Before you read this story, let's take a look at a sentence in Chinese, "研表究明，汉字序顺并不定一影阅响读。" Did you notice that some of the characters in this sentence are in the wrong order? You might not realize it, but your brain can read and understand most sentences, even when the words are in the wrong order.
This may have something to do with psychology, according to Chen Qingrong from Nanjing Normal University.
When we're first learning how to read, we read word by word. But after we become more experienced, we read in full phrases and even sentences. People can read five to six words at one time, Chen told the Yangtse Evening Post. Also, as experienced readers, we take the things we're familiar with for granted. We don't pay much attention to small details, such as word order.
Therefore, when we read the sentence at the beginning of this article, the content was familiar to us. So we read it the way we think it should be in our memory, with all the words in the right order. This is like when we see a person with long hair, we assume (认为) the person is a girl without taking a closer look according to Chen.
This can be also seen in many other languages, such as English. Read the following sentence, "This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe."
It is believed that humans remember the meanings of words mostly by their shape and layout, rather than the order of the letters, Matt Davis of Cambridge University told the Independent.
However, we cannot read scrambled (乱序的) sentences as quickly and efficiently as we read the normal text, according to Daily Telegraph.
