In 2020 Adolfo García, a neurolinguist at Argentina’s University of San Andrés, experienced a chance encounter with a photographer who amused his products by chattering to them backward—the Spanish word casa (house) grew to become “asac,” for occasion. On understanding that the photographer had been fluent in “backward speech” since childhood and was capable of holding a discussion totally in reverse, García established out to review the phenomenon.

His investigate on this amusing speaking design and style drew plenty of interest to garner him an Ig Nobel Prize, an award sponsored by Harvard University because 1991 for analysis that “first will make individuals chortle and then feel.” Backward speech confers no simple edge to its speakers. Maybe it simply exists for the sheer satisfaction of the speaker and listener, who figure out the appears in asac or “onom,” which is from the Spanish term mono (monkey). Yet, this ability, which García states was originally dismissed by his acquaintances and colleagues as “ridiculous and worthless,” is by no suggests a whole waste mainly because it presents insights into how the human mind procedures language in atypical techniques.

“We had the opportunity to take a look at a little something unusual, even, at instances, absurd,” García states of the 2020 Scientific Reviews examine for which he and his crew won the Ig Nobel. This recognition took him by surprise, primarily looking at that he did not go on to pursue this distinct line of investigation after the study was revealed. His exploration now focuses on addressing language complications in autistic folks and in persons with ataxia, Parkinson’s ailment or neurodegenerative problems. But García continues to be an ardent advocate for building backward converse additional than a linguistic oddity. He hopes, in simple fact, that his perform will establish beneficial in producing extra efficient therapies for language problems.

All-around the La Plata River estuary, which abuts the province of Buenos Aires and some pieces of southern Uruguay, the language of term inversion belongs to a type of slang identified as lunfardo, which is the merchandise of immigrant languages from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This linguistic marvel makes use of only letters or syllables swapped from back to front. In lunfardo, the phrase vesre represents the Spanish phrase for “reverse”—revés—with its syllables pronounced backward.

There are still legions of passionate lunfardo speakers nowadays. Thousands of exchanges turn up in ordinary conversation: feca (café, or espresso), choborra (borracho, or drunk) or rioba (barrio, or neighborhood). In Argentina and Uruguay these phrases are part of the culture. They frequently demonstrate up in tango lyrics but are sprinkled as solitary phrases into conversation by practically everyone, nevertheless not as constant backward speech as shown by the photographer encountered by García.

Backward speech can be practiced in any language that has a “transparent” grammar, indicating that phonemes—the unique sound units of a language—have the identical audio irrespective of their position relative to other sections of a word, according to María José Torres Prioris, a researcher in the faculty of psychology at the University of Málaga in Spain and at the Biomedical Investigation Institute of Málaga, who co-authored the Scientific Studies review.

Phrase reversals are probable in languages this kind of as Spanish, Basque or some Mayan languages, in which there is a immediate just one-to-one correspondence between letters and seems. For occasion, Spanish has five vowels, and each just one has a unique audio that remains constant across all words and phrases. In distinction, English, considered an “opaque” language, has 12 unique sounds for these same five vowels. In Spanish, the letter A has a constant seem and is prepared the exact way, whilst in English, it can make different seems, as seen in terms these types of as “back” (/æ/) or “far” (/ɑ/). In some cases, it could be read devoid of getting explicitly written, such as in “cup” (/ʌ/). Torres Prioris acknowledges that individuals can speak backwards in English as very well, but the speaker and listener can get perplexed in between how a term is pronounced and how it is written. That confusion of sounds does not exist in Spanish.

Backward talking is not confined to the La Plata River space. In France talking backward is known as verlan, a time period that is the inversion of the syllables of l’envers, this means “the inverse.” Verlan features expressions such as cimer for merci (thank you) or jourbon for bonjour (good day). A thing very similar exists in Medellín, Colombia, the place folks have on in parlache, and in Panama, which has slang called reversina.

Cultural adoration for backward converse most likely reaches an apex in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, a town in Spain’s Canary Islands exactly where citizens are pushing for formal recognition of backward speak. Listed here the custom received started in the 1930s by a barber who spoke backward. Nowadays those he influenced have requested the United Nations Instructional, Scientific and Cultural Corporation (UNESCO) to declare the exercise an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.” Some San Cristóbal people have even quarreled with Spanish-language professors and authorities at the Canarian Language Academy who contend that this way of talking equates to nothing additional than a linguistic video game.  

The Ig Nobel–winning researchers’ prize consisted of an out-of-circulation Zimbabwean banknote and a PDF that could be printed out and folded to variety a miniature cola box. The backward speakers in their review possessed an “extraordinary ability” to immediately reverse text (even invented types), sentences and texts. These individuals could rearrange appears but protect a word’s identity simply, García and Torres Prioris’s staff observed. As an alternative of stating plata (dollars), for instance, they explained atalp. They reversed the letters in the term, not the syllables, and even maintained the proper accents. “It is a significantly a lot more intricate mechanism” than a silly sport, Garcia emphasizes.

In the Scientific Reports research, the scientists built numerous responsibilities to evaluate the participants’ means to generate words backward and ahead. The scientists calculated precision and velocity in rearranging phoneme sequences, and they obtained structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings.

1 of the study’s findings exhibits that the members had an capability to quickly interact in term reversal that could not be defined by, say, getting a remarkable doing work memory (the variety of memory that enables folks to briefly recall a phone quantity, for illustration). Moreover, these persons did not show any other reversal capabilities, this sort of as mirror crafting, or writing in reverse.

Neuroimaging disclosed that backward speakers experienced more grey subject volume and connections among the neurons, not only in areas associated with phoneme processing (together what is identified as the dorsal pathway of the remaining hemisphere) but also in other mind spots associated in semantic processes, certain visible capabilities and cognitive manage. Backward speech for that reason provides into play cognitive mechanisms further than classical language circuits.

A different intriguing factor of the team’s results, according to Torres Prioris, demonstrates that the mind plasticity demonstrated by the study’s backward speakers enabled them to “accomplish the very same undertaking with different neural resources.”

María Castelló, an affiliate professor of research in integrative and computational neurosciences at Clemente Estable Organic Exploration Institute in Uruguay, who was not concerned in this review, believes that it has opened “a window into the mechanisms of phonological coding”—the recording of prepared, orthographic information and facts into a seem-based code. Especially, it sheds light on “an location that has been minimal explored in neurolinguistics,” Castelló says.

“Neuroimaging reports have disclosed that the particular mind areas involved can differ between folks, underscoring the plasticity of the human brain in adapting to exceptional linguistic talents,” she provides. The most important contribution of this review, Castelló says, is that it giving insights that improve being familiar with of the neural mechanisms included in processing sounds and constructing text.

Backward converse may well look to some like an absurd indulgence that does nothing at all more than provoke laughter among the close friends in spots such as San Cristóbal de La Laguna. But García and Torres Prioris argue that this exploration is applicable for a deeper being familiar with of neurological problems that affect language. “I simply cannot say that this examine has a direct clinical effects, but I do feel it goes in that route,” Torres Prioris states.

Given that the publication of the team’s write-up, Torres Prioris has concentrated on researching attribute signs of poststroke aphasia, which impacts the means to discuss and success from accidents to the brain locations accountable for language. Folks with aphasia might exhibit linguistic errors these kinds of as the inversion, substitution, addition or subtraction of phonemes when speaking. In this context, the identification of neural circuits linked with backward speech is, in her see, “a stage forward” for the improvement of noninvasive mind stimulation treatment options for people with this condition. And in the potential, she hopes to derive an powerful therapy from the success of studying backward speech.

“When confronted with some thing seemingly preposterous or absurd, it is really quick to dismiss it as if scientific price lies in grandiose, innovative and transcendent matters,” García says. “A lesson from this review is that if we see some thing absurd, and we fail to uncover inspiration, we are not pondering deeply ample.”