A recent study has uncovered that the human brain can distinguish the basic structure of written language almost instantaneously, enabling rapid comprehension of the vast amount of information delivered through smartphones.

By observing the brain activity of 36 volunteers, scientists discovered that individuals can identify the fundamental structure of sentences in just 125 milliseconds, approximately the time it takes to blink.

This speed matches the brain's ability to process visual scenes, a skill critical for observing and navigating the surrounding environment.

Published on October 23 in Science Advances, this finding sheds light on how the brain encodes language. According to linguistics and psychology professor Liina Pylkkänen from New York University, studying how the brain processes written information provides unique insights into the properties of language—specifically those unrelated to speech. Pylkkänen noted that studying spoken language often complicates research because speaking requires converting language into sequential brain activity to articulate words, limiting the understanding of language attributes to the properties required for verbal expression.

To overcome this challenge, researchers employed a non-invasive technique called magnetoencephalography, which uses magnetic fields to monitor electrical activity in the brain. During the study, participants viewed three-word sentence structures displayed on a screen for 300 milliseconds. A second set of words then appeared, either identical to or slightly altered from the first. Participants were tasked with evaluating whether the two sentences matched.

The scans revealed heightened activity in the left temporal cortex—a region critical for language comprehension—when participants viewed structured sentences compared to unstructured word arrangements. This activity occurred within just 125 milliseconds. Sentences with clear subjects, verbs, and objects, such as "The nurse cleaned the wound," elicited the fastest brain responses, outperforming noun-only sequences like "Heart, lung, liver." Moreover, the brain quickly identified nonsensical sentences, such as "The wound cleaned the nurse," showing its ability to apply prior knowledge to interpret meaning.

Pylkkänen explained, "Just as you can quickly recognize your car in a parking lot, certain linguistic structures are rapidly identifiable, triggering syntactic effects in the brain almost instantly." She emphasized that while sentence structure knowledge is abstract, the brain can still grasp it effortlessly under stimulation.

Future research will delve deeper into the types of sentence structures the brain can detect so quickly and investigate whether these structures align with the earliest sentence patterns learned in childhood. Additionally, researchers aim to determine whether the brain mechanisms used for processing images or other visual stimuli are similar to those employed when interpreting text.