"Perl's syntax is as intuitive to beginners as that of another language whose tokens and keywords were randomly-generated" is verbose, but accurate. The structure of Randomo was entirely based on Quorum, with certain tokens and keywords randomized. The study really only speaks to the "intuitiveness" of the most superficial parts of those languages' syntax, which is something that Quorum happens to focus on:

    action z(integer a, integer b,
    integer c) returns number
      number d = 0.0
      number e = 0.0
      integer i = a

      repeat b - a times
        if i mod c = 0 then
          d = d + 1
        end
      else then
        e = e + 1
      end

      i = i + 1
    end

edit: I realize the title I gave isn't short enough to post on HN, but I wanted to reply just to make a point about the study, not your title.

Actually Quorum looks much more verbose than Perl. That may be the main distinctive feature helping absolute newcomers to grasp the code. In that vein, Java probably would fare way better than most terser languages, too. This would be something to test for (on a significant number of guinea pigs preferably).