You made that up!
A poster describing how our brains decipher unfamiliar words and ultimately find meaning and read.
Can we really understand what a word like redorkulated means?
Even though this word may at first seem indecipherable, our brain uses multiple resources to decode made-up words like this one.
When we read, our brain wants a fast transmission of meaning with an accurate representation of sound. The two routes to achieve this are the lexical (directly from visual word to meaning) and the phonological (the “sounding out” of a word to find meaning). However, our brain needs both of these paths—simultaneously functioning—to read the multitude of words (official or not) in the English language.
