From the Guardian 25th September
The ease might be illusory. Or even ilosruly. Never mind what the web loggers tell you, scrambled words can be hard to read.
Not so, says Martin Turner of the Dyslexia Institute. "There is a spectrum of truth here, and that is towards the lower end, because actually sequence is about the only thing that is important."
Experiments with so-called format distortion can change the appearance of a word drastically - alternating letters in capitals, lower case, superscript and subscript, for instance, or in a huge Gothic typeface to disguise the lettering - but in experiments young children can still read such disguised words, says Turner. What throws them is a change in the sequence of letters, hardly surprising because letters represent a flow of speech sound. The first letter is an important clue to a scrambled word, the last much less so.
In fact, the exact way in which the letters are scrambled can be extremely significant. For example, with plurals, leaving the "s" at the end, but not the letter that should have preceded it, can make the word hard to decipher.
"All you need to do is try and read that email," says Turner. "Immediately, you discover it is quite difficult to read. And secondly, you get very fed up with it after two or three sentences. What you have done is put yourself in the position of a dyslexic or poor reader, who loses interest jolly quickly.
"Motivation slumps and it is quite an aversive experience. I got that email, from a fellow psychologist, needless to say, and immediately wrote back commenting that it was hard work, and aversive. After a while, I thought: do I really want to do this? Why don't I look out the window and see what is going on?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/thisweek/story/0,12977,1048638,00.html
Simon