I found it fascinating, too. And it just sounds compelling. The example is perfect. So I tried to find the source of the information but could not find it.
Instead I found the following.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/op...-3963847c.html
Quote:
Qitue fasnciantig
This story was published Wednesday, September 17th, 2003
Something making the rounds on the Internet:
"Aoccdrnig to rsceearch 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 a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
According to the urban legends site, www.snopes.com, no research has actually been conducted at Cambridge University to verify the statement above. The author is unknown. However, the content speaks for itself.
Intgirunig, ins't it?
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Steven T Abell on USENET said the following in comp.lang.apl. I don't know him but he seems to make sense.
Quote:
I've seen this thing popping up in several places on the net
in the last day or so,
and I don't buy it.
I tried a little experiment,
and the simple claim given here doesn't hold up very well.
Short sentences without context are very hard to read,
especially if they don't have many one-, two-, or three-letter words
that are obviously invariant under the given rule.
Four-letter words are found in their correct form half the time,
and trivial to correct when they are not.
Furthermore,
one can devise scrambling strategies that mislead the reader
for certain classes of longer words.
I think what we see in the given paragraph
is that the first/last letter constraint
combined with enough invariant or nearly-invariant words
combined with enough material to provide context clues
raises the information content of the stream to a readable level.
I don't think the first/last letter constraint by itself is adequate.
It's certainly interesting, but the claim as given here is overstated.
Steve
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