Semantic Satiation
- “why does a word stop looking like a word”
- “semantic satiation explained”
- “said a word too many times and it lost meaning”
- “word looks wrong now”
:: COMPARE ::
Semantic satiationvsJamais vu
The short answer
Same experiment, different half of the result. Semantic satiation names the fading of a word's meaning; jamais vu names the eerie unfamiliarity that fading produces. Researchers have used the same word-repetition task to induce both.
Side by side
| Aspect | Semantic satiation | Jamais vu |
|---|---|---|
| Names | The mechanism | The feeling |
| You notice | Meaning draining | Strangeness arriving |
| Induced by | Repetition | Repetition |
| Reversible | Yes | Yes |
Which one you meant
Readers who land here meaning Semantic Satiation rather than Jamais vu are usually searching for phrases like “why does a word stop looking like a word”, “semantic satiation explained”, “said a word too many times and it lost meaning”.
Jamais Vu
- “my own house felt strange for a second”
- “jamais vu meaning”
- “opposite of deja vu”
- “a familiar word suddenly looked wrong”
Which came first
Semantic satiation. 1962 — Leon Jakobovits James coins 'semantic satiation' in his McGill doctoral thesis, supervised by Wallace Lambert. The pair had published on the same effect under the earlier label 'verbal satiation' in 1960.
- 1962Semantic SatiationLeon Jakobovits James coins 'semantic satiation' in his McGill doctoral thesis, supervised by Wallace Lambert. The pair had published on the same effect under the earlier label 'verbal satiation' in 1960.
- 2021Jamais VuMoulin, Bell, Turunen, Baharin and O'Connor show it can be produced deliberately in healthy people. About 70% of 94 undergraduates stopped copying a word because it had started to feel peculiar, typically after around a minute and thirty repetitions. A second experiment using only the word 'the' produced it in 55% of participants. The work won the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature.
Read either one in full