I've read about this. What's his name... Noam Chompsky, the Linguistics professor at MIT has published some information about this. As long as, with some long-words and some others that could be mistaken for more than one thing, the first lteter and last ltteer are in the correct place, understanding the word is not hard to do.

Ptetry amaznig, huh?

I didn't think I should drudge up an old topic, but I noticed that no one wrote anything about dyslexia, so I figured I'd add my reply.

My husband is dyslexic, which means that he has trouble processing words because the letters get mixed up or appear backwards when he's trying to read. Everything he reads looks similar to the example. But reading takes twice as long for him because his brain works twice as hard to process. It addition, you have to recognize the word in order for your mind to translate it into something that has meaning. If you never knew the correct spelling of the word in the first place, then you wouldn't be able to unscramble the letters into something that your brain recognized.
I think words would tend to lose their importance if they weren't spelled the same most of the time. We would have to go back to the pre-literate age of using pictograms and symbols, which would make abstract concepts hard to express. Chinese developed from pictograms and they have over 10,000 characters while English only has 26 letters. Each character represents a different idea, while letters must be formed into words in order to generate meaning.

So I think that spelling does matter, especially at the initial stage when you are trying to learn words. And spell-check is ruining spelling in school and limiting vocabulary. Texting is a close second.

Have been getting this chain mail for so long trust me it gets me ticked off but its true what science has done to us as the world advances.

Its pretty amazing that the human mind can do that. The only place where it would be important would be an exam where you get graded on your spelling and punctuation.

i know this. you could mix up all the letters except for the first and the last of the word and you could still determine the word. this is because the brain is able to process the word (assuming that the word has been pre-stored in the brain, probably by reading, memorizing... you know, when we go to school, we learn about words and their meanings ) just by looking at the first and last letter of the word.

This is really famous, I see everywhere I had this article appear on my news site by on my writers and it's actually weird lol, but i think spelling matters because if you are looking for a job you need to be able to spell right and stuff.

I totally agree with you Tiki..Spelling is important for if you do not know the spelling then you would not recognize the word itself. Pronunciations and spelling are two different things so when you pronounce it in your head or verbally, you try to replicate the exact which might not give you the right result everytime.

But this is a really old discovery, i had read it in a magazine and heard it from my uncle.

That's wild. I absolutely cannot stand seeing web content that is loaded with misspelled words, typos, and grammatical errors. As I stated in a previous post, I think that it is essential that people have someone to review content of their sites for typos and errors.

Personally, when I see a site with misspelled words and poor grammar, it does not have much credibility in my opinion. No matter what type of site it is, it just makes me not take the content seriously. If it is a site that is selling something, I think, okay...if they are not careful enough in ensuring that their site is presentable and professional done, how efficient are they going to be in processing my order? Is my credit card information safe?

Just my two cents...

Wow that is really amazing i read that whole thing with out any problems. That is really cool.