Language at a Glance.

Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian on an interesting-sounding study:

Whether it is news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in a single glance. Prof Liina Pylkkanen, co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume words are understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the whole sentence.

“From this perspective, at-a-glance language processing really shouldn’t work since there’s just not enough time for all the sequential processing of words and their combination into a larger representation,” she said. However, the research offers fresh insights, revealing we can detect certain sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds (ms) – a timeframe similar to the blink of an eye.

Pylkkanen said: “We don’t yet know exactly how this ultrafast structure detection is possible, but the general hypothesis is that when something you perceive fits really well with what you know about – in this case, we’re talking about knowledge of the grammar – this top-down knowledge can help you identify the stimulus really fast.

“So just like your own car is quickly identifiable in a parking lot, certain language structures are quickly identifiable and can then give rise to a rapid effect of syntax in the brain.”

The team say the findings suggest parallels with the way in which we perceive visual scenes, with Pylkkanen noting the results could have practical uses for the designers of digital media, as well as advertisers and designers of road signs. Writing in the journal Science Advances, Pylkkanen and colleagues report how they used a non-invasive scanning device to measure the brain activity of 36 participants.

Further details at the link; thanks, Trevor!

Comments

  1. It makes perfect sense. This is how we process everything else. I wouldn’t be surprised if spoken language is also processed chunk by chunk, not word by word (by which I mean “small chunk”).

    btw, s/b Pylkkänen (not your fault, the Guar̈dian’s.)

  2. cuchuflete says

    “unpicked”?

    Cambridge Dictionary:

    unpick verb [T] (IDEAS):

    If you unpick a difficult subject, you separate and examine its different parts carefully:
    He expertly unpicks the significant features of each painting.
    If I try to unpick my own motivation, I think mostly I was jealous.

    This is new to me. Is it British English?

  3. J.W. Brewer says

    This “unpick” is also new to me, but seems suggestively similar to what wiktionary gives as sense 3 of “unpack,” i.e. “(figurative, transitive) To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.” And that’s a sense I am familiar with. So is this sense of “unpick” an eggcorn based on a trans-Atlantic mishearing, or sheer coincidence?

  4. J.W. Brewer says

    The verb “unpick” in a literal sense having to do with sewing (deliberately taking out stitches previously made) is of long standing. E.g. (from a novel published in 1898): “She found her huswife and chose the finest scissors, and then gave her attention to the white gown that lay on the bed. She turned the skirt inside out and began to unpick the tucks.”

    But the question is when this extended figurative sense arose. If it arose fairly recently, I still have my eggcorn thesis, because almost everyone in the relevant modern societies in the last few decades who would have occasion to talk about either unpacking or unpicking ideas or concepts has personal experience with unpacking a suitcase but comparatively few with e.g. unpicking the tucks in the skirt of a gown.

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    I used it myself here:

    https://languagehat.com/polyglot-daily-bread/#comment-4618590

    Apologies if USian Hatters were mystified*. I had no idea it was a UKism.
    The things one learns here …

    * An alternative possibility, of course, is that nobody actually reads my comments. Probably wise. You can’t handle the Truth! However, it’s all being fed into the maw of the LLMs. Bwahahaha!

  6. cuchuflete says

    Apologies if USian Hatters were mystified. I had no idea it was a UKism.
    The things one learns here …

    No need for apologies, as context makes the meaning clear. I, too, learned something here today.

    I also thought it might be a typo for unpack, but Collins and Cambridge dictionaries explained the figurative meaning, while Merriam-Webster omitted it. Alas, the trouble one must go to when the British half of the household is out and about.

  7. Possibly related: when I worked at various magazines, I was a pretty good proof reader* and on occasion would see a typo merely by glancing over a column of text, without even beginning to read it. I suppose this is some sort of pattern-recognition thing. The misspelled word would register in my brain, raising an alarm, even though I hadn’t yet taken any meaning from the text.

    The same thing would also happen when (in ye olden tymes) I was reading the newspaper in its ancient print format. I would look at a page and spot a typo halfway down the third column, before I’d made any attempt to read the story.

    *not of my own stuff, natch

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    Presumably this is a purely visual phenomenon, from the very nature of the necessarily-sequential nature of speech.*

    As such, it doesn’t seem very surprising. For example, fluent readers do not read words letter by letter but as whole gestalt chunks. This is just the same phenomenon working over longer chunks.

    After all, pattern recognition is what we do. In fact, we’re so good at it that we can even recognise patterns that aren’t actually there at all …

    *This

    http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Donaldson2021.pdf

    despite its off-putting title, is a nice clear argument for necessarily sequential processing happening with some English constructions even in reading.
    [Snarfed from Geoffrey Pullum’s site, though not by him.]

  9. Nothing if not unpicky, I nevertheless noet several millinery occurrences of unpick* over the years.

  10. After all, pattern recognition is what we do. In fact, we’re so good at it that we can even recognise patterns that aren’t actually there at all …

    Yes, apophenia. Though across the decades I have preferred to see it as paranoia – of which only an excess is unhealthy. Necessary to life as we know it.

  11. “unpick” in a literal sense having to do with sewing (deliberately taking out stitches previously made)

    Yes. Weren’t everybody’s grandmothers engaged in adjusting the kids’ hand-me-downs to distribute around the family? There’s a ‘seam ripper’ for the purpose (and videos on Youtube).

    I’m quite surprised the metaphorical usage is UK-only. What do you say over there for ‘unpick an argument’? (Which typically means to expose flaws in its logic.)

    I see Noetica’s scan has identified several nit-picks.

  12. Figurative “unpack” is something I recall judging as a new pop-psych or corporate buzzword in the early part of this century. Lacking OED access, the earliest use I find is a 1980 article “Unpacking Some Dualities Inherent in a Mind/Brain Dualism”

    Figurative “unpick” had never struck me as odd or new, but perhaps it just crept up on me. New Left Review 1976 has

    To unpick the rhetoric which would induce such a fantasy is a complicated task, but looking back to 1945 one point can be made immediately. ‘Marxist’, in these years, has changed its meaning—or, more strictly, has taken on additional meanings.

  13. Apologies if USian Hatters were mystified.
    Au contraire! Your mystifying comments are often one of the high points of my day!

  14. J.W. Brewer says

    @AntC: I am familiar with the grandmotherly process you describe, but I would not unprompted have come up with “unpick” as the verb to describe it and I frankly don’t know if that’s the first word my grandmothers would have used to describe it. FWIW the first few pages of 20th century hits for the sewing sense of “unpick” that the google books corpus is giving me are all U.K./Commonwealth rather than U.S.

    To AntC’s other question, in idiomatic AmEng one certainly might “pick apart” a shoddy argument made by someone else. That’s sense 2 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pick_apart

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    For me, unpicking an argument is not the same as picking an argument apart.

    With “unpicking”, there’s no implication that it’s necessarily a bad or invalid argument (though your unpicking might eventually reveal it as such); just that it’s an argument whose logic is not immediately obvious but needs some further elucidation.*

    Indeed, you might piously declare in a sermon that you are going to unpick St Paul’s argument for your congregation in some case where his logic is not obvious. If, on the other hand, you declared an intention to pick his argument apart, you might find yourself having to do some explaining to the church elders (transpose as appropriate from the Presbyterian to your preferred church governance idiom.)

    * It also differs from “unpacking” (though there is some overlap.) Unpicking implies some close analysis, but not necessarily lengthy paraphrase; the sermon may yet not expand into a second hour. Unpacking means that we’re in for a twelve-point sermon and lunch will be late.

    “Unpacking” (unlike “unpicking”) also comes across to me as trendy management-speak, probably reflecting some ghastly American influence somehow.

  16. With “unpicking”, there’s no implication that it’s necessarily a bad or invalid argument …

    I defer to m’learned colleague. I did say “_typically_ means to expose flaws in its logic”, not necessarily.

  17. “ analyze – analyse
    transitive verb
    To examine methodically by separating into parts and studying their interrelations.”

    Is that close to the general understanding of unpick?

  18. DE: This sounds close to what I would call picking at an argument. Questioning, but without prejudice. Like those annoying people who take up all of the q&a time after a talk, with a back-and-forth with the speaker.

  19. @cuchuflete: Have you noticed a movement in our country to replace “analyze” with “break down”? And is “break down” a calque?

  20. to me (the phrase is a familiar one, tho i’m on the western side of the pond) “unpicking” is about tracing the threads, not questioning or analyzing exactly – more a philological project than a critical one.

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