Word Wise

[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?

Comments

[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.

[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)

[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."