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Subject: Re: dylsexics of the wrold, untie!
From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
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Date: 12 Sep 2002 12:59:03 -0700

On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 12:22, Dave Long wrote:
> <http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000393.html>
> 
> > ... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no
> > effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This
> > is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could
> > ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same,
> > and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come
> > to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce
> > retigcionon.  Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael
> > prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing
> > coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need
> > the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.


I'm working with an experimental text recognition/processing engine that
exhibits similar characteristics.  It can read right through
misspellings like the above without any difficulty.  And as the author
above suggested, the pattern matching is inherently parallel internally.

If the text recognition algorithm/architecture humans use is anything
like the algorithm/structure we've been working with, the reason the
first letter (and to a lesser extent, the last letter) is important is
that without it the text pattern recognition problem is exponentially
more difficult (from a theoretical standpoint anyway) and has to be
resolved using deeper abstraction analysis.  The middle letters are far
less important and computationally much easier to resolve correctly.  

Cheers,

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com


