Language processing in our brain happens at a speed faster than speaking a word aloud. This finding could help scientists better understand language.
According to a new study, the human brain can recognize the basic structures of written language in a single glance, allowing us to quickly process the flood of information coming from our smartphones.
By measuring the brain activity of 36 volunteers, scientists discovered that individuals can detect the fundamental structures of a sentence in just 125 milliseconds—almost the blink of an eye. This means people can process words at a speed similar to how we perceive visual scenes, a skill that allows us to continuously see and navigate the world around us.
This new finding could provide key insights into how language is encoded in the brain. Lina Pilkannen, a professor of linguistics and psychology at New York University, told Live Science: ‘Studying how the brain processes written messages helps scientists learn more about the features of language, particularly those not related to speech.’
Pilkannen added that studying the neurobiology of language through the mouth is challenging because it forces us to turn language into a sequence of brain activity in order to speak the words aloud. This limits our understanding of language features to the word-by-word sequencing needed for speech.
To address the issue, researchers used a non-invasive method called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which uses magnetic fields to track electrical activity within the brain. During the brain scans, they presented a three-word sentence structure to the participants, which appeared on the screen for 300 milliseconds. A second set of words was then shown, either identical to the first or with slight changes. Participants were tasked with determining whether the second sentence matched the first exactly or had a slight change.
The scans revealed that the left temporal cortex, the outermost layer of the brain responsible for key language processing, showed more activity for three-word sentences than for lists of unstructured words. This activity occurred in just 125 milliseconds.
Participants performed best when the sentences contained a subject, verb, and object, with brain activity for phrases like ‘Nurses clean the wounds’ being faster than for noun lists such as ‘Heart, lungs, liver.
Quick detection was also observed for sentences containing agreement errors, where the verbs did not match the plural subject. For example, ‘The nurses cleans the wound’ was used. The brain can rapidly detect unlikely sentences, such as ‘The wounds cleans the nurses.’ According to the researchers, not only does our brain recognize words, but it can also apply our prior knowledge of the world to instantly analyze the meaning of words. Pilkannen says:
Just like you quickly recognize a car in a parking lot, creating linguistic structures is also rapidly recognizable, demonstrating the swift impact of syntax (sentence structure) in the brain. This is interesting because structural knowledge [of sentences] is abstract, yet somehow, you can still perceive it from the stimulus.
The researchers plan to continue their work by further investigating the types of sentence structures the brain can quickly recognize. They are also examining whether these structures align with the kinds of sentences people learn in childhood. Additionally, they aim to determine whether other visual stimuli, such as images, are processed using similar mechanisms to those we use for understanding text.
The researchers’ findings were published on October 23 in the journal Science Advances.