Why words can suddenly look unrecognizable. Learn to love the full stop. Marley.
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
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The Semantic Satiation of Words
Psychologists have been aware of this weird thing with words for more than a hundred years. It got the name that stuck when psychologist Leon James and Wallace Lambert called it semantic satiation in 1961. When people learn two languages at the same time, we call that being compound bilinguals. And researchers think the languages in such people are stored together in an intermingled way in the brain.
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