A Linguistics Lesson For You.

This is really funny. I came across this image while I was on Facebook last night, and there was a whole list of comments underneath it about people freaking out because they couldn't find the mistake. 

Can you find it? Here is a hint: Read each individual word aloud. Go slowly. Do not skip through any part of the sentence. 

...For those of you who found it, good job! "The" is repeated twice in the phrase, "Can you find the mistake?" 

Now, for the interesting part! I bet you didn't know that the reason most people skip over the second "the" has to do with an applied theory of Linguistics! In linguistics, there are content words and function words that make up everyone's vocabulary. Content words are like verbs, adjectives, adverbs. All the words that have meaning. Function words are like pronouns, prepositions, and articles. They don't have an exact lexical meaning, but they sort of hold the sentence together. 

Function words and content words are represented differently in the brain, because the brain has submodules. While your brain recognizes when a content word is repeated in a sentence, it does not recognize it when function words are. Weird, right? More evidence of submodularity is that when you jumble up a sentence or make a speech error - like if you say, "My sore is throat" instead of the correct "My throat is sore," you are mixing up the content words, but never, ever, EVER the function words. 

I just find all of this really fascinating. I bet none of you thought that you would be receiving a crash course in Linguistics today, huh? :)