Bad letters or just scrambling journalism ?

I have read in French newspapers the study by Cambridge researchers showing that the scrambling of letters in words did not matter as long as the first and last letter be in the right place. This is definitely true in English, but I have difficulty to believe this is the case in French (replace the words in the previous link by your favorite language). Unless maybe it was just simply bad journalism ? Further research could probably benefit from this study , it would be interesting to see how much entropy is generated from changing letters in a word and how this would affect the ranking of the generated tree in Figure 1.