Typoglycemia: this is why we are able to read words that are mixed up

If you can read the title of this slide then you’re experiencing a very unique cognitive phenomenon known as Typoglycemia. 

Typoglycemia, also known as the transposed letter effect, is the ability to read words even when they’re all jumbled up or scrambled, but there’s a catch. 

Your brain can only read a jumbled or scrambled word if it is guided by the word's two exterior letters. So technically you can’t read a truly scrambled word, only one whose inner letters are mixed up. 

“As long as the exterior letters of the words remain the same,” said Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni in a 2017 Observer interview, “typoglycemia captures our preserved ability to comprehend them.”

Nadkarni is an Instructor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School as well as the director of Digital Integrated Care and has pointed out the similarities between the brain's ability to decipher mixed-up words and a cognitive shortcut called "Chunking."

“In a way, chunking is a type of mnemonic device,” Nadkarni said. “For example, if you were to speed read a page, you might utilize chunking by breaking down the page into individual paragraphs, then reading each paragraph by comprehending it as a single unit rather than a string of sentences."

Nadkarni noted that the process being utilized in Typoglycemia is similar since the brain is both reading and comprehending individual words as a whole. 

Typoglycemia was exposed to the world in a turn-of-the-century meme in which a jumbled—but albeit readable— paragraph explains the phenomena and leaves the credit for its discovery at the feet of researchers from the University of Cambridge. 

Photo by Twitter @GoldmanForts

But in an early 2000s blog post by the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge scientist Dr. Matt Davis debunked the meme and tried to set the science straight. 

“I've written this page,” Davis wrote, “to try to explain the science behind this meme. There are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect."

“Most strikingly” Dr. Davis added, “a recent paper showed an 11% slowing when people read words with reordered internal letters.”

The paper Dr. Davis was referring to was titled “Raeding Wrods With Jubmled Lettres: There Is a Cost” and it also found that some sentences with transposed letters are easy to read while others are not. 

In a March 2018 blog post by the University of British Columbia, Yuuki Shibutani explained why the Typoglycemia meme worked so well. 

First, according to Shibutani, the words were short and the function words that provide grammatical structure were not messed up. Switched letters were also beside each other and when scrambled, the sound of each of the individual words was preserved. But most importantly the words chosen were predictable, which makes them easy for the brain to read. 

So Typoglycemia isn’t a catch-all that will work for all mistakes. But it will work in very specific circumstances. 

"Another interesting feature about this is,” Shibutani added, “is that this sentence can be recreated in many other languages, such as Spanish, Russian, German, Danish, etc.”

"However other languages such as Chinese and Japanese will not work this way” Shibutani continued, “this is because the language uses symbols/characters in their writing system.”