Try reading that poem as a string of numbers

With all the screeching about how new media technologies such as "texting" and "googling" (whatever those are!) are altering our attention-spans, it's interesting to see a study that tries to pin down exactly how our relationship to language might be changing. Sascha Topolinski at the University of Würzburg, Germany, decided to test whether "texting" (whatever that is!) allows us to associate letters with numbers:

Topolinski found that 27 German study participants rated seemingly random numbers such as 373863 and 7245346 as equally pleasant. But when a further 38 German participants were asked to dial the numbers on a cellphone before rating them, they significantly preferred 373863 – equivalent to using the predictive text function to type "friend" in German – to 7245346 – German text for "slime".

Topolinski also found that companies are more liked if their phone number spells out a company-related word, like "flower" for a florist. This applied even if the company-related word has negative connotations – "corpse" for a mortician, for example.