Wild By Repetition: An Unscientific Inquiry Into Words Becoming Sounds

(The term for which I learned while watching a TV show.)

I recently started watching the comedy show Ted Lasso, which follows the story of an American college football coach who is hired to coach a professional “football” (soccer) team in the UK.

In one scene, Coach Lasso uses the word “plan” so many times that something strange happens to him (which Coach Beard helpfully defines).

Lasso: “I’m not planning on that. My plan is for my plan to work. But you know what they say about the best laid plans, right— Hm. Said “plan” too many times. Word’s lost all its meaning now. Plan. Plan. Plan… Plan. Plan?”

Beard: “Word become a sound?”

Lasso: “What’s that called again?”

Beard: “Semantic satiation.”

Lasso: “Yeah. Okay.”

Something similar happens in an episode of the show Friends, between Monica and “a stoned guy” (after which the episode is named) —

Monica: “In about eight and a half minutes we’ll be serving some delicious onion tartlets.”

Stoned Guy: “Tartlets… Tartlets... Tartlets... The word has lost all meaning.”

Relatable? If you’re still scratching your head, here’s a quick experiment you can do on yourself. Grab your phone and set a timer for 20 seconds. Pick something around you and repeat that word (“Chair. Chair. Chair. Chair…”) until the timer goes off.

As you repeat the word, pay attention to what is happening in your brain. Are you suddenly aware of how similar it sounds to “hair”? Are your “r” sounds starting to stick out more? Or perhaps you start to get a creeping feeling that the word you’re saying is slowly ceasing to be a word, more like a lump of sounds just squished together. Who decided this clump of sounds means “chair,” anyway?

This peculiar feeling isn’t limited to comedy shows — people have been discussing this phenomenon for centuries. G. K. Chesterton wrote about it in his essay “The Telegraph Poles” (1910).

"Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as 'dog,' thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like 'snark' or 'pobble.' It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition."

Semantic Satiation

Ever since Coach Beard put a name to this phenomenon for me, my interest has been officially piqued. I’d never heard about semantic satiation during my studies in linguistics — and from what I can tell, it’s something that’s mostly being explored by psychologists and cognitive researchers.

One of its earlier appearances in the research literature took place in 1907. In their article “The Loss of Associative Power in Words After Long Fixation,” Elizabeth Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn reported the results of having participants stare at a word for three minutes, while noting any perceived changes regarding the appearance of the word.

This experiment yielded some pretty funky results. Here’s a shortened example of how one participant perceived the word “rumble” over three minutes of staring:

0:02 Sound of thunder.

0:21 Word divides into rum ble.

1:21 No meaning to word.

1:29 “u” looked like “n” upside down. No sound or meaning.

2:29 Think of sound, but it no longer fits the look of the word.

So after about three minutes, people's perceptions of words — particularly how the words connected to meaning — were breaking down. They also followed a bit of a predictable sequence. First, letters might start to group together. Sounds associations would start to vanish, and the forms of letters might start to stand out. Later on, words that were not directly associated with phonetics (such as “caught”) would start to morph as well (like perceiving “caught” more as the sound “cagt”).

Interestingly, for some of the results they reported (like words such as “blood” and “career”), the words all happened to fall apart within the allotted three minutes of time, which felt a little suspect to me. So I decided to conduct my own little scientific inquiry on this topic — using my roommate as my guinea pig.

Inquiry 1: The Three Minute Stare

A few days ago, I interrupted my roommate’s evening to ask her to participate in a quick three-minute experiment. She graciously agreed, setting aside her webtoons and bowl of Sun Chips while I explained the premise. I was concerned that the people in the 1907 study were aware of what the researchers were looking for (why did the words all break down by the three minute mark?!), so I didn’t tell her much of the premise. I just asked her to look at the word and to verbally express any changes that occurred in her mind as she looked at it.

To my surprise and wonder, here are the changes she noticed as she stared at the word “rumble” —

0:20 Bumble, or rum bum

1:10 Thumb

1:45 RumBLAY, rumBLOO

After the three minutes, I blurted out, “wow, that’s amazing,” grabbed my slip of paper and scurried off to my room, leaving her a bit confused. (Thanks for your help, roommate!)

While my roommate’s perception of the word never devolved completely into just being a mess of blobs entirely disconnected from meaning, it did start to break apart in a similar way to the researchers’ reports: the word started to segment and break apart, the silent “e” started to make different sounds. Interesting!

Inquiry 2: Transparent or Opaque

While semantic satiation has been explored for over a century, Leon Jakobovitz officially coined the term in his 1962 doctoral dissertation, in which he explored the effects of repeated stimulation. Since then, semantic satiation (which is connected more generally with mental fatigue) has been the subject of lots of different experiments — verbal versus written words, monolinguals versus bilinguals, etc.

One potential link to understanding semantic satiation of words is related to morphology: the more transparent a word’s morphology is, the less likely it is to become semantically satiated.

So what does it mean to be transparent (or opaque)? It really does come down to clarity: or, how clear the links are between the meanings of a word’s morphemes (the smallest meaningful parts of a word) and its overall meaning.

For example, if we look at the word “backpack,” we can break it into two meaningful parts — It goes on your back! And it’s a pack! Backpack! But we wouldn’t be able to do this as easily with a morphologically opaque word like “mascot.” A cot for mas? Not entirely helpful.

I decided to test this idea of transparency on my next victim, my fiancé. I had him repeat the word “backpack” for twenty seconds, then do the same for “mascot.” Here’s what he reported:

After saying “backpack” for 20 seconds: “It’s okay. It still has its meaning.”

After saying “mascot” for 20 seconds: “Yeah, it lost its meaning a little bit. Maybe because it’s not a compound word like backpack is.”

Yes! Woohoo! So the test of transparency was successful. Words that can be broken down meaningfully (in a way that connects to the word’s overall meaning) hold their ground better than words that don’t do the same.

Inquiry 3: Non-English Languages

So far I’d tried semantically satiating myself and others with words in English. But is this a common experience for speakers of other languages, too? To get some answers, I decided to call up my mom to ask her if she’s ever experienced this phenomenon in her first language, Chinese.

Me: “…have you felt that before? Ever?”

Mom: “No. Never.”

Rather than giving up too quickly, I decided to clarify by doing my “chair” exercise with her in Chinese: yizi, yizi, yizi, yizi, yizi. (For the record, I definitely encounter semantically satiation in my heritage language, Chinese, as well. But it’s hard for me to tell if words in one language do so faster than the other.) Here’s what she told me — I’m keeping the transcript for anyone who’s a fan of authentic translanguaging in action.

Mom: “椅子。椅子。椅子。因為你的 attention span， 一開始你會 register 椅子， 你會 relate to that. (Chair. Chair. Chair. Because your attention span, at first you’ll register “chair,” you’ll relate to that.) If you repeat it a hundred times of course it becomes a sound. That’s every — that’s how your brain works.”

Me: “Right right. Is that a thing in Taiwan? Does anyone talk about it?”

Mom: “No. Never heard about it. But it’s just common sense, right?”

So there you have it, folks. Semantic satiation. It’s just common sense.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition of Everybody Talks! What are your experiences with semantic satiation? Are you already plotting to experiment on your family and friends? Let me know in the comments below.

If you haven’t already, would you consider subscribing to this newsletter? It helps me out a lot and it’s been so fun witnessing this little community grow.

See you next Tuesday!