Hello hello!
I was re-reading Chapter 11 (Language Processes) for the final, and I found something worth discussing. I think it's fascinating that no matter how you rearrange a sentence, semantically it has meaning. In our brains, we concieve meaning from a sentence as long as it has potential meaning. The term used by the book to describe an awkwardly worded sentence is "regularity", something that, despite making the sentence difficult to read and consisting of a different underlying structure, makes sense to the human brain. Enjoy!
-Nishant
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4 comments:
That is a really interesting point. So our brains can concieve meaning out of nonsense? So, the process behind simply reading and comprehending words is constructing some meaning out of the them no matter how difficult they are to read. However, what is classified a sentence with "potential" meaning? I do not fully understand that concept.
I think our brains have seen sentence and word structures for so long that it disregards nonsense
I think it's another example of our brain trying to make sense of input, even if it isn't supposed to make sense. Our brain just fills in what it thinks should be correct.
I can't remember if this had been brought up in class or not, but I find that it relates to some degree. (It's the subject of a relatively popular chain email...)
I'm sure you've seen the message someplace where the words are in the correct order but the letters within the words, save for the first and last ones, are scrambled. Even though the letters are in a completely different order, our brains are able to pick up the pieces and rearrange them in a sensical way.
More impressively, if two words utilize the same letters, we are able, from the context, able to choose the right word.
I find this to be a small marker of just how quick and powerful our brains really are...
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