Why Our Brains Are Effective at Quickly Processing Short Messages? Study Provides Insights

A new study by a team of New York University linguistics and psychology researchers has 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," says Liina Pylkkänen, a professor in NYU's Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology, who led the research, which is reported across papers appearing in Science Advances and the Journal of Neuroscience. "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."

The scientists began their research by considering current scientific explanations of how we understand language, which center on word-by-word sentence processing models. The researchers concluded these don't effectively account for how quickly our brains can process entire sentences seen at a glance, as opposed to word by word like in speech.

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 or just lists of nouns. 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," 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."