

Fish

Date: 2005-05-03 12:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 40hex.livejournal.com
Google totally ruins questions like this.

Re: Fish

Date: 2005-05-03 12:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
cheater, cheater, pumkin eater :)

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 12:56 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bezique.livejournal.com
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 04:14 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
WOW!

Thank you sooo much for that article. Not only did it confirm what little I've learned about the cognitive aspects of reading, but I gained a lot of valuable information as well. Not to mention that I think I might also try to send an application over to Cambridge's Cognition and Brain Sciences department for grad school.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-03 06:47 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isotripy.livejournal.com
You might be interested in Gernsbacher's work, its about how more skilled readers rely heavily on context whereas less skilled find dont rely as much on sentence contex and find it difficult to suppress contex irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words.
I couldn't find the original reference but here is a related one about the appreciation of puns.

GERNSBACHER, M. A. , & ROBERTSON, R. R. W. (1995). Reading skill and suppression revisited. Psychological Science, 6, 165-169.

Gernsbacher (1993; Psychological Science, 4,294-298) reported that less-skilled readers are less able to quickly suppress irrelevant information (e.g., the contextually inappropriate meaning of a homograph, such as the playing-card meaning of spade, in the sentence, He dug with the spade, or the inappropriate form of a homophone, such as patience, in the sentence, He had lots of patients). In the current research, we investigated a ramification of that finding: If less-skilled readers are less able to suppress a contextually inappropriate meaning of a homograph, perhaps less-skilled readers might be better than more-skilled readers at comprehending puns. However, intuition and previous research suggest against this hypothesis, as do the results of the research presented here. On a task that required accepting, rather than rejecting, a meaning of a homograph that was not implied by a sentence context, more-skilled readers responded more rapidly than less-skilled readers. In contrast, on a task that required accepting a meaning of a homograph that was implied by the sentence context, more- and less-skilled readers performed equally well. We conclude that more-skilled readers are more able to rapidly accept inappropriate meanings of homographs because they are more skilled at suppression (which in this case involves suppressing the appropriate meanings)

(no subject)

Date: 2005-05-05 04:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trickykitty.livejournal.com
A favorite:

Time flies like an arrow;
fruit flies like a banana.

Of course this takes the cake:

Instead of "Time flies when you're having fun," we should all follow the advice of Kermit the Frog:

"Time's fun while you're having flies."

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