15 Word Illusions →
(via bebelestrange)These are fun, but the commentary is silly. I don’t believe that “the brain is capable of processing the word “of”. I counted six f’s right away by not reading the words but rather looking at the letters. That doesn’t make me a genius.
Hahahah, I just looked at the pictures when I read it, so I missed the “NEWS FLASH: BRAIN CANNOT PROCESS ‘OF’” line. The real answer, as you no doubt know from linguistics, is that “of” is [əv] phonetically and most people only count the /f/s they hear. (Which in psycholinguistics suggests a triangular lexicon whereby spelling is decoded into sounds before being processed into meaning wooohooooo!)
Yeah, whoever wrote this thought they were all cool and shit but definitely failed to be objective in their analysis of the illusions.
Re: the triangular lexicon, I think I decode sounds into spelling and not the other way around. If you teach me a word, I can’t learn it until I know how it is spelled because I need to see it in my mind, or I won’t be able to replicate the sounds. Does that make sense? (Just a disclaimer, I was one of those creepy National Spelling Bee kids back in the day so maybe that is why).
Well if you took psycholinguistics, you’d know of an experiment that tests whether people access meaning from spelling or from sound. You also learn how to induce tip-of-the-tongue states in speakers!
