It takes 38 encounters with a new word to recognize it without having to sound it out.
Then, your brain sees the word as a whole. This means even if the letters are scrambled, you can figure it out - as long as the first and last letter are in their correct place. An example of this is this English paragraph:
The phaomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid.
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the human mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Smiply amzanig huh?
Was that hard to read? (well, if your English is fluent, it shouldn’t have been).
But does this work in Farsi? We have semi-cursive letters. I took the paragraph above, translated it into Persian (with the help of ammeh Seddigheh, of course!), scrambled the letters within words. See the results attached below (click the image attachment thumbnail to open). How difficult was this to read?
Note: It helps to resize the image, expand the window to get the fonts a bit bigger and clearer.
]]>