Why do words sound strangely familiar if they are repeated many times?

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Semantic satiation is a neurological phenomenon that occurs when we repeat the same word many times. In the end, that term loses all meaning and sounds strange.

We have all played that childhood game in which we repeat familiar words many times to the point that that term stops making sense in our heads. It is enough to pronounce “microprocessor” or “neuron” a thousand times, for example, for both the meaning and the image we have of those nouns to fade in our minds.

This phenomenon may not be of any interest to many, but the truth is that it is a clear and curious example of how our brain works. This subjective loss of meaning is called semantic satiation. It was in the 60s when this term was coined and since then it has been applied to clinical realities such as speech anxiety in dysphemia or stuttering.

This small failure of the brain, more than entertaining us when we are children, can be useful to us in some situations. We analyze it below.

When the human being continually repeats a known word, the brain causes that term to become gibberish after a few minutes.

Semantic satiation and when familiar words become gibberish.

In the 1960s, Leon Jakobovits, a language psychologist, presented interesting work at McGill University. He wanted to understand the phenomenon of why when repeating familiar words they lost their meaning. The truth is that this phenomenon had already been studied previously and had received the name inhibition of meaning (Herbert, 1824) or mental fatigue (Dodge, 1917).

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To understand the mechanisms of this experience, a series of cognitive tasks was presented to a large sample of students. That research work from 1964 can still be found in the The American Journal of Psychology and continues to be of great interest for psycholinguistics.

It was discovered that the brain has two mechanisms when processing words and that one of them is responsible for what we know as semantic satiation.

Familiar words and the two routes of the mental lexicon

When we learn a new word, the brain stores it through two channels: one with the meaning itself and another with the form.. In the latter, what is done is to process that term according to its sound when pronounced and also how it is written. That is, we encode it in sound and also in writing.

Meanwhile, the other brain route integrates it according to its meaning, but also linking it to how it sounds and how it is written. That is, they are not two different neurological paths. They actually work together.

Well, when we play that game, in which we repeat familiar words many times, what happens is the following:

Rapid repetition causes neurological activity in the peripheral sensorimotor region to become hyperactive. We find ourselves in a situation where one pronounces that word, but one also hears it. They are two entry and exit routes that cause great neurological exhaustion. This intense activity focused on the area related to vocalization and listening itself generates a perceptual loop that, sooner or later, will cause semantic satiety. That is, By repeating and hearing that word, the path that anchors it to its meaning ends up being disconnected. Although yes, it is a very short phenomenon. It didn’t take us too long to reconnect that channel where sound and definition go together.

With each repetition of that familiar word the brain gradually loses its ability to recognize the meaning. Neurons in the peripheral sensorimotor area fire and become hyperactive to the point of shutting down for a few seconds.

Semantic satiation is used for the treatment of dysphemia

Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repeating familiar words gradually causes the person to process those terms as mere sounds without any meaning. Good, What for many is nothing more than a simple game, others use it as a technique for the treatment of stuttering.

A form of therapy

The mere fact of repeating words not only made them lose their meaning for a moment, but also reduced their discomfort and anxiety. It is a therapy very similar to systematic desensitization.

Let us remember, this type of therapy is a resource that is based on the cognitive-behavioral therapy approach and that allows achieving a state of calm and habituation, after exposing a patient many times to that anxious or phobic focus.

The same thing happens with people who stutter. As the words are repeated, they stop having that anxious and negatively valenced component.

To conclude, this curious lexical and psychological phenomenon that makes us forget what a word means is not only very revealing about how the human brain works. It is also useful in various clinical settings.