New York University research challenges the traditional understanding of text comprehension.
The human brain can process certain sentences “in the blink of an eye”, according to a recent study.
According to the researchers, the findings differ from previous theories, according to which people understand words one at a time.
It is traditionally assumed that words are understood sequentially before their meaning is combined into a complete sentence.
The study found that the human brain can perceive certain sentence structures in up to 125 milliseconds, i.e. a time equivalent to the blink of an eye.
– Certain language structures are quickly recognizable, in the same way as your own car is recognizable in the parking lot, says the professor Liina Pylkkänen from New York University for The Guardian.
This is how the research was done
The participants of the study were given the task of identifying whether two sentences shown in quick succession correspond to each other. The fastest and most accurate answers were obtained when the sentences contained a subject, a verb and an object, such as “nurses clean wounds”.
The same reaction was also observed when there was a grammatical error in the sentence or the sentences became implausible.
Reactions slowed down if the structure of the sentence was less typical, such as “wounds clean nurses”, or if it was a list of words without structure.
29 native English-speaking, right-handed people participated in the study.
Research shows that rapid comprehension may be based more on the structure of the language than on the meaning of the words. It has been published In Science Advances.