Has COVID Changed How We Process and Understand Words?

COVID brought with it drastic changes overnight, not just impacting how we interacted, but also completely re-writing the script in terms of what we were talking about. Words like masking, isolation, and quarantine became routine topics of discussion, accompanied by new ways of conceptualizing how they applied to our daily lives. What kind of impact has this had on our language and the way we comprehend linguistic meaning?

New research suggests that the impact comes in the form of a rapid and population-wide shift in the way we access and understand words. If you have ever wondered why sometimes you can come up with words without problems, while other times you drive yourself crazy trying to get them out, it seems it may be because of how you have those words organized in your brain based on your most recent experience.

Language for a new world

Think about how mask, a word previously relegated to surgeons or Halloween costumes, has become a common, and highly emotionally charged, everyday word. Not only has it increased substantially in terms of how frequently we use it, but it has also taken on a lot of related baggage, such as being tied to our politics, beliefs about COVID, and our level of concern for others.

It is probably not that surprising to learn that the more frequent a word is the more easily we are able to access or come up with its meaning. For instance, since we experience a world in which insects are more apt to be part of our daily lives than cloak and dagger devices, when we hear the word ‘bug,’ the meaning of insect will be accessed much faster than the meaning of hidden surveillance equipment. But, if we experience a sudden increase in how much we are talking and hearing about bugs used with this sense, say by reading a marathon of spy novels or spending too much time on the dark web, research suggests it increases our ability to access this meaning more readily than we had before, though such measured effects have tended to be short lived, sometimes fading within a few hours of exposure.

Does hearing a meow make you think 'cat'?

Source: Jae Park/Unsplash

Likewise, words don’t exist in vacuums. We often hear them in certain contexts or often linked with certain other words. This network of related word meanings we create helps us more quickly access a word’s meaning when related words or contexts are mentioned. For example, we often semantically link the word cat with a word like litterbox and sounds like meow, which means when we hear them it primes us to think of the word cat because they exist in our minds in ways that have become linked.

Both of these aspects — how frequent a word is and how it is semantically linked (e.g., to other concepts and words) — are crucial components in how we mentally store, access and understand words.

But what does it take for a new meaning or an infrequent word to ‘stick’ or become more permanently stored and easily accessible in cognition? This is a question that has intrigued language scientists but is difficult to study since it requires a type of repeated high-frequency exposure that is hard to create in a laboratory setting. The pandemic, though, offered a unique opportunity to observe how our language system has changed as a result of a profound and deeply affecting real-world experience that brought with it a massive uptick in the frequency of certain words. So, how did this dramatic and sudden event change how we process and comprehend speech?

The experiment

The experiment by an international team of researchers used what is called a phonemic restoration task. In this type of design, a sound in a word is replaced with noise, but participants are able to reconstruct the word based on knowledge about words they know exist and things like how frequent they are. So, for instance, when listeners hear a word like #ask, where # represents a sound replaced by some kind of realistic noise (like a cough or static), they are still pretty good at restoring the sound that should be there based on knowledge they have about real words and where and how often they tend to hear them.

This doesn’t always mean there is only one option they might decide from — for instance, #ask could easily be either mask or task. Which one a person hears depends on things like how frequently they have come into contact with a word and/or their recent linguistic and semantic experience.

In this particular study, after hearing a word with a segment replaced with noise (e.g, #ask), participants typed the word they thought they heard. Words were drawn from words heard more frequently during COVID (e.g., mask, lockdown or lung) which also had a non-COVID related competitor (or option) (e.g., task, knockdown or rung). Pre-pandemic, the words in these pairs occurred at about the same frequency, but the researchers established that COVID target word had become much more frequent than the competitor during the pandemic.

The researchers hypothesized that, if sudden and more frequent use impacted how words were processed, we should expect them to be more mentally accessible than their competitor. And, in fact, that is exactly what the researchers found. Participants’ responses were almost four times more likely to be biased towards the words they had been exposed to more during the pandemic, despite having been used at about the same frequency as competitor words prior to the COVID outbreak.

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Relatedly, researchers also found that using a cough to replace the sound in a word (rather than just noise) increased this bias even more, suggesting that even just the sound of a cough had become semantically linked to these words during the pandemic. Control words (where both members were unrelated to the pandemic) did not show these same effects.

The big reveal

What this experiment showed is that repeated exposure to certain words suddenly and over a limited time span can dramatically alter how we comprehend language over the long term — both in terms of how accessible words are and how they have become linked in terms of having shared meaning-associations (such as coughing and masks). This may not seem that surprising to those that have just lived through the pandemic and heard these words daily, but contrast this relatively short period of exposure to a lifetime of hearing these other non-pandemic words.

This is important work in terms of showing that recent linguistic experience might be weighted more heavily than past exposure in terms of how words and their meanings are stored, linked and comprehended. As well, this work, especially since it used a naturally occurring event as the condition affecting this change, tells us that dramatic real-world experiences might have a greater and longer lasting effect on how we think about language and the world it represents than we might have suspected.