Cómo resolver anagramos largos y difíciles:
Abstract
An experiment is reported involving 72 student subjects, a population of 144 different five-letter anagrams and a total of 864 solution times for analysis. Various characteristics of anagram solving are considered leading to a conception of the process as a recurring trial and check activity in which the nature and sequence of the tests are determined jointly by the thinker’s set, linguistic knowledge, and preference for certain forms of letter position rearrangement . Regarding this last factor of letter location, solution is attained sooner if the thinker must change the location of a single letter (a) rather than the locations of several letters, (b) ) from an end to a middle rather than from a middle to an end location: ease of moving to a single letter does not depend on the direction of the move. A subsidiary experiment that shows the relative difficulty of complex, as opposed to simple, moves is less for students than for 15-year-olds than for 12-year-olds. This finding is interpreted in terms of interaction between letter location factors and varying levels of linguistic knowledge. It is ksuggested that improvement in overall anagram solving performance can be brought about only with learning which extends over a period of months or years.