Not only did they confirm that weird non-words tend to make us laugh, they discovered something more profound: "Non-words are funny to the extent that they are weird," says Westbury.
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Actually, the metric is for non-words, the kind of stuff Dr. Seuss was so good at.
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Horobin notes that most of the errors "suggest too much reliance upon spellcheck," which only recognizes non-words and turns them into real words.
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The Dr. Seuss catalogue provides countless examples of non-words — barbaloots, truffula and snergelly, for example — which were not created with entropy in mind.
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He invented hundreds of non-words — like schloppitty-schlopp, diffendoofer and yuzz-a-ma-tuzz — in order to make the imaginary worlds he created for his characters that much more ridiculous.
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The Cat in the Hat In a study extended to the general public, participants were asked to compare two non-words and decide which one they thought funnier, after which they were shown a single non-word and asked to score it from 1 to 100 in terms of funniness.
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The baboons were shown words they had previously learned and non-words. The non-words were created by using four- letter words, previously learned by the baboons, and either transposing the two middle letters or replacing the two middle letters with different letters (double substitute non-words). Baboons classified TL non-words as words significantly more often than double substitute non-words.
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Ebbinghaus developed his own experiment in which he constructed over 2,000 syllables made out of nonexistent words, for instance EAS. He then examined his own personal ability to learn these non-words. He purposely chose non-words as opposed to real words to control for the influence of pre-existing experience on what the words might symbolize, thus enabling easier recollection of them. Ebbinghaus observed and hypothesized a number of variables that may have affected his ability to learn and recall the non-words he created.
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Phonological dyslexia is a reading disability that is a form of alexia (acquired dyslexia), resulting from brain injury, stroke, or progressive illness and that affects previously acquired reading abilities. The major distinguishing symptom of acquired phonological dyslexia is that a selective impairment of the ability to read pronounceable non-words occurs although the ability to read familiar words is not affected. It has also been found that the ability to read non-words can be improved if the non-words belong to a family of pseudohomophones.
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In immediate recall, trace reconstruction is more accurate for words than for non-words. This has been labelled as the lexicality effect. The effect is hypothesized to occur due to the differences in the presence and availability of phonological representations. Contrarily to non-words, words possess stable mental representations of the accompanying sounds.
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Block representation of syllables: Once the child understands that syllables consist of sounds, they then have to count the number of sounds, the order and distinguish between phonetic features. N.B. all block representation tasks deal only with non-words; this is to prevent the child from using pre-learned spelling patterns to respond to the tasks. Reading and spelling non-words: This builds on previously learnt skills by using block representation to read and spell non-words. The child is encouraged to employ metalinguistic knowledge to describe changes.
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Short-term implicit memory for words and non-words. J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 21(5):1108–26.McKone E. 1998.
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It was found that the participants could pick out certain abstract clues from the different foods tasted and associate them in a significant manner to meaningless non-words.
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This subtest is more about measuring the ability of children to recognise unfamiliar words, pseudo-words or non-words. It uses 63 pseudo-words of one to three syllables and measures the children's efficiency of reading these words. The scores on this subtests helps researchers to understand the enthusiasm of students' to learn independent reading and spelling skills. It generally starts with non-words that have less syllables and less difficult and gradually increase in both syllables and difficulty.
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Patients with phonological dyslexia have problem reading non- words and unfamiliar words. According to the dual route model, patients with phonological dyslexia use route 2 or 3 that have intact orthographic input lexicon which allow them to pronounce familiar words whether regular or irregular. However due to phonological dyslexia they are unable to use grapheme-phoneme conversion (Route 1), as route 1 is impaired, thus patients find it difficult to pronounce unfamiliar words and non-words.
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Deep dyslexia can affect both pathways in the dual-route hypothesis of reading. The "Morton and Patterson (dual route) model" is based upon the dual route hypothesis of reading. It proposes that the occurrence of semantic errors alongside an inability to read non-words aloud must be due to multiple loci of damage within this dual-route model. Because a deep dyslexic cannot read aloud non-words, a disruption in the phonological process is assumed, forcing reading to proceed through the semantic route.
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The dual-route hypothesis to reading can help explain patterns of data connected to certain types of disordered reading, both developmental and acquired. Routes impaired in surface and phonological dyslexia Children with reading disorders rely primarily on the sub-lexical route while reading. Research shows that children can decode non-words, letter by letter, accurately but with slow speed. However, in decision tasks, they have trouble differentiating between words and pseudohomophones (non words that sound like real words but are incorrectly spelled), thereby showing that they had impaired internal lexicons.
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As a result, researchers created an old-young IAT that involved pairing young and old faces with neutral words (non-salient attribute) and non-words (salient attribute). Response times were faster when old faces (salient) were paired with non-words (salient) than when old faces (salient) were paired with neutral words (non-salient), supporting the assertion that faster response time can be facilitated by matching salience. Although proponents of the IAT acknowledge that it may be influenced by salience asymmetry, they argue that this does not preclude interpreting the IAT as a measure of associations.
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The peak of Ashish's achievements is being awarded a lifetime recipient of the Corporate Bullshittery awards. The award was given for "most likely to unironically use non-words to describe ephemeral ideas and concepts that have no basis in anything tangible".This Guy Can Corporate Bloomberg L.P.
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Graigner J. (2008). Cracking the orthographic code: An introduction. Language and Cognitive Processing, 23(1), 1-35. Baboons were asked to classify strings of letters as either words or non-words by selecting certain shapes (for example, a circle for a word and a square for a non-word).
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Their research question was: will the generation effect occur for words only or also non-words? To test this they studied 168 Purdue undergraduate students. The researchers divided the participants up into two groups. The first group had word or non word pairs that rhymed and were told to read both out loud.
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Individuals who suffer from phonological dyslexia have the opposite problem to surface dyslexics. These individuals are able to read using the whole word method. However, they struggle when it comes to sounding words out. Phonological dyslexics are able to read familiar words, but have difficulties when it comes to unfamiliar words or non-words that are pronounceable.
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Another form of visual stimuli are words and non- words. In a set of experiments, words and non-word were used as subliminal primes. Primes that work best as subliminal stimuli are words that have been classified several times before they are used as primes. Word primes can also be made from parts of practiced words to create new words.
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Thus, patients with this particular type of reading disorder read non-words fluently, like "yatchet", but struggle with words that defy pronunciation rules (i.e. exception words). For example, a patient with surface dyslexia can correctly read regular words like "mint", but will err when presented a word that disobeys typical pronunciation rules, like "pint". Often, semantic knowledge is preserved in individuals with surface dyslexia.
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The second group had a word or non word and the first letter of the next followed by blanks, and were told to read the first word out loud and generate a word that rhymed with the first word and started with the letter presented. The results were as expected. Participants were only generating words rather than non words according to the lexical activation hypothesis.
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Several standardized test batteries exist for diagnosing and classifying aphasias. These tests are capable of identifying conduction aphasia with relative accuracy. The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) and the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) are two commonly used test batteries for diagnosing conduction aphasia. These examinations involve a set of tests, which include asking person to name pictures, read printed words, count aloud, and repeat words and non-words (such as shwazel).
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The capacity to acquire the ability to incorporate the pronunciation of new words depends upon many factors. First, the learner needs to be able to hear what they are attempting to pronounce. Also required is the capacity to engage in speech repetition. Children with reduced ability to repeat non-words (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children with normal ability.
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In testing the ability of beginner readers, pseudowords are used due to their characteristics as pronounceable non-words. Those with reading disabilities have a more difficult time pronouncing pseudowords. Because pseudowords are made using common syllables, it might be obvious that trouble in pronouncing them would be connected to trouble pronouncing real words. From these findings, nonsense word fluency is now considered to be a basic early literacy indicator.
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Semantic priming measures the association between two concepts. In a lexical decision task, subjects are presented with pair of words, and asked to indicate whether the pair are words (for example, "butter") or non-words (for example, "tubter"). The theory behind semantic priming is that subjects are quicker to respond to a word if preceded by a word related to it in meaning (e.g. bread-butter vs. bread-dog).
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Instead of being defined by 'non' words, some organizations are suggesting new, positive-sounding terminology to describe the sector. The term 'civil society organization' (CSO) has been used by a growing number of organizations, including the Center for the Study of Global Governance. The term 'citizen sector organization' (CSO) has also been advocated to describe the sector – as one of citizens, for citizens – by organizations including Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.Drayton, W: "Words Matter" .
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In the semantic priming task paradigm described by Wittenbrink et al. (1997), participants are shown a word prime at intervals which are too brief for reported awareness (see subliminal stimuli). The word prime consists of two groups of words representing the concept in question (such as black sounding names or white sounding names). Participants were then asked to complete a lexical decision task (LDT) to identify if target stimuli are words or a non-words.
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In this case, the actual word used as a prime can have the opposite meaning of the words it came from (its "parents"), but it will still prime for the meaning of the parent words. Non-words created from previously practiced stimuli have a similar effect, even when they are unpronounceable (e.g., made of all consonants). These primes generally only increase response times for later stimuli for a very short period of time (milliseconds).
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Perception can be shaped by "top-down" processes such as drives and expectations. An effect of these factors is that people are particularly sensitive to perceive certain things, detecting them from weaker stimuli than otherwise. A simple demonstration of the effect involved very brief presentations of non-words such as "sael". Subjects who were told to expect words about animals read it as "seal", but others who were expecting boat-related words read it as "sail".
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From this explanation of the spacing effect, it follows that this effect should not occur with nonsense stimuli that do not have a semantic representation in memory. A number of studies have demonstrated that the semantically-based, repetition priming approach cannot explain spacing effects in recognition memory for stimuli, such as unfamiliar faces, and non-words that are not amenable to semantic analysis.Russo, Riccardo; Parkin, Alan J.; Taylor, Sandra R.; Wilks, Jacqueline. Revising current two-process accounts of spacing effects in memory.
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Meaning that there is a relationship between the word and its meaning and not just the mechanisms in how it is pronounced. People who suffer with surface dyslexia also have the ability to read words and non- words alike. This means the physical production of phonological sounds is not affected by surface dyslexia. The mechanism behind surface dyslexia is thought to be involved with the phonologic output of the lexicon and is also often attributed to the disruption of semantics.
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Researches in 1980s by Soares and Grosjean on English-Portuguese bilingual had two main findings. One is that although bilingual can access real words in English as quickly as English monolinguals, but they are slower at responding to non-words. The other finding is that bilingual took longer to access code-switched words than they did base-language words in the monolingual mode. These two findings can be seen as the evidence for more than one lexicon are existed in bilinguals' brains.
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Language-nonselective access is the automatic co-activation of information in both linguistic systems. It implies that when a bilingual encounters a spoken or written word, the activation happens in parallel in both contextually appropriate and inappropriate linguistic subsystems. Also, there is evidence that bilinguals take longer than monolinguals to detect non-words while in both bilingual and monolingual modes, providing evidence that bilinguals do not fully deactivate their other language while in a monolingual mode.Soares, C. and Grosjean, F. (1984).
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At the time of its conception, Morton's logogen model was one of the most influential models in springing up other parallel word access models and served as the essential basis for these subsequent models. Morton's model also strongly influenced other contemporary theories on lexical access. However, despite the advantages that the logogen theory presents, it also displays some negative facets. First and foremost, the logogen model does not explain all occurrences in language, such as the introduction of new words or non-words into a persons lexicon.
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A simple demonstration of the effect involved very brief presentations of non-words such as "sael". Subjects who were told to expect words about animals read it as "seal", but others who were expecting boat-related words read it as "sail". Sets can be created by motivation and so can result in people interpreting ambiguous figures so that they see what they want to see. For instance, how someone perceives what unfolds during a sports game can be biased if they strongly support one of the teams.
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In studies in Cantonese and Korean, subjects were able to read non-words in their native orthography without a delay relative to the speed with which they read real words in their native orthography. There is a delay noted with exception words in English, including the examples 'chaos', 'unique', and 'enough'. These studies also illustrate difficulties in understanding what it is that they are reading. The findings suggest that non-hyperlexic readers rely more heavily on word semantics in order to make inferences about word meaning.
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This experiment focuses on human speech and language. Brown-Peterson In the Brown- Peterson experiment, participants are briefly presented with a trigram and in one particular version of the experiment, they are then given a distractor task, asking them to identify whether a sequence of words are in fact words, or non-words (due to being misspelled, etc.). After the distractor task, they are asked to recall the trigram from before the distractor task. In theory, the longer the distractor task, the harder it will be for participants to correctly recall the trigram.
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Using positron emission tomography (PET) scans and event-related potentials, researchers have located two separate areas in the fusiform gyrus that respond specifically to strings of letters. The posterior fusiform gyrus responds to words and non-words, regardless of their semantic context.(Nobre, Truett & McCarthy, 1994) The anterior fusiform gyrus is affected by the semantic context, and whether letter combinations are words or pseudowords (novel letter combinations that mimic phonetic conventions, ex. shing). This role of the anterior fusiform gyrus may correlate to higher processing of the word's concept and meaning.
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Understanding these subtypes is useful in diagnosing learning patterns and developing approaches for overcoming visual perception impairments or speech discrimination deficits. Cestnick and Coltheart (1999) demonstrated what these underlying deficits are in part, through unveiling different profiles of phonological versus surface dyslexics. Surface Dyslexia is characterized by subjects who can read known words but who have trouble reading words that are irregular. Phonological Dyslexia is characterized by subjects who can read aloud both regular and irregular words but have difficulties with non-words and with connecting sounds to symbols, or with sounding out words.
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Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later. As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding, using a lexical-decision task. He asked participants to make decisions about whether two strings of letters were English words. Sometimes the strings would be actual English words requiring a "yes" response, and other times they would be non-words requiring a "no" response.
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Through a series of experiments, Glucksberg found that these models might have produced these outcomes in experiments because of backwards priming, which is when a visual target word influences the initial ambiguous word. For example, the ambiguous word "cast" is heard by a listener and then they see the word "actress". While processing the auditory statement, the visual target is available during the mental representation of the ambiguous word, thus bringing about the "cast of characters" meaning to the word rather than the more dominant one. Glucksberg's solution was to use non-words as the visual target so it would eliminate backward priming.
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Test of Word Efficiency Second Edition or commonly known as TOWRE - 2 is a kind of reading test developed to test the efficiency of reading ability of children from age 6–24 years. It generally seeks to measure an individual's accuracy and fluency regarding two efficiencies; Sight Word Efficiency (SWE) and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency (PDE). SWE measures ability of pronouncing words that are printed and PDE assesses the quantity of pronouncing phonemically regular non-words. TOWRE - 2 is a very simple test which can be administered by teachers and aides, and it only takes five minutes to complete the procedure.
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Although the generation effect is a robust finding, there are some studies that have found no memorial benefits of generating compared to reading. For example, one study did not find the generation effect when they used legal non-words and found a reduced generation effect when they used material unfamiliar to the participants. They concluded that generating may have limited effectiveness when applied to new or unfamiliar material. This warrants some concern because if the generation effect is to be incorporated into educational practices such as classroom teaching, we would want it to help students learn new material.
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Experiments involving pseudonyms have led to the discovery of the pseudoword effect, a phenomenon where non-words that are similar orthographically to real words give rise to more confusion, or "hits and false alarms," than other real words which are also similar in orthography. The reasoning behind this is focused on semantic meaning. Semantics help us more quickly differentiate between words that look similar, leading to the conclusion that the pseudoword effect is caused by a familiarity-based process. Pseudowords are also often used in studies involving aphasia and other cognitive deficits. Particularly Broca’s aphasia has been associated with difficulties in processing pseudowords.
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In another experiment, TL non-words were more likely to be (incorrectly) classified as actual words than are nonsense control words (Andrews, 1996). Andrew’s results are also inconsistent with the many slot- based coding models because even with two of the letters in the incorrect spot they read the word as if spelled correctly. The parallel distributed processing model proposed by Seidenberg and McClelland (1989) also uses a portion of words but instead of letters they are a small group of letters in the same order as in the word. For example, the word “judge” would have these groupings: .
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Rates of vocabulary expansion link to the ability of children to vocally mirror non-words and so to acquire the new word pronunciations. Such speech repetition occurs automatically, quickly and separately in the brain to speech perception. Moreover, such vocal imitation can occur without comprehension such as in speech shadowing and echolalia. Further evidence for this link comes from a recent study in which the brain activity of two participants was measured using fMRI while they were gesturing words to each other using hand gestures with a game of charades—a modality that some have suggested might represent the evolutionary precursor of human language.
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Findings showed 'from birth bilinguals' had significantly more difficulty distinguishing Catalan words from non-words differing in specific vowels than Catalan-dominants did (measured by reaction time). These difficulties are attributed to a phase around age eight months where bilingual infants are insensitive to vowel contrasts, despite the language they hear most. This affects how words are later represented in their lexicons, highlighting this as a decisive period in language acquisition and showing that initial language exposure shapes linguistic processing for life. also indicate the significance of phonology for L2 learning; they believe learning an L2 once the L1 phonology is already internalised can reduce individuals’ abilities to distinguish new sounds that appear in the L2.
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This combination of the parts of linguistics is known as connectionist theory, in which non-words are distinguished from words by differences in interaction between phonology, orthography, and semantics. In the Lee and Hwang study, the subjects scored lower on general language test and vocabulary tests than the average for their age groups. Literacy education in South Korea involves teaching students entire words, rather than starting with the relationship between phonemes and letters in Hangul, despite evidence that letter name knowledge is useful for learning to read words that have not been taught. The results suggest that hyperlexics are able to obtain the relations between letters (or the smallest unit of the writing system) and their phonemes without knowing the names.
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Normal spellers have access to a lexical spelling system that uses a whole-word; when functioning properly, it allows for recall of the spelling of a complete word, not as individual letters or sounds. This system further uses an internal memory store where the spellings of hundreds of words are kept. This is called the graphemic output lexicon and is aptly named in relation to the graphemic buffer, which is the short term memory loop for many of the functions involved in handwriting. When the spelling system cannot be used, such as with unfamiliar words, non-words or words that we do not recognize the spelling for, some people are able to use the phonological process called the sub-lexical spelling system.
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For example, in Pienie Zwitserlood's study of Dutch compared the words kapitein ("captain") and kapitaal ("capital" or "money"); in the study, the stem kapit- primed both boot ("boat", semantically related to kapitein) and geld ("money", semantically related to kapitaal), suggesting that both lexical entries were activated; the full word kapitein, on the other hand, primed only boot and not geld. Furthermore, experiments have shown that in tasks where subjects must differentiate between words and non-words, reaction times were faster for longer words with phonemic points of discrimination earlier in the word. For example, discriminating between Crocodile and Dial, the point of recognition to discriminate between the two words comes at the /d/ in crocodile which is much earlier than the /l/ sound in Dial.Taft, 264.
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One of the frequent cases was the Tetragrammaton, which according to later Jewish practices should not be pronounced but read as "Adonai" ("My Lord"), or, if the previous or next word already was Adonai, as "Elohim" ("God"). Writing the vowel diacritics of these two words on the consonants YHVH produces and respectively, non-words that would spell "Yehovah" and "Yehovih" respectively. The oldest complete or nearly complete manuscripts of the Masoretic Text with Tiberian vocalisation, such as the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, both of the 10th or 11th century, mostly write (yhwah), with no pointing on the first h. It could be because the o diacritic point plays no useful role in distinguishing between Adonai and Elohim and so is redundant, or it could point to the qere being Shema, which is Aramaic for "the Name".
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