Human brain can process certain sentences in ‘blink of an eye’, says study

The study found that processing sentences – such as those read on our phones – was easier if they were made up of a subject, verb and object. Photograph: Victor Bordera/Stocksy United

Whether it is news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in a single glance.

Prof Liina Pylkkanen, co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume words are understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the whole sentence.