Why Can Jumbled Words Still Be Read?
November 28, 2023
For starters, how the letters are jumbled can impact the ease or difficulty in deciphering the word. Since a word is made up of arbitrary lines, your brain uses a simple process that you learned when you started to read. By recognizing the shape of letters, your brain associates a sound to the word and you understand exactly what it means.
The word-scrambling phenomenon is called typoglycemia and is used to describe one’s ability to extract words that are jumbled in the middle. In addition, words can be scrambled with numbers in a similar way, as demonstrated below:
“Cna Yuo Raed Tihs?” or “Numb3rs 1nst3ad 0f L3773rs”
If you can read these, you have typoglycemia. Since your brain processes all the letters of word simultaneously, the same concept of deciphering meaning applies to letters and words as context for one another.
However, your ability to read jumbled words relies on a few simple rules established in the brain’s visual system, which is where your response to a scramble characters is seen as a sum of the individual letters and numbers you see. The ease at which you extract meaning from jumbled words is related to your ability to infer context, which stimulates the areas of the brain that corresponds to what you expect.
Areas of the brain are critical in language processing.
Wernicke's area of your brain is a critical language area in the posterior superior temporal lobe that connects to the Broca's area via a neural pathway. Scientists have long associated this area with language processing for both written and spoken words. Wernicke's area is primarily involved in the comprehension of meaning based on the order in which the words appear.
Your brain is actually quite proficient at solving jumbled word puzzles and rearranging the letters or deciphering the meaning of numbers used to replace them. Through orthographic coding*, your brain processes and stores written words in a mental dictionary that includes the sound of letter patterns as well as the meaning of the actual word. This process helps you read words more quickly.
*NOTE: Orthographic coding refers to the ability to store written words in working memory while the letters in the word are analyzed and the ability to create permanent memory of written words linked to their pronunciation and meaning.
How You Use the Orthographic Code
Reading is a complex process where your brain decodes the letters and symbols in a word to derive its meaning. Research suggests your brain processes jumbled words using the orthographic code at various levels, including visual, phonological and linguistic.
At the visual level: It is easier to read a jumbled word correctly when the first and the last letters are retained and the other letters are jumbled or replaced with letters of similar shapes.
At the phonological level: It is easier to recognize similar sounding words. But, exactly how these factors contribute individually or collectively to recognize words remains unclear.
At a linguistic level: It is easier to recognize words that we encounter more frequently or that contain frequently-used letters. Your brain gathers just enough information to interpret the word you see.
The same orthographic code applies to both letters and words. Our brains process all the letters of a word simultaneously and uses the them as context for each other. Even someone who is lacking in skills for typoglycemia can usually read jumbled words, although it may require more time to figure them out.
Neuroscience Study Says Order Matters
Neuroscientists at the Indian Institute of Science shed light on how our brain deciphers jumbled words. Using a computational model with artificial neurons, they found that our brain forms an image of a word based on its letter shapes, comparing it to visually similar words stored in our memory. Researchers noted that the more similar the shapes of the odd letter and the distractors, the longer it took for people to spot the odd letter accurately.
By calculating the similarity index among letters, the team designed artificial neurons to mimic this processing. These neurons accurately predicted the time it took to identify different letter combinations:
- Letters Switched in Middle – Jumbled letters decreased reading ability by 12%
- Letters Transposed at End – Jumbled at the end of the word decreased ability by 26%
- Letters Mixed at the Beginning – Jumbled at the beginning decreased ability by 36%
Brain imaging through functional MRI revealed that the lateral occipital region that’s responsible for visual information processing is activated when you observe a word even when it is jumbled or contains numbers.
Word activation most likely occurs when a scrambled word is compared to visually similar examples that are stored in the brain’s visual area. Nonetheless, these important insights could lead to improved text recognition algorithms and better diagnosis of reading disorders like dyslexia. By identifying children with visual processing deficits through similar experiments, experts hope to develop targeted training methods to enhance fluency in individuals with reading problems .
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At ProLingo, we encourage everyone to exercise their language skills whenever the opportunity arises. Adopting healthy lifestyle habits can help enhance brain health, so add a word jumble app to your phone and take a mental workout with you. Call 800.287.9755 for your professional language services.
