I would guess part of the reason why native speakers (and probably fluent speakers) can read that text is because of linguistics probability (Bayesian probability). Humans seem to use probability of phrases to fill in blanks in speech/reading.

For example, if you see/hear the phrase "I am" there is a pretty high chance that the next word is one of the following: an adjective, the person's name, a/an or here because of syntax. Or if someone says "would you like a cup of", you can guess that the next word is likely some sort of liquid because that is what goes in a cup. Similarly, you can sometimes finish other people's sentences because of probability.

The word scrambling breaks down, as mentioned in the link, with ambiguous words where changing the order makes it look like another word and unfamiliar words.

I don't know why most people can read scrambled words. I have no proof to what I am going to propose.

I had a horrid time learning how to read. I had a worse time learning how to spell.

It all changed around the end of 3rd grade. What changed! I just memorized what the words looked like visually. You could misspell a word/words, and it didn't matter. I was looking at what a word looked like visually. Even now, I have no problem understands typos/misspelling, and never see the need to correct someone.

I have a feeling there are many people out there who are reading like myself. I don't know, just have a feeling. I do transpose letters in in writing, but I don't think I'm I have dyslexia.

Once I realized my process of reading, I caught up to the other kids. I say my process. It's probably everyone's process. I really don't know. All I know is the way I was taught to read was useless. I was never taught how to memorize, other than route repetition. Route repetition didn't work for myself. Even today I know what 8 X 8 is by visualizing the 64.

It looks like most of you breezed through high school, and college. So you don't need to know what helped me.

What helped me in learning was visualizing. In college, I took notes once. I tried to make each page look visually different. I usually drew doodles, or detailed drawings all over the pages. For instance, when I needed to memoririze all the parts of the Femur bone, I drew the bone on the page and labeled all the areas I needed to know. Even years later, I can bring up that page in my head. And no, I don't have a idetic memory. It's just the way I got through school.

I definetly had a learning problem. The specialists at the time offered no help.

I got off topic, but if you have, or know of a kid who's not keeping up in school, pass on this visualization method. It's simple. You don't need to pay for a course. It's easy concept.

(By the way, I'm still not a natural reader. I'm not the guy who can just pick up a book(fiction), and zip through it. I find myself losing my place on the page. I sometimes need to put my finger on the line I'm reading. My mind starts to wander. Although, if the author is a skilled writer, like Nabrakov; I have no problem getting through the book?

I don't have this problem when reading most non-fiction? It could be I just don't like a lot of fiction?)

°°°[ This sounds much like an ancient method for politicians and other public speakers to remember their speeches in the days before paper and literacy were so common - they would visualize their speech as a house, and every topic is another room. Giving their speech was as simple as waking thru all the rooms in the house they imagined. ]°°°

>>>[ Do words of different colors help you visualize the differences? Like how some IDEs highlight a languages keywords or italicize comments? ]<<<

===[ Also, have a visual reminder of this comment. ]===

Actually, this has a name in neuro-psychology: Method of loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

It's actually fairly ancient, and unfortunately not studied enough.

Except.. it is! By a fairly 'ancient' group of men: "I want to make clear to you is that such memory training techniques are not new. Whether used by actors, students, public speakers or Freemasons, some techniques go back to antiquity. Before the invention of printing, when manuscripts had to be copied by hand, writing materials were scarce and expensive, and many could not read and write, a trained memory was a valuable asset. Thus, ancient orators, aided by teachers of rhetoric, taught techniques enabling orators, politicians, priests, and others to memorize large amounts of material in great detail."

http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/memory-freemasonry.htm...

It is in fact studied, and I admit my "not studied enough" remark is indeed, wrong. There were about 150 papers citing method of loci since 2015: https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2015&q=%22method+of...

Interesting. AFAIK, your self-discovered process of memorizing "word images" is exactly what is recommended as a help for teaching dyslexics. Eg: I've heard it described as holding up a word at a time, and asking the learner to mentally "take a picture" by blinking their eyes, or looking off the page.

On the other side, AFAIK, most "normal" readers also read "word images" (once one is beyond the point of spelling out words as one reads) -- which is why most can read words that are partially misspelled (up to a point).

Weird. If you natively visualize things, I natively reduce them to text. It's damn hard for me to remember the fine details of an image, but I can remember a description. And I zip through most reading material really quickly, unless it's really verbose or overly purpled.

I think words as images is also a common strategy for reading. That's why designers say signs in all capital letters take longer to read than signs with lowercase or standard capitalization practices because we remember the shape of the words in more common form (Turn Left or turn left vs. TURN LEFT).

If you think that's weird, I find that I fill in missing words.

I am pretty sure I am dyslexic. My favour slogan is "Dyslexic of the World Untie!"

Just don't send your Christmas wishlist to Satan...

It may remind you, because the original page links to the Wikipedia page for that phenomenon. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia

I think it works best with words you recognize, I'm reading this article and I can't figure out the words I don't recognize, it also is a bit slower to read when all the letters are jumping around every other second. If that sentence had any words I had never seen or heard of before I probably couldn't tell you what the word is supposed to be.

> I think it works best with words you recognize, I'm reading this article and I can't figure out the words I don't recognize

"typoglycemia", for instance?

Indeed, was wondering what that word was, there was a few others, which kind of deterred me continuing reading the article sadly.

I read this without a problem as I scrolled to the right... when I was done, all the text was still moving. Great eye/mind trick!

We can only read them because we know what the original spelling is. A dyslexic kid just starting out to read and write, would have no prior knowledge of words to refer to. If we don't know what the correct pronunciation for a word is, or its spelling to start with. All the best trying to read or write with such a condition.

It's testimony to the power of the effect, though, that the two times Matt uses (sic) [when decoding "rscheearch" as "research" and "researcher"] he uses it incorrectly. Possibly some copy-editor has fixed both inconsistently or something, but I think he just didn't unscramble the word manually.

The proper misspelling is probably "researchch".

I know that an anecdote is not data, etc, etc, but I can't read that garbage. I may as well be trying to decrypt it.

This actually seems like a problem with the implementation linked here: it seems to avoid scrambling the beginning or end of the word, and as a result you can mostly read the text without too much difficulty. To more accurately convey the problems faced by someone with dyslexia, the words should be scrambled in a way that doesn't leave them easy to make out.

That is entirely intentional. It is still possible to read. At least short wods, and the longer ones you recognize, and can infer from context. The jumping text is mostly distracting.

I'm dyslexic but I have no trouble reading, I just flip letters and numbers around while they are stored in my head primarily. I dont look at individual letters as much the shape of words and context clues so changing a letter or two doesn't matter. If this effect was about half the speed I might get though the article without noticing.

I'd love to know how people try and mitigate thier LD. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224017

I think one of the factors you are missing is that we haven't had dyslexia all our lives. We have read the unscrambled version so much that the scrambled versions rarely deter us from reading at normal speed. But a real dyslexic never had that chance so their struggle is far greater. It's like when you come across words you don't know or can't guess. Even when you stare at the word for quite some time, you can't make sense of what it is.

it seems probable that phenomenon may be related to what's going on in the brains of people with dyslexia