Source: The Body Odd – Cracking the code: Why yuor barin can raed tihs.

For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm.

It is funny how we can read this above sort of thing. It is even funnier how I can read my own handwriting a day or more after I have written it.

We use context to pre-activate the areas of our brains that correspond to what we expect next, she explained. For example, brain scans reveal that if we hear a sound that leads us to strongly suspect another sound is on the way, the brain acts as if we’re already hearing the second sound. Similarly, if we see a certain collection of letters or words, our brains jump to conclusions about what comes next. “We use context to help us perceive,” Kutas said. 

I am deaf and I often times have to rely on what people commonly call “lip reading” to try to figure out what is going on.  In the context of this post I want to tell you a little about this topic and how it relates to the source article.  First of all the more accurate term is “speechreading” as it is more than just watching lips. It is watching body language, expressions, and most importantly context.  Many words appear the same when trying to speechread. One group of words that appear the same on the lips are “buy”, “my”, “pie” or letters b m and p. So, when I see the lips purse for a b, m, or p I have no idea which is being spoken without trying to put the word in context. With these types of problems in mind a deaf person trying to figure out what is being said is simply a guessing game. For even the most fluent speechreaders, I am certainly not one of them, only about one-third of the words are gleaned by actually seeing them on the lips. The rest have to be guessed by taking the context of what the topic is.

Context is everything in speechreading and being able to read the gibberish at the start of this post is the same thing. When words are taken out of context speechreading becomes almost impossible for anyone.  I have no problems speechreading someone who asks me how I am or if I like a particular thing in front of me. But when they come to me asking about how IBM did in yesterday’s stock market I very likely will give them a glazed look.

I am a wordsmith. I struggle to find just the right way to say something in all of my posts. So, having to fill in a 66% gap in a discussion comes difficult to me. The other thing about speechreading is that it is a very tiring thing. It takes total concentration and then some to accomplish it even at a rudimentary level. After a few minutes of filling in the gaps I just get too tired to do it anymore, at least with any degree of success.

I am tired just thinking about all this stuff so I will stop here… 🙂