I have to say that in a slightly different context, I have noticed exactly the same thing. It brought me to the conclusion that sometimes what we lack in sight, we make up for with pattern recognition - so I can sometimes recognise a word from a distance as much by its length / the general 'shape' of the word as a whole, as much as the individual letters. If this is changed (e.g. like your example of text speak) then it leaves me floundering. I particularly found it when I was trying to read Russian. My knowledge of English is such that I can do the combination of looking at the pattern of a word and making an educated guess as to what it is likely to be, even if I cannot actually properly define its individual letters. However I'm much more of a novice at reading the cyrillic script in Russian and *do* need to be able to clearly see each letter in a word before I can pronounce it, and it came to my attention one day that I have two pictures stuck to my wall, one with English text and the other with Russian, both the same size font and without glasses I can read the English one, but not the Russian one, from the same distance (even though I can read Russian script).
Most people are probably familiar with this phenomenon, there are various versions of a similar thing circulating the web:
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
- which very much supports the thought that we reply on 'patterns' and recognition of specific combinations, and the minute those are changed, e.g. shortening things in 'text speak' we suddenly find it a lot harder because it relies on us being able to see the individual letters, which requires a greater degree of visual acuity, hence why it can be a lot harder. At least, that's what I've come up with after musing over my Russian difficulties for rather a while now!
