Word scrambling is a deceptively simple mechanic. Rearrange the letters of a word, ask someone to restore the original — that's the entire game loop. But underneath that simplicity is a cognitive process that language researchers find genuinely interesting, and that developers building educational tools keep returning to. The Cognitive Mechanics of Unscrambling When a learner attempts to unscramble a word, they're engaging several parallel cognitive processes: pattern recognition (matching lette