> "Your eyes actually take in multiple words at a time and parse the sentence based on the words you've taken in. This also means that unless a particular parti

> "Your eyes actually take in multiple words at a time and parse the sentence based on the words you've taken in. This also means that unless a particular particle is deadly important to the sentence, your brain ignores it" I have a hunch that's not actually what's going on, the second "the" gets filtered out way earlier, before it even reaches the higher features of language processing: to compensate for the constant jittering and shifting of the eye's focus, our pattern recognition modules need to navigate by close-by features in order to build up a model of what we see. In reading mode, the second "the" never even makes it to language processing because it gets filtered out during error correction as an eye-alignment error. I imagine the pseudo code backtrace would be something like this: "I saw a 'the' shape" > "move focus to next position on the right" > "still seeing the 'the' shape" > "move focus to next position on the right". So unless you decide to consciously process the line, or your visual system explicitly learns to recognize a 'the the' pattern, the data simply never gets passed along.