Thursday, December 9, 2010

Word Weirding (Not the modules from Dune)

Language Log | Word Weirding:
The earliest serious study known to me is M.F. Bassett and C.J. Warne, 'On the Lapse of Verbal Memory with Repetition' (Minor Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Cornell University XLIV), The American Journal of Psychology 30(4) 1919: "It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away. In this paper we report the result of experiments whose aim was the determination of the number of repetitions required for monosyllabic nouns to lose their meaning."
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