Reading Jumbled Words

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Reading Jumbled Words Douglas College Abstract The purpose of this experiment was to identify the effectiveness of jumbled words in the text and how it affects comprehension and reading rates. The independent variables were the story and position of the letter transposition. The dependent variables consisted of the time it required to read the text, and the scores for the comprehension questions related to the text. The participants in this experiment were psychology students (11 Males, 29 Females) who were asked to participate voluntarily. Materials included consent forms, stop watch, an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice, and the short story “The Beginning of Armadillos” (normal and transposed versions). Collected data was age, reading time and comprehension scores. The tests given were the practice comprehension test consisting of 3 true or false and the true comprehension test consisting of 10 true or false questions. The time required to complete the normal text was not significantly shorter than the text includes the jumble words and the comprehension rate remained stable for all the conditions. Reading rate for transposed letters at the beginning, middle, and end were closer to the normal than needed to draw a proper conclusion. Comprehension scores for the three were lower than the normal. Our hypothesis was supported in terms of comprehension scores but not for reading rate. Introduction As we read our eyes make small movements along 6 to 8 letters long and tend to skip over filler words which are high in frequency. When words are less frequent we tend to go back to read the word again; we do this automatically. Research shows that the first 2 letters are crucial in word recognition and transposition of these or end letters decreases reading rate. The number of words that people can see at one time decreases as contents of text gets more
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