Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener,[1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
[3] There is also the experiment conducted by Kouinos et al. (2000), which revealed that semantic satiation is not necessarily a byproduct of "impoverishment of perceptual inputs.
"[4] Jakobovits cited several possible semantic satiation applications and these include its integration in the treatment of phobias through systematic desensitization.
He argued that "in principle, semantic satiation as an applied tool ought to work wherever some specifiable cognitive activity mediates some behavior that one wishes to alter.