Dr Winford James
trinicenter.com

Levels of (il)literacy

September 21, 2003
by Dr Winford James


The other day, somebody sent me the following email message with the comment 'Very interesting one!':

'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. Ceehiro.'

They didn't say why or how it is very interesting, so they obviously felt that the interestingness was self-evident. So let's see.

All the words of four or more letters, fully 35 of them, are misspelt between the first and last letters, but I am able to read and understand the message. There are 69 words, so we are talking about just over a half of them; and if we consider that, of the remaining 34, 'a', 'at', 'it', 'in', 'is', 'the', 'and', and 'can' are repeated, some of them more than once, unlike the case of the 35 where only 'raed' and 'wrod' are, then, by a rough calculation, we are really talking about more than three quarters of misspelt words. This must be where the interestingness lies - in the fact that I am able to read a message with so many misspellings, even with the letters between first and last ones carelessly jumbled.

How am I able to do so? The email message itself answers that research at an English university has found that I am because the first and last letters are in the right place, this being 'the olny iprmoetnt tihng'.

Surely, that must be an oversimplification?

The account of the 'research' seems to be asking us to accept that a child learning to read can recognise the word we know as 'place' in the spellings 'pclae', 'plcae', 'pacle', 'palce', and 'pcale', and the word we know as 'important' in the spellings 'iprmoetnt', 'irpmoetnt', 'iprometnt', 'irpmeotnt', 'iproemtnt', 'iptrmontet', to spell some of the possible shapes. (For some reason, it replaces the 'a' with 'e'!) So, once the child knows that 'place' begins with 'p' and ends with 'e', she doesn't need to bother about internal patterns or combinations. Presumably, on the basis of that knowledge, she will correctly guess the identity of the word.

But how do you go about teaching a child, or how does a child go about learning, words that begin with 'p' and end with 'e'? What communication values would she attach to those letters for psychological storage? And wouldn't such values, once assigned, influence her interpretation of those letters occurring between initial 'p' and final 'e'?

And if a child came across the message 'Terhe was a blot on the door', would she not have to know the communication values of the first and last letters of each of these words before she could correctly interpret the identity of the words? And, in the case of 'blot', how would she interpret it? As 'blot'? Or 'bolt'? How could she know merely by knowing that 'b' begins it and 't' ends it?

If an illiterate adult were to be taught that 'important' begins with 'i' and ends with 't', would that knowledge be sufficient to enable him to recognize the word? How? Wouldn't he have to know things like the following: the communication values of the internal letters; the length of the word (would he be able to guess 'important' from 'ipmtnt'?); the organisational structure of the word; the use of the word in the context of other words to form a coherent message? How could it be sufficient just to know the position of the first and last letters?

I am able to read and understand the email message easily, not merely because the first and last letters of the words are in their right places, but also because I already have an ingrained psychological sense of the shape of the words and of the message contexts in which they will come. And I have an ingrained ability to predict the identity of a word from surrounding small words such as 'I', 'an', 'it', and 'was'.

One moer thign. I dotn haev to knwo how worsd in cnotxet end to itnterprte thme croretcyl.


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