Someone on Substack argues that we read by word shapes. He posted the above image to prove his point.
No, I don't think this supports Whole Language, whole-word or word shape reading at all.
In fact, the famous paragraph is often misunderstood.
First, the claim that it came from Cambridge University is false. There was never a Cambridge study proving that readers only look at the first and last letters. The paragraph became popular on the internet, but the attribution is dubious.
Second, the reason most literate adults can read it is that the surrounding context is highly predictable and most of the words are only mildly scrambled. Notice that:
The first and last letters are usually correct.
The sentence structure remains grammatical.
The words are familiar.
You already know English well.
Try scrambling it more aggressively and comprehension quickly collapses.
For example:
"Aoccdrnig" is still recognisable as "According".
But "Acrngoicd" is much harder.
And "cdAnorcgi" is harder still.
If readers truly recognised words only by their overall shape, all three versions should be equally easy.
To read the paragraph, the reader must already possess detailed knowledge of the words and their letter sequences. The brain is not seeing a shape and saying, "that's according." Rather, it is using multiple cues, including:
letter identities,
approximate letter order,
word length,
sentence context,
prior vocabulary knowledge.
A further point is that beginning readers and struggling readers often find this paragraph much more difficult than fluent readers. If whole-word recognition were the primary mechanism, one might expect the opposite.
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