Contemporary digital media transmit rapid messages, such as phone notifications and text overlays on videos, to our brains at a remarkable velocity, significantly exceeding the pace of spoken language. Can we analyze these sentences as swiftly as we can assess the composition of the pictures that constitute our screen experience?
The answer seems to be “yes,” according to new studies. Researchers have discovered that when a brief sentence is flashed, our brains detect its basic linguistic structure extremely quickly — in roughly 150 milliseconds, or about the speed of a blink of an eye.
“Our experiments reveal that the brain’s language comprehension system may be able to perceive language similarly to visual scenes, whose essence can be grasped quickly from a single glance. This means the human brain’s processing capacity for language may be much faster than what we might think—in the amount of time it takes to hear one syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a short sentence,”
says Liina Pylkkänen, a professor in New York University’s linguistics department and psychology department who led the research1.
Understanding Snap Decisions
Email, social media, and smartphones have replaced reading as a thoughtful, leisurely activity. Instead, we now consume digital content quickly and fragmentedly, with brief messages continuously flashing at us through online platforms, phone notifications, and, maybe soon, augmented realities.
This change makes it abundantly evident that our brains not only can automatically process fast messages but also can make snap decisions based on them — that is, whether to keep or delete an email or respond to a brief social media update.
“But how well do we really understand these quick messages and how do our brains manage them? The fact that our brains can, at least in some way, grasp the meaning of these fast messages from just a single glance may reveal something fundamental about the processing potential of the language system,”
said Pylkkänen.
The researchers initiated their investigation by examining contemporary scientific theories on language comprehension, which focus on word-by-word sentence processing frameworks. The researchers determined that they do not adequately consider the rapidity with which our brains can comprehend full sentences at a glance, in contrast to the sequential processing of words as in spoken language.
Rapid Visual Perception
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 results showed that the brain’s left temporal cortex — used for language comprehension — starts distinguishing simple three-word sentences from unstructured word lists as quickly as 130 milliseconds after seeing them.
“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,”
explained Pylkkänen.
The scientists also note that this fast structure detection occurs in the left temporal cortex even in cases when a sentence contains an agreement error, with the incorrect number marking on the verb (nurses 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,”
said first author Jacqueline Fallon, an NYU researcher at the time of the work and now a doctoral student at the University of Colorado.
All Are Cats Nice?
Related research on these quick signals published in the Journal of Neuroscience, conducted by NYU graduate student Nigel Flower, further substantiated this notion. It demonstrated that even minor errors in phrase structure — such as transposing two consecutive words, “all are cats nice” — result in a decline in the brain’s quick response.
Minor errors can readily escape the attention of readers. 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 not only quickly recognizes phrase structure but also automatically corrects small mistakes. This explains why readers often miss minor errors—their brains have already corrected them internally, ”
Flower said.
Though the meaning of the sentence was meaningless or there was a grammatical error that still maintained the correct phrase structure, the researchers could find the brain’s capacity to rapidly identify basic phrase structure by flashing the participants’ whole sentences all at once as opposed to word by word.
These findings may provide valuable insights into the brain’s intrinsic language processing abilities, independent of the usual sequential flow of spoken language,”
said Pylkkänen.
- Jacqueline Fallon, Liina Pylkkänen, Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input. Sci. Adv. 10, eadr9951(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adr9951
Abstract
Human brains grasp the gists of visual scenes from a single glance, but to what extent is this possible for language? While we typically think of language in terms of sequential speech, our everyday experience involves numerous rapidly flashing written notifications, which we understand instantly. What do our brains detect in the first few hundred milliseconds after seeing 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. Our findings unveil one aspect of how our brains process information rapidly in today’s visually saturated world.