on thu NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER dave long wrote URL randomising letters in the middle of words has little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text this is easy to denmtrasote in a pubiltacion of new scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs keipeng the first two and last two the same and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed my ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon saberi s work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work the resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton we only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang i m working with an experimental text recognition processing engine that exhibits similar characteristics it can read right through misspellings like the above without any difficulty and as the author above suggested the pattern matching is inherently parallel internally if the text recognition algorithm architecture humans use is anything like the algorithm structure we ve been working with the reason the first letter and to a lesser extent the last letter is important is that without it the text pattern recognition problem is exponentially more difficult from a theoretical standpoint anyway and has to be resolved using deeper abstraction analysis the middle letters are far less important and computationally much easier to resolve correctly cheers james rogers jamesr URL 