Short Report
Raeding Wrods With Jubmled
Lettres
There Is a Cost
Keith Rayner,
1
Sarah J. White,
2
Rebecca L. Johnson,
1
and Simon P. Liversedge
2
1
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and
2
University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom
Two years ago, a widely circulated statement on the Internet
claimed that resarceh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy fuond that sen-
tecnes in whcih lettres weer transpsoed (or jubmled up), as in
the setnence you are now raeding, were easy to read and that
letter position in words was not important to the ability to read
successfully. In actuality, the statement was a hoax in that no
such research had been conducted at the University of Cam-
bridge (see http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/
Cmabrigde/). We report here results from a study showing that
although some variations of sentences with transposed letters
are relatively easy to read, other variations are not, and that
there is generally always a cost associated with reading words
with transposed letters.
We asked 30 college students at the University of Durham,
United Kingdom, to read 80 sentences in which letters were
transposed. In each sentence, transpositions were consistently
located at the beginnings, middles, or ends of words (see Table
1). About 40% of the words in the sentences (all content words
longer than four letters) had letter transpositions. In addition,
the students read sentences without any transpositions. Eye
movements were recorded via a Fourward Technology Dual
Purkinje eyetracker; the spatial resolution of this eyetracker is
less than 10 min of arc. Comprehension questions were asked
after 30% of the sentences. Readers were able to answer the
questions with high accuracy, but 50% of them indicated that
there were a few words that they did not understand.
Whereas the base reading rate for normal sentences was 255
words per minute (wpm), all of the variations involving letter
transpositions resulted in some cost to reading. When internal
letters were transposed, the reading rate was 227 wpm (an 11%
decrement in reading speed). However, when the transpositions
involved the ending letters of words, reading rate was 189 wpm
(a 26% decrement), and when the transpositions were at the
beginnings of the words, reading rate was 163 wpm (a 36%
decrement).
1
Readers made more and longer eye fixations (see
Table 1) with the more difficult transpositions.
The Internet statement was correct in that some letter trans-
positions do yield words that are relatively easy to read. How-
ever, our results clearly demonstrate that transpositions always
carry a cost. Furthermore, our research also shows that trans-
positions vary in their costliness depending on their location in
the word: Transpositions of internal letters are much less costly
than transpositions of ending letters, which in turn are less
costly than transpositions of beginning letters. These results
demonstrate the importance of beginning letters for word rec-
ognition (see Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989, for a summary). In other
work (Christianson, Johnson, & Rayner, 2005), we have also
demonstrated that letter transpositions that cross morpheme
boundaries (even with internal letters) are associated with an
additional cost. Thus, susnhine is more difficult to read than
sunhsine.
Finally, a previous study showed that when letters are sub-
stituted rather than transposed, readers take much longer to read
sentences (Rayner & Kaiser, 1975). In the case of substitutions
involving visually similar letters, substitutions for internal let-
ters (e.g., problem printed as pncblem) doubled reading time, as
did substitutions for ending letters (e.g., problnc); substitutions
for beginning letters (e.g., qroblem) were associated with reading
times 2.5 times longer than normal. In the case of substitutions
involving visually dissimilar letters, substitutions for internal
letters (e.g., prkylem) or final letters (e.g., problky) tripled
reading time; substitutions for beginning letters (e.g., fyoblem)
quadrupled reading time. In all cases (except when visually
similar letters were substituted for internal letters), substitutions
also reduced comprehension.
Address correspondence to Keith Rayner, Department of Psychology,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, e-mail: rayner@
psych.umass.edu.
1
The decrements reported are undoubtedly an underestimation of the true cost
of reading text with transposed letters because we transposed letters only in
content words. One might expect the cost to be even greater if transpositions
occur in all the words of a sentence.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
192 Volume 17—Number 3Copyrightr 2006 Association for Psychological Science