All Things Linguistic

This is one of those things that it’s tremendously satisfying to realize that there’s a word for: 

Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. […]

…experiments that demonstrate the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bilingual translations of words repeated in one of the two languages. In each case subjects would repeat a word or number for several seconds, then perform the cognitive task using that word. It was demonstrated that repeating a word prior to its use in a task made the task somewhat more difficult.

For some reason, my go-to word to demonstrate semantic satiation is “toast”. Let’s use it to demonstrate how semantic satiation even works in written form: toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast toast. 

(And now that I’ve finished writing this, I’ve become semantically satiated on the word “satiation”. I’m sure I’m not the first, either.)