ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Christine Mohrmann

Christine Mohrmann was a really smart lady who lived a long time ago. She loved to study how our bodies work and she especially loved studying our language. She was really good at it!

One of the things Christine studied was the way our brains process words. When we hear a word, our brain has to figure out what it means before we can understand what someone is saying. This is called semantic processing. Christine wanted to know how our brains do this.

To study language, Christine used a special method called psycholinguistics. That's a big word, but it just means she would ask people to do things like read words or listen to someone talk, and then she would see how their brains reacted.

Christine was the first person to discover that our brains process words differently depending on what part of speech they are. For example, nouns and verbs are processed differently because they do different things. Nouns name things, like "dog" or "house," and verbs describe actions, like "run" or "jump." Our brains have to do different things to understand these different parts of speech.

Christine also found out that our brains process words based on how frequently we use them. So words like "the" and "and" are processed much more quickly than words like "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" because we don't use that word very often!

Overall, Christine Mohrmann's research helped us understand more about how our brains process language. Thanks to her, we know that our brains do a lot of work when we hear and understand language, and that different parts of speech are processed differently.