By: Vivian Pham, Staff Writer
You were focusing on a good book when all of a sudden, you got distracted and lost track of the book. You had to re-read the paragraph again, but a weird thing happened. You stared at the words for a minute and suddenly, the word became unfamiliar. After a few minutes staring at it, you believe that it wasn’t misspelled, but it still looked like there was something wrong with it, even after you checked the dictionary. Are there any reasons behind this strange phenomenon?
In “Verbal Conditioning and Behaviour”, Dr. Jagannath Prasad Das defined “semantic satiation” as a loss of meaning of a word following its massed evocation as the word is repeated over and over again. When this study is expanded, it is suggested that this psychological phenomenon is applied for readers as well. In Dr. Leon Jakobovits’s 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University, he pointed out that when we stare at a word for a long time, this psychological phenomenon will be activated which makes the word look strange and unfamiliar, even with the simplest word.
“Unconscious inference” was first proposed in 19th century by a physicist Hermann Helmholtz, where inference refers to the idea that the brain conjectures what might be out there, and the unconscious reminds us that we have no awareness of the process. This process constantly occurs since we were born. An example for unconscious inference is the brain tends to think the Sun moves around the Earth – sunrise and sunset. However, in fact, the truth is the Earth orbits around the Sun, it’s just the brain thinks that what we see is the Sun orbits the Earth. Likewise, when we read and perceive language, our brains are in an unconscious inference state. So, when we stare at a word longer than we should, this state of mind is interrupted, causing the brain to “question” the meaning of that word.
The study “Communication in the Real Word” from Minnesota University dug deep into the essence of language and claimed that the language system is primarily made up of symbols which combine to deliver messages. When we perceive language, we perceive the combination of factors that make a language meaningful, not perceive it separately. Therefore, when we read a word, we don’t just read letter by letter, we read the whole word structurally in order to avoid looking at the words by its letter and break its meaningful structure.