• Subconscious Word Recognition - the Goal of Literacy
• What does Whole Word Recognition look like? See this Scrambled English Paragraph
• Neat! Does that work in Persian? See this Scrambled Persian Paragraph

Subconscious Word Recognition - the Goal of Literacy

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. (OK, maybe not glow, but somehow researchers have mapped this out. Here is a link to a paper on the subject.)

Getting to whole word recognition takes a while. Decades of research in Education indicates that reading starts with phonological awareness - learning the alphabet and the sounds that correspond to each letter or group of letters. (For more information, here is an excellent article on the process.)

Once you've learned your phonics, though, it still takes about 38 encounters with a new word before you learn to recognize it on sight. Language is all about exposure and familiarity. 38 encounters may seem like a lot, but just think: with word magnets on the refrigerator, you will achieve this number of encounters quickly and painlessly, during your normal process of getting snacks. In short, while you are hanging out in the kitchen, having random fun with a bunch of word magnets, you are engaged in a process that will help you to achieve Subconscious Word Recognition.

What does Whole Word Recognition look like? See this Scrambled English Paragraph

A while ago, this paragraph was circulating around the internet. Try to read it and see if you notice anything strange:

Click here to read the paragraph unscrambled. There you have it. An demonstration of the fact that the "human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole."

When I first read this paragraph I was amazed! It was easy to read English scrambled. Of course, it's not as easy as they make it sound. Click here for Matt Davis' website that discusses the limits of this word scrambling phenomenon.

And click here for Josh Nimoy's site that has a scrambler. You can type in any English text and it will scramble it for you, keeping the first and last letter in place. Cool.

Neat! Does that work in Persian?

OK, it works in English, but can you scramble words and still recognize them as a whole in Persian (a.k.a. Farsi)? The Persian language seems somehow more complex than English. First of all, it has a semi-cursive alphabet. If you re-order the letters, even if you keep the first and last letters in their original places, the shape of the letters within the words may change as they take on a different cursive form. On top of this, half the vowels (the short vowels) are not shown in writing.

How much of a difference does this make? Will it be harder to decipher scrampled Persian script than it is to decipher English script? If so, would that mean that English is a more practical script in terms of being easier for the mind to map/decode/subconsciously recognize?

To answer this question, we have translated this paragraph into Persian and scrambled it (see below. Also, for the unscrambled version, click on the scrambled version, or click here and compare. We suggest you try the scrambled version first, otherwise you're "cheating"). I found it readable while scrambled, but I am biased because I translated it. I've run it by a few other people of mixed reading ability, and results have been mixed. There must be a systematic way to test if this is readable. In any case, contact us and let us know your level of Persian reading ability, and on a scale of 1-10 how easy it was to read (with 10 being the easiest). Also, let us know from 1-10 how easy the English was to read.

Scrambled Persian:

Click here for unscrambled version.

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