Scrabble and the Lexicon

Anyone who's spent any time thinking about it is impressed with the human capacity for learning and recalling words.  Adult speaker have available, at a moments notice, something on the order of a hundred thousand lexical items.  (And some estimates are even higher.)  You'd think that the ability of Scrabble champions to look at the board and their seven letters and find English words that fit would show just how fast and flexible access to the lexicon can be—you'd think that, but you might be wrong.

The Wife (who's recently been dissertation-blogging up a storm, BTW) sent me a link to a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Panupol Sujjayakorn, the current World Scrabble Champion.  It's impressive that a non-native speaker (he's Thai) can do so well in an apparently vocabulary-based game like Scrabble, but what's even more impressive is that he doesn't actually speak much English.  It seems contrary to common sense, but being a master Scrabble player isn't really a language skill:

Diane F. Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College who has just finished a study of top Scrabble players' cognitive skills, says the best players do not play the same game as the rest of us.

"We play as if we are using the English language," says Ms. Halpern. "They do not. For them it is a very spatial game. We think of it as a point game laid out on a board. They think along an axis, where point values occupy a place in space."

It'd be fascinating to spend an afternoon inside the skull of a non-native-speaking Scrabble master while he or she played in a tournament.  What must it feel like?  I'll bet it puts those Tetris dreams many of us had about ten years ago to shame.

[Now playing: "Statue of Liberty" by Joe Jackson]