ephemera

Alyssa talking backwards. Poteau Oklahoma

It’s worth watching at least a minute or so of this video to get the hang of what’s going on. When given a word verbally, this girl can give at least a close approximation of what that the spelling of that word would sound like backward.

The mechanism, at a guess, seems fairly clear. Alyssa has an excellent, albeit not perfect, recall of the spelling of words. She has also trained herself (or gained through some trick of genetics and neuroscience the ability) to picture in her head the spelling of words she hears, invert the order of the letters, and immediately read off the reversed spelling.

That last part in particular is worth breaking down for two reasons:

1. In addition to having a finely tuned ability to convert the sound of a word into a learned spelling and reverse that spelling, Alyssa must have a strong internal canonical pronunciation for each letter or phoneme, allowing her to make near-instantaneous (although probably not language-of-origin-sensitive) decisions on the pronunciations of totally unfamiliar words like “retnecrepus” and “galf naciremA”.
2. In response to certain relatively common words like “hospital”, Alyssa demonstrates no appreciable delay between apprehension of the word and response; in other cases, with longer and uncommon words or phrases, she demonstrates a longer pause than for short but uncommon words. This suggests to me that her ability is simply an extremely well-practiced skill, but that it’s probably something she can’t entirely turn off—that is, she most likely finds herself unintentionally reversing words when she doesn’t mean to (and likely even in situations where she would rather not devote the runtime). As a result, she has an indeterminately-sized stockpile of relatively common words that she need not even think about; the reversed form of those words is as inextricably tied to the normal sound of them for her as the meaning of them is for you or me.

This is hardly unprecedented; you’ve most likely met someone who puns or rhymes past the point of annoyance, and Neven Mrgan wrote in December about his deeply-ingrained habit of spoonerizing just about every word he encounters. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating window on human speech processing and just how many processing cycles most of us probably have going to spare.