We have to protect ourselves. Patternicity is a one of many traits where our brains don’t know what’s good for us.

– The Blissful Ignorance of the Narrative Fallacy

… when joining or connecting many systems, the macroscopic or collective properties of the outcoming system are not generally related with the properties of their individual constituents. In this case, the resulting system is a complex system … knowing the nature and shape of complex systems in organizations can be an important tool for the managers

– Engineering Complex Systems applied to Risk Management in the Mining Industry

What happens to a tyre when it goes over a sharp object? Some students say it blows up and others say it blows out. When presented with either version in a comprehension cloze passage, students might read into one the meaning of the other. This is not an uncommon phenomenon and it happens because of the salience of the common term used in both phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs (PVs) constitute a main verb and a preposition and Liu (2011) says English language learners face “great difficulty” with them for various reasons such as, “cross-linguistic differences”, “complexity of syntactic and semantic structures” and that the “enormous number of PVs in English also contributes to the problem”.

A phrasal verb can be defined in two ways.

The first is that it consists of a “lexical verb (LV) proper… followed by an adverbial particle (tagged as AVP) that is either contiguous (adjacent) to that verb or non-contiguous (i.e., separated by one or more intervening words” (Gardner & Davies, 2007 as cited in Liu, 2011).

An example of adjacent AVP use is when the preposition appears immediately after the verb – threw off or thrown off as in Do not be thrown off by the difficult word. An example of a non-contiguous AVP is threw his calculations off as in mistakes threw his calculations off a bit (Marriam-Webster). The preposition is separated from the verb.

Defined this way, the phrase, ‘come up’ in ‘Come up to the stage’ counts as a phrasal verb even though it literally means to go from a lower level to a higher level. The meaning of ‘come up’ here is derived fully from ‘come’ and ‘up’.

The second definition is that of Biber and others (1999) which in addition to the first definition, includes another criterion – phrasal verbs “must have meanings beyond the separate meanings of the two parts” (Liu, 2011). This is the definition of phrasal verbs which students learn in school.

In I came across a word I’d never seen before (Macmillandictionary), the verb, came across, is only slightly related to the meanings of came and across on their own. It does not mean to cross over to where someone else is standing. It also means something different from came up, came down or came in.

It is much easier to recognise the word ‘came’ than to remember each and every nuance in meaning when the adjoining preposition changes. This is where salience which gives rise to patternicity becomes a stumbling block.

Salience refers to the quality of standing out prominently. Patternicity is a term coined by Shermer to refer to, “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise”. He suggests that “our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connects the dots and create meaning out the patterns we think we see” (Shermer, 2008). To illustrate, he asks questions like why we see faces in nature.

When there is too much information to process, the brain looks for what is familiar or prominent in a complex landscape with very many granular details and creates a convenient narrative with only the bigger pieces.

In the case of phrasal verbs, the verb portion would be prominent and familiar. However, a tiny detail like a two lettered preposition could fundamentally alter meaning – blow up and blow out.

In Formula 1 races, tyres are expected to wear out or blow out (Jake Williams Smith, 2020). In anticipation, drivers are supported by “crews on pit lane and elsewhere” which “monitor performance, which tyres to use and when to pit and change them” (Brown, 2019). It is because tyres are expected to blow out that incidents of an entire car blowing up are rare (motoring, 2011).

Apart from phrasal verbs, vocabulary with similar spelling also poses a problem. The words imminent, eminent and prominent share the same sequence of letters toward the end. In the case of the first two, even the first sound is somewhat similar. When only one of these words is encountered in a text, students would notice the most salient features – the same letters in the same sequence as well as the pronunciation and assume imminent means the same thing as eminent. When they appear together in vocabulary MCQs it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

Noticing similarities across various components of the English paper, however, does confer real benefits. A situational writing task could provide ideas for a continuous writing task if the student spots some connection between any part of the former and the theme or pictures of the latter. In this way, the student harnesses the synergistic potential between two separate components, saving time and effort.

Spotting similarities allows more to be done in less time. To spot similarities, a student must have a comprehensive understanding of the requirements of every component. This can only be achieved if she has a macro view of all four English papers – Situational & Continuous writing, Language use, Listening comprehension and Oral communication. She will then be able to function like an F1 race engineer who is able to coordinate between various segments which make up a team to achieve the best possible outcome for the driver and ultimately the team and the fans.

Each discrete component of the English Language examination serves a distinct and independent function. One tests awareness of vocabulary exclusively. Another tests knowledge of word forms and spelling. The way the exam is compartmentalised or layered, works to limit destructive spillovers. Even if a student does not perform well in one component, he could still get a decent score, even pass well, because of other components. This could happen if by sheer chance, all five words tested in vocabulary MCQ are foreign to him even though on the whole he does possess a decent repertoire.

Still, there are also similarities. For one, they all require decoding – uncovering meaning. Mistakes are made across components because of erroneous interpretation. If a student has pinned down decoding, most words, in whichever component they may appear would be no barrier to understanding and consequently, there would be an overall uplift across components. This applies also to continuous writing tasks, where themes have to be decoded. A student who manages to achieve some distance from the nitty-gritty of discrete components would be able to observe this to be a common thread. She would then no longer fret about not spending enough time on every component. All she has to do is to focus meticulously on decoding technique in one component and the benefits will spill over to others.

Spotting similarities comes quite effortlessly and accordingly students should use what comes naturally to their advantage. At the same time, they should also be mindful that this process sometimes yields comparisons which are not very useful for their purpose.

When is something a good comparison?

In the case of phrasal verbs, the main verb is not very relevant to the overall meaning. Students should then know that focusing on the most salient feature in this instance would not be useful. Instead they should focus on the small detail – the prepositions which make all the difference. In the case of imminent, eminent and prominent, the similarity in spelling while prominent, is only relevant in the pronunciation of these words. Prominence is not relevance.

Decoding on the other hand goes to the heart of communication which is the raison d’etre of language and will always be relevant. Comparisons between requirements of components would shed light on skills which can be applied across. This is an example of comparison of relevant details.

With that said, even if a student decides that turning into a new leaf is the right option in an exam, he could always turn over a new leaf and start a new component with fresh eyes.

The Brain Dojo