syrinx

why not? Some studies have shown that our brains and those of other life forms seem hard wired to recognize the difference between 1, 2, and 3 instances, but only humans have apparently figured out how to use symbols to represent precise numbers above 3.
Maybe (and maybe Matt Davis already thought of and tested this hypothesis) - the first and last letters are within our limit of comprehending as two separate things and we count all the rest as one thing and recognize the other letters and unscramble them to create a known sequence that symbolizes a specific word? Not sure how one would test that, tho.
And might this have a relatioship to dyslexia? not having it, I don't know for sure what it's like, but understand it is similar to seeing words as letters but not recognizing the pattern, or seeing a different pattern than is presented on the page.
I know of one instance in which a young person saw the word "Trailblazer" on the packaging of a set of camping cookery and pronounced it as "Traz-blur". And another who, in the early stages of learning to write, having been taught the letters and the phonetics attached to them, spelled "bird" as "brid", which actually, when sounded out letter by letter, sounds like "bird", although maybe the "i" was inserted because the word had been seen before but the pattern wasn't committed to memory yet, and after the "buh" "er" and before the "dub" seemed like the logical place to put the silent "i".
fascinating topic...thanks for sharing it!