“Ths sntnc s mssng ts vwls.” You likely figured out the words — “this sentence is missing its vowels” — even though they’re lacking several letters of the alphabet.
But how can you understand words without vowels?
Your brain does not read words letter by letter, experts told Live Science. Instead, it looks for patterns, considers context then makes predictions. So even if a word is misspelled or missing its vowels, your brain should be able to figure it out.
Your brain makes inferences about the world around you
“We don’t passively receive sentences, but actively predict them,” David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, told Live Science in an email. “Our brains aren’t blank slates waiting for input; they are model builders, constantly generating internal expectations about what’s out there.”
When vowels are missing, your brain leans on past experience and context. It makes guesses based on common letter combinations, your knowledge of the language, as well as surrounding words.
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According to Eagleman, this phenomenon also explains why you can recognize a friend in dim lighting. Even though the incoming sensory information is incomplete, your brain fills in the gaps. “It uses what’s available and compares it against a vast internal library of patterns it has learned over time,” Eagleman said.
Recognizing words: the visual word form area
Alex White, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Barnard College in New York, told Live Science that there are many stages involved in recognizing words.
As with all vision, your eyes first detect the object — in this case, the basic shapes of the letters. That information is sent to the visual cortex, the outer layer of gray matter at the back of your brain, which processes the edges and curves of letters. Deeper in the brain, some regions appear to identify specific letters and letter combinations called bigrams — pairs of letters that appear next to each other in a word, like “th” or “er.” From there, the information moves to a specialized area in the left fusiform gyrus known as the visual word form area (VWFA).
The fusiform gyrus is a large structure that spans both brain hemispheres on the underside of the temporal and occipital lobes. It plays an important role in processing complex visual information. In most people, the right fusiform gyrus is responsible for face and object recognition, while the left side is home to the VWFA, which plays a key role in recognizing letter patterns and words.
Researchers have performed studies where they scanned the brains of young children, Jin Li, a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience at Georgia Tech, told Live Science. These experiments involved trying to capture the time window before and after the kids learn to read. “They can see this nice emerging VWFA after they start school,” she said.
With practice and exposure, the VWFA becomes tuned to the language you read, making it incredibly good at spotting meaningful combinations of letters, even when letters are missing. For example, Hebrew is mostly written without vowels, and fluent readers can still understand the text with ease.
Commonly combined letters are likely a big piece of the puzzle in how we can read words without vowels.
“One theory is that at the next stage after the visual cortex registers the letters, neurons in your brain light up when particular letter combinations are present, not entire words,” explained White. “The letter combinations that are detected could be pairs or triplets of letters that are common in your language, and then those might activate a part of your brain that recognizes the whole word.”
Those letter combinations, the bigrams, are likely important building blocks that are used to recognize familiar letter patterns, especially during the early stages of learning to read. Think Wordle. If you identify an “l” in the fourth spot, and you are looking for likely letters for the fifth spot, you might consider “y” because “ly” is a common bigram.
Choosing the best word
Removing vowels introduces ambiguity.
Consonants partially activate several words in your mind, but then you go with the one that’s most likely based on the context.
After reading “Y cn rd sntncs wtht vwls”, your brain comes up with several possible candidates and relatively quickly settles on the one that makes the most sense in the sentence. It’s mental auto-complete.
Abbreviations, predictions and pattern recognition
People often use abbreviations made up mostly of consonants rather than vowels — such as bldg. or Dr. — because we’re naturally good at recognizing these patterns, Li pointed out. “People seem to agree on how to abbreviate a word, and it usually does not include vowels.” Simply put: we reverse-engineer a word from the abbreviation when vowels are missing.
After years of reading, you’ve absorbed the patterns of your language. You’ve learned which letters tend to go together and which words fit in which situations. You can read without vowels because your brain is not just reading, it is reconstructing.
“Our expectation-driven perception is what makes us such powerful recognizers,” Eagleman said, “even when the data is corrupted.”
Nc jb. Yr brn hd n prblm rdng this.
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