Reading Words As Patterns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNNULmgIUAs

This is an aspect of language that has always fascinated me. Many people think when we are reading written language, we are going through and specifically decoding each word, which is how I think we did it when we were first learning to read, but after gaining years of experience, our brains have created a shortcut that allows us to read much faster.

This video shows us that we are able to read and comprehend words, even when horribly misspelled, as long as the first and last letters are in the correct place and all other letters are somewhere in the middle(though I'm sure there are exceptions). This proves that our brains don't necessarily go through and piece together each letter in a word before understanding it. I think we would read much slower if that were the case. Instead, we store images of thousands of words in our brains and recognize them by their patterns.