Today I was thinking about the mind and how typos can be easily read and understood by people of the same mother tongue. I finally found the example by searching the keywords ‘ESL, typos, understand, native,”. Here is a good summary of what’s up with typoglycemia
What jumped out at me was the explanation of why ‘they’ think it happens. They say it’s because if you don’t change the first or last letter of the word it doesn’t affect the readability. Weird. Hmm. So then I started thinking about a post I just happened to write last month about speed reading
It seems as though these two work side by side and that reading isn’t really understanding your abc’s and how those individual abc’s work together to form a word, but more so the *memorization* of the general shape and form of those words as a unique ‘picture’ if you will.
I was also meandering in my mind about how this might also help understand why captchas are sometimes brutally hard for humans at times but nearly impossible for robots…
Anyways, what I’m thinking is that the eyes recognize words more as a ‘picture’ in much the same way that you can recognize people you know by quickly scanning through a group picture of hundreds or thousands of people.
Do you know your abc’s?
Maybe it doesn’t matter as much after all….
