The stats are definitely bs. I've done some adult literacy tutoring and the big hurdle to becoming a competent reader is getting the mind to recognize the patterns (through repetition), as someone posted earlier. Once you are able to read without resorting to phonetics your brain just picks up letter shapes, first and lasts, etc. instead of processing every letter. I'll bet that would be harder to read (but still not that difficult) in all caps, because of the assistance you get from the different shapes of lowercase letters. Grammar helps too. I probably get tripped up more reading my first grader's compositions than I do reading trade journals at work because you never know what word is coming next. Still neat.
