Have you ever repeated a word over and over until it doesn’t even sound real to you anymore? Consider the word “owl,” for example. Owl. Owl, owl, owl, owl, owl, owl, owl, owl, owl. Owl?
After a while, the word you’re repeating tends to lose all meaning. This phenomenon has a name — “semantic satiation.” If a word is repeated enough times, it can temporarily seem like a nonsense sound. So, what’s the story behind this speech pattern?
What Is Semantic Satiation?
It’s a neurological phenomenon, and it actually has nothing to do with speech (because it can happen with the written word as well). People have likely been experiencing this sensation of words losing meaning as long as they’ve been communicating with words, but the concept was described in print in a 1907 issue of The American Journal of Psychology.
In an article titled “The Loss of Associative Power in Words After Long Fixation,” psychologists Elizabeth Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn wrote:
If a printed word is looked at steadily for some little time, it will be found to take on a curiously strange and foreign aspect. This loss of familiarity in its appearance sometimes makes it look like a word in another language, sometimes proceeds further until the word is a mere collection of letters, and occasionally reaches the extreme where the letters themselves look like meaningless marks on the paper.
Over the years, the phenomenon has been called “verbal satiation,” “inhibition,” “work decrement,” or “lapse of meaning.” “Satiation” comes from the verb “sate,” meaning “satisfy to the full.” As it was studied more officially, “semantic (“relating to meaning in language or logic”) satiation” became the accepted terminology.
Psychologist Leon Jakobovits James explored the phenomenon more closely in the early 1960s. In one study, participants were asked to repeat a common word, such as “father,” out loud up to three times per second for 15 seconds. Afterward, they took a test to see how well they could measure a word’s meaning, and the participants rated the repeated words as less meaningful. Various studies have shown this concept can occur with both written and spoken words.
Why Does Semantic Satiation Happen?
Whenever you think of a word, the neurons in the brain fire to recall all the memories and associations around that word. Take the word “cheeseburger,” for example. Every time you say “cheeseburger,” the brain conjures up a whole bunch of associations and memories — smells, tastes, images — to give the word “cheeseburger” meaning. Now, repeat the word over and over again. Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger.
By the time you got to that last “cheeseburger,” you probably weren’t thinking of juicy beef patties or melted cheddar. The word may have started to lose meaning. That’s because the neurons in your brain had to go to work each time you repeated the word. But instead of recalling all those delicious associations every single time, your brain backed off to conserve energy.
The same thing can happen with familiar scents in our own homes. If we’re around a stinky litter box all the time, we don’t notice it has a foul odor. We don’t notice our own perfume throughout the day. That’s because our brains won’t constantly send us the same stimuli. They’re trying to conserve energy, not overload us.
Semantic Satiation in Music
James also studied semantic satiation in popular music. He theorized certain songs would rise to the pop charts quickly and fade away just as quickly because they were too familiar. In other words, our brains got tired of listening to them.
Other researchers believe semantic satiation plays a role in the enjoyment of music. For example, when we repeatedly listen to songs we like, the words lose meaning and fade into the background with the instruments. We can sing along to the vocals without thinking about the words' meaning because the brain might not be attaching any significance to them upon this replay. Perhaps it might be important to feel the emotions of the lyrics while writing or performing for the first time, but when a musician needs to worry about being on stage or focus on the instruments, semantic satiation can free up some needed brain power.
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