Blackberry, for example, contains two grammatical units, which are technically known as morphemes. That’s because words frequently consist of two parts. “In English, words aren’t manipulated very often.”
“English is pretty boring when it comes to morphology,” Wittenberg tells Inverse. “How quickly this satiation occurs will depend both on how many times the word is repeated (by analogy, how long you stare at the flag) and also the extent to which you pay attention while repeating the word (by analogy, how consistently you keep your eyes fixated on the lower right star).”Įva Wittenberg, Ph.D., a linguistics professor at the University of California, San Diego, theorizes that the more transparent the morphology, the less likely satiation effects will occur. “Our experimental results suggest that a similar sort of neural habituation explains semantic satiation, except that in this case, the habituation is not for the colors of a flag but rather for the meaning of a word,” Huber says. However, if you don’t do that and simply look at the flag for a split second, the afterimage will be weaker or the after image will simply look the same.
If you then look at a white wall and blink your eyes, you’ll see an ‘afterimage’ consisting of a flag with black and green stripes and black stars against a yellow rectangle. Imagine, Huber instructs, you’re looking at a picture of an unfurled American flag and you stare at the lower right star for 10 seconds. He uses another phenomenon, called visual habituation, as a metaphor. It’s important to remember that semantics is the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning and satiation is the condition of being full.ĭavid Huber, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, examined semantic satiation in a 2010 study published in Cognitive Psychology.Īmherst explains to Inverse that when it comes to words, the loss of association isn’t an all or event - it’s more of a gradual process. Some experiments have also demonstrated that it’s not necessarily even the verbal repetition that strips a word of its meaning - that’s a specific type of semantic satiation called ‘meaning satiation.’ In some cases, it’s simply seeing a word too often that causes its lexical definition to be forgotten.
Try it: mushroommushroommushroommushroommushroommushroom For the uninformed, semantic satiation occurs when the uninterrupted repetition of a word eventually leads to the sense that the word has lost its meaning.įor example, if you take the word ‘ mushroom’ and then repeat it as mushroom, mushroom, mushroom and so on, the meaning will drop away and you’ll no longer visualize a bulbous fungus when you hear the word. Reddit recently united over this experience in its discovery of a phenomenon typically only spoken of in linguistic classes: semantic satiation.Īs of Friday afternoon, this reddit submission defining semantic satiation had received 53,100 upvotes on the subreddit r/todayilearned. Learning that, for example, clinomania is an “excessive desire to stay in bed” and philocaly is “a love of beauty” enriches your mind and your vocabulary. It’s a very satisfying thing to learn that there’s a word for an experience you didn’t know could be described by a word.
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