Semantic satiation

Semantic satiation

Semantic satiation is the psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then processes the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. It is especially noticeable if you repeat a strange word several times to yourself in order to get the pronunciation right and the accent on the correct syllable and it ends up sounding stranger and stranger the more you try before becoming complete nonsense to your ears.

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Categories: LanguagePeople

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