You continue to see the letters but they no longer make the word; it, as such, has vanished. The phenomenon is called 'semantic satiation' (first identified by Severance & Washburn 1907), or loss of the signified concept from the signifier (visual or acoustic)."
It's just a common brain glitch called wordnesia. This problem crops up when you can't spell the simplest words. When familiar words suddenly seem like the strangest things. We don't know what exactly happens in the brain when wordnesia occurs, but some researchers have an idea.
We posited that the attentional and perceptual decoupling associated with mind wandering would reduce the amount of satiation in the semantic representations of repeatedly presented words, thus leading to a reduced semantic-satiation effect.
Semantic satiation occurs due to how the brain works. When you hear words, neurons fire in the brain to retrieve their meaning. Every word triggers a specific neural circuit. So “apples” would trigger a particular neural circuit, “oranges” another.
Generation, the opposite of satiation, appears more likely to occur when the stimuli are meaningless, when different words are interspersed during repetition, when the repetition period is short, and when the rate of repetition is slow.
verbigeration. noun. ver·big·er·a·tion (ˌ)vər-ˌbij-ə-ˈrā-shən. : continual repetition of stereotyped phrases (as in some forms of mental illness)
Semantic dissonance simply means that the structure may be similar (or even the same) but the meaning associated with the attributes that define each structure are different, has received less attention in the world of practical software development.
For starters, it would appear that wordnesiac experiences can sometimes result from a heightened focus on certain words as we are reading or writing them. “This seems to happen more when you're thinking specifically about the word, and you lose your ability to process the word as a whole unit,” says Mahowald.
Semantic narrowing is a type of semantic change by which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its earlier meaning.
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
Psychic satiation denotes a loss of intrinsic motivation when the same action is performed repeatedly.
This reduction of a word's intensity is called “semantic bleaching,” and it's a linguistic phenomenon that is more common than you may realize: when you say “Have a great day!” you don't mean “Have a day that is large in spatial dimension,” and when you say “That movie was awesome” you don't necessarily mean “That ...
An integral part of language evolution is semantic changes, or changes in the meanings of words. Semantics, or the meaning of words, have been changing ever since the first language began to be spoken, and have evolved into what they mean now, when there are more than 6,000 existing languages on record.
Maybe you're trying to spell the word “computer” and your brain decides that the word has an A and two O's. Maybe you're working on an essay for school and you need to write the word “procrastinate,” and your mind just goes blank after that first P. Welcome to the weird world of wordnesia!
the effect in which a word seems to lose its meaning after it has been repeated many times in rapid succession. The reasons for this effect remain poorly understood.
Many anxious and overly stressed people experience mixing up their words when speaking. Because this is just another symptom of anxiety and/or stress, it needn't be a need for concern. Mixing up words is not an indication of a serious mental issue. Again, it's just another symptom of anxiety and/or stress.
Semantic Change: Bleaching, Strengthening, Narrowing, Extension.
People with semantic processing difficulties have particular trouble with abstract words like 'curious' or 'vague', words that relate to feelings and emotions such as 'embarrassed' and 'anxious', and words that refer to status (for instance 'expert' or 'authority') or degree (for example, 'essential' or 'approximate').
Individuals with aphasia frequently show lexical retrieval deficits due to increased interference of semantically related competitors, a phenomenon that can be observed in tasks such as naming pictures grouped by semantic category.
It could be due to problems in visual perception, be it problems with the eye itself or the brain's processing of visual signals. If this were the case any problems would effect all vision, not just reading. So problems recognising written words might also be accompanied by problems recognising objects.
A malapropism (also called a malaprop, acyrologia, or Dogberryism) is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance.
Dissonance, from the Latin words for “sounding” and “apart,” is the simultaneous sounding of two or more notes to produce a clashing, or unpleasant effect. Its opposite is consonance, a pleasing sound, a “sounding together.”
Pragmatic dissonance occurs when a speaker knows that it is pragmatically appropriate to adopt a certain way of speaking in a particular cultural context but to do so, so offends their own pragmatic norms that they still find it impossible to adopt such norms. ...