I have no academic nor professional background in this field, I’m only an amateur. This is probably not real science, and more like pseudoscience. The results cannot be used to make any meaningful conclusions.

I randomly came across the (wrong) Cyrillic transliteration of the word “Guantanamo Bay”, “Gцаитаиамо вау.” (I came across it in the context of people writing English words using the Cyrillic alphabet for aesthetic purposes.)

Looking at it as a Greek, I started wondering about how Americans (or well, basically anyone else) would perceive it. Obviously, most people with common sense are able to perfectly understand what it says without really knowing the Cyrillic script. I suspect that the reasons for this are:

• the similarities between the letters (at least in this specific word,)
• the similarities between the lengths of the words (considering that the person reading it has seen “Guantanamo Bay” written before)

The Experiment

I decided to set up an experiment to see how long people take to recognize the word. There are probably better resources to perform this experiment more accurately, but the approach I chose was super simple: a web app where the subject looks at the word, and when they recognize it, they click a button.

Of course, this requires the subject’s reflexes to be intact, so I decided to make the user play a simple game to temporarily boost their awareness and reflexes.

Results

I will publish the results here when I have enough data.