I was just about to explain that same thing.Originally Posted by turtlecat
When the brain processes sentences tht are arranged in that way (with the repeated word split by line) it doesn't recognise the "typo" because it processes the parts of the sentence each as a seperate unit and then puts it together. have you ever had one of those days where you'r ereading and you just can't get past that one line on a paage? same thing.
The reason the second one works, by the way, is because after we've learned to read, we don't usually read every letter seperately in a word unless it's unfamiliar. at that point, we simply recognize the basic shape of the word. this is als the reason that dyslexics have a hard time reading, because they can't process words that way. there is a method to fake it out though. for whatever reason if yu take a bit of red film and hold it over whatever the dyslexic is reading, it helsps thier brain process the information
The other thing I would add is that there is a "cost of expertise." Because we are all expert readers, we read things in a way that makes sense, ignoring things that are out of place. A different way of showing the cost of expertise is to do something like: 4 4, now how many #'s are there? We want to say 4, because it's so natural for us to just READ, when we all really know that there is actually 2 there.
