Poll
Fluent in Persian? How was it to read the scrambled Persian paragraph (click image attachment below to read)?
Very easy 0
Easy 1
Difficult 0
Very difficult 1
Total Votes: 2
You must be a logged-in member to vote
Whole Word Recognition - كلمه باز شناسى نا خود آگاه
Posted: 06 December 2006 08:20 PM   [ Ignore ]
Administrator
Avatar
RankRankRank
Total Posts:  120
Joined  2006-01-12

The goal of literacy is subconscious word recognition. Poor readers transform into fluent readers once their brains are able to recognize words as a whole, on a subconscious level, without having to analyze them. There is actually a section of the brain devoted to this. Once you become fluent, that part of your brain will glow while you read.

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.

Click here for the paragraph unscrambled.

Profile
 
 
Posted: 06 December 2006 08:21 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 1 ]
Administrator
Avatar
RankRankRank
Total Posts:  120
Joined  2006-01-12

For the record, the English unscrambled is: 

The Phenomenal Power of the Human Mind.

According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

Simply Amazing, huh?

Profile