Whether it's news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short texts. Now researchers say we don't choose how we get its essence at a glance.
Professor Lena Pilkanen, a co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume that words are understood individually, providing the meaning of the entire sentence.
“From this point of view, at-a-glance language processing doesn't really work because there is not enough time for sequential processing of all the words and their combinations in a larger representation,” he said.
However, the research provides new insights and reveals that some sentence structures can be detected in as little as 125 milliseconds (ms), a time period similar to the blink of an eye.
Pilkanen said: “We still don't know exactly how this ultra-fast detection of structures is possible, but the general hypothesis is that something you perceive matches very well with what you know (in this case, we are talking about grammar knowledge) and this knowledge above down will help you recognize the stimuli very quickly.
“Just as you quickly recognize your own car in a parking lot, you also quickly recognize certain language structures and syntax can have a rapid effect on the brain.”
The findings suggest parallels with how we perceive visual scenes, which Bilkanen notes may have practical implications for digital media designers, advertisers and traffic sign designers.
In an article in the journal Science Advances36, Pilkanen and his colleagues report how they used a non-invasive scanning device to measure participants' brain activity.
Each participant was presented with a three-word prime sentence that flashed for 300 ms, followed by a second sentence that was identical or differed by one word. With a repeated test using different initial sentences, participants were asked to indicate whether the sentences matched.
The results revealed that participants made faster and more accurate judgments about whether sentences contained a subject, a verb and an object – such as “nurses clean wounds” – than when they had a list of nouns such as “heart, lung, liver.” .
Furthermore, participants' brain activity increased rapidly in response to an initial sentence with a subject, verb, and object, and activity was detected in the left medial temporal cortex within 130 ms, about 50 ms longer than a list of nouns.
A similar rapid response was observed when sentences began with a subject, verb, and object such that they contained an agreement error (e.g., “nurses clean wounds”) or became implausible, e.g., “nurses clean wounds.” “wounds.”
But the effect disappeared when the sentences were given less common structures, for example “the nurses clean the wounds” or “the nurses clean the wounds.” Pilkannon said these sequences do not activate the same sentence recognition system.
While the authors focused on English, they say that rapid comprehension may depend on other features in different languages, and this study provides new insights.
“From one point of view, the initial level of understanding appears to be more structural than meaning-driven,” they write.
