Summary: The human mind can find the construction of a short phrase in as little as 150 seconds, the velocity of a flash. Researchers discovered that the body’s language understanding system processes sentences that flash on a screen in a similar way to how it interprets a visible scene by using brain imaging.
The head quickly recognizes the structure of a sentence and yet automatically corrects minor errors, even when there are grammatical errors. These findings highlight the brain’s extraordinary speed at processing language, which is far beyond what we can find in regular speech.
Important Facts:
- The brain is find sentence structures in only 150 seconds.
- Word comprehension at once resembles quick visible scene perception.
- As it processes, the head can quickly correct minor grammatical errors.
Origin: NYU
Our brains are quickly redirected to our brains by modern technology, including word overlays and smartphone notifications, much faster than spoken words can. However, as quickly as we can decide the composition of the visuals that make up our display lives, can we practice these texts?  ,
According to new research by a group of language and philosophy researchers at New York University, the solution appears to be “yes.” It has discovered , that when a simple sentence is flashed, our brains detect its standard language structure really quickly—in about 150 milliseconds, or about the speed of a blink of an eye.
” Our experiments reveal that the body’s language interpretation system may be able to understand language similarly to visual scenes, whose nature can be grasped quickly from a single glance”, says Liina Pylkkänen, a teacher in NYU’s Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology, who led the study, which is reported across papers appearing in , Science Advances , and the , Journal of Neuroscience.
This suggests that the human brain can process a little sentence more quickly than we might anticipate because it can actually find the framework of a short sentence when it hears one syllable.
The rise of email, followed by social media and smartphones, has shifted our reading experience from a pensive, quiet activity to swift and scattered consumption of online content, with short messages constantly flashing at us through phone notifications, online platforms, and, apparently quickly, augmented realities.  ,
According to Pylkkänen,” This shift has made it clear that our brains can also make snap decisions based on quick messages, such as whether to keep or delete an email or how to respond to a brief social media update.”
” But how well do our brains handle these quick messages and how well do we really understand them?” The fact that our brains can, at least in some way, comprehend the meaning of these quick messages from a single glance may reveal something about the language system’s processing potential.
The researchers started their research by examining current scientific theories of how we understand language, which focus on word-by-word sentence processing models. These do n’t effectively account for how quickly our brains can process entire sentences seen at once, as opposed to word by word, as they do in speech, according to the researchers.  ,
In seeking a better understanding, the authors conducted a series of experiments, measuring brain activity using magnetoencephalography while participants read word lists that were either grammatical sentences ( e. g.,  , nurses clean wounds ) or just lists of nouns ( e. g.,  , hearts lungs livers ).
The left temporal cortex of the brain, which is used to comprehend language, can begin distinguishing simple three-word sentences from unstructured word lists as soon as 130 milliseconds after being viewed.  ,
” This speed suggests that at-a-glance sentence comprehension may resemble the rapid perception of a visual scene rather than the slower, step-by-step process we associate with spoken language”, explains Pylkkänen.
” In the amount of time that it takes one to hear one syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a three-word sentence”.
The scientists add that this rapid structure detection occurs in the left temporal cortex even when a sentence contains an agreement error, the wrong number on the verb ( nurse cleans wounds ), or lacks a plausible meaning.  ,
” This suggests that the signals reflect the detection of basic phrase structure, but not necessarily other aspects of the grammar or meaning”, explains Jacqueline Fallon, the , Science Advances , study’s first author, who was an NYU researcher at the time of the work and is now a doctoral student at the University of Colorado.  ,
Related research on these rapid signals in the , Journal of Neuroscience, led by NYU graduate student Nigel Flower, further supported this idea. It showed that even small errors in phrase structure—like swapping two adjacent words,” all are cats nice “—cause a drop in the brain’s rapid response.
Readers are likely to overlook these minor errors. In fact, Flower observed that starting around 400 milliseconds, the brain appears to” correct” the mistake, processing the sentence as if it were fully grammatical.  ,
This suggests that the brain can quickly identify phrase structure and quickly correct minor errors, according to Flower. ” This explains why readers often miss minor errors—their brains have already corrected them internally” . ,
The researchers could learn the brain’s ability to quickly recognize basic phrase structure by flashing the study’s participants ‘ entire sentences all at once, as opposed to word by word, even if the sentence’s meaning was absurd or there was a grammatical error that still managed to maintain the correct phrase structure.
” These findings may provide valuable insights into the brain’s intrinsic language processing abilities, independent of the usual sequential flow of spoken language”, says Pylkkänen.
Funding: The studies were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS- 2335767 ) and the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute.
About this news about neuroscience and language processing
Author: James Devitt
Source: NYU
Contact: James Devitt – NYU
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
” How our brains interpret language structure from parallel visual input.” by Liina Pylkkänen et al. Science Advances
Abstract
How our brains interpret language structure from parallel visual input.
How much of the human brain can comprehend the meanings of visual language in one glance?
Our daily interactions involve numerous quickly flashing written notifications, which we are instantly familiar with despite the conventional notion of sequential speech that we typically think of when we think of language.
What do our brains initially learn in the first few milliseconds after receiving such a stimulus?
We flashed short sentences during magnetoencephalography measurement, revealing sentence-sensitive neural activity in left temporal cortex within 130 milliseconds.
These signals emerged for subject-verb-object sentences regardless of grammatical or semantic well-formedness, suggesting that at-a-glance language comprehension begins by detecting basic phrase structure, independent of meaning or other grammatical details.
In today’s visually saturated world, our findings reveal one aspect of how quickly our brains process information.
