an even more remarkable study, volunteers listened to a recording of the word eel preceded by a cough (which I’ll denote with a *). The volunteers heard the word peel when it was embedded in the sentence ‘The *eel was on the orange’ but they heard the word heel when it was embedded in the sentence ‘The *eel was on the shoe.’13 This is a striking finding because the two sentences differ only in their final word, which means that volunteers’ brains had to wait for the last word of the sentence before they could supply the information that was missing from the second word. But they did it, and
...more
