I can never do the word games because it costs me all day to assemble the sounds of the alphabets into the visual images of words. Is that a kind of mental defect or a common phenomenon? When you hear someone spell out a word, is it normal that you have to assemble the sounds to make out the picture of a word in your mind?
RobertB asked: When you hear someone spell out a word, is it normal that you have to assemble the sounds to make out the picture of a word in your mind?
I think that might depend on whether English is your first language. What you're describing here is extremely subjective, so I'm not sure if I read your question correctly, but here's my take.
English is my first language, and when I play those word games I jump right from the spellings to the words ... no conscious processing in between that I'm aware of. But since I moved to Arizona I've been picking up more and more Spanish. Never took a course, but there's so much Spanish in the culture down here that you can't escape encountering the language in newspapers, signs, TV channels, etc. When I see a new Spanish word I think I do what you described, assembling the overall sound from individual phonemes, diphthongs, diacriticals, inflections. And I still get it wrong about half the time.
Perhaps with one's first language, this has all become so internalized and automatic that the process is "invisible," even though it's still happening at some subconscious level? I certainly don't think it's a "mental defect" ... especially with a second language.