Letter salad
A jumble of letters is colloquially a jumble of characters with a meaning that is difficult or impossible to recognize . It is produced, for example, by faulty printer drivers or keyboard tests. In most cases, even cryptographically encrypted texts appear as a jumble of letters.
Viewing digital texts in the wrong character set table regularly leads to a special form of letter jumble, which is known as character jumble. In pedagogy, the term letter salad is used as a letter game when learning to read , in which the students have to find the correct word from a mix of letters.
In the writings of people with dementia, one can find “senseless stringing together of letters (letter salad), senseless jumble of groups of letters (syllable salad), senseless structure of words (word salad)”.
A certain form of puzzle , the so-called search puzzle , is also called a letter salad . Search pels consist of a grid of letters in which words are hidden that must be searched for.
Readability
In 1976, Graham Rawlinson found, as part of his dissertation at the University of Nottingham , that the order of the letters within words - if one or more initial and final letters remained correct - had only limited influence on reading comprehension. This was true of English texts in which words with one to three letters (which Rawlinson left unchanged) occur more often than in German. Apparently the phenomenon shows up in other languages as well. However, it is important whether z. B. in the case of compound words, their components ( constituents ) are considered individually. In addition, the length and degree of interchangeability are also decisive in determining whether a word can still be read. Less swapped words are easier to read. The word Bcuhstbaenrehenifflge is still relatively easy to recognize, while Bbnsghhceeunftloiraee is barely legible. The example below has been circulating on the web since 2003.
"According to a Sutide eneir elgnihcesn Uvinisterät, it is not witihcg, in wlecehr Rneflogheie the Bstachuebn in eneim Wrot snid, the only thing that is effective is that the estre and the last Bstabchue snid at the ritiionhceid. The Rset can be a ttoaelr Bsinöldn sien, tedztorm can be lseen without pemoblre. That’s the way we don’t read any Bstachuebn enzelin, snderon the word as breaths. "
“According to a study by an English university, the order in which the letters are in a word does not matter, the only thing that matters is that the first and last letters are in the correct position. The rest can be total nonsense, but you can still read it without any problems. This is because we don't read each letter individually, but the word as a whole. "
literature
- Ulrich Schnabel: Linguistics: Bnuter Bchutsabensalat . In: Die Zeit , No. 7/2006
Web links
- Katja Schmid: Unlguailbch! In: Telepolis . September 24, 2003, accessed December 25, 2014 .
- Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy ... from October 20, 2003 - with examples in several languages
Individual evidence
- ^ Penny Ur, Andrew Wright (Ed.): 111 short recipes for teaching French. Interactive exercise ideas for in between. Translated and edited by Barbara Huter and Susanne Schauf. Klett-Verlag for knowledge and education, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-12-525840-5 , p. 14. Restricted preview in the Google book search.
- ↑ Robert Saudek : Emphasis and sub-emphasis of word beginnings and word ends as characterological and psychopathological features of writing. In: Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol. 37, 1930, ZDB -ID 715089-1 , pp. 99-134, here a limited preview in the Google book search.
- ^ Graham Ernest Rawlinson: The significance of letter position in word recognition. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham 1976, Summary .
- ↑ heise.de