" —"In recent weeks, a web-based word puzzle called Wordle has become a popular daily distraction. Suddenly, millions of people are focused on their vocabulary of five-letter words and are newly aware of concepts like letter frequency and letter position as they strategize about the best opening words and faster solutions."Penny Pexman is a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. She studies language, and how it's understood and acquired.
PEXMAN: Word games are captivating because they allow you to feel like you get this little moment of play, right? So it's tapping into something that's pretty readily accessible in your mind, thinking strategically and getting to engage in some complex cognition, which for many people is quite pleasurable.
PEXMAN: And again, that's not something the average reader can do. Most people need to think about the meanings of words in order to know what they're looking at. But a Scrabble player doesn't need to know what the words mean. CHAKRABARTI: OK, so where does Wordle fit into all of this? Clearly, there are marked differences between the two games, but Pexman thinks there's a lot of similarities that Scrabble players, or what she's found about Scrabble players, that can apply to Wordle players too. Because wordplay is so accessible. For example, people do learn it quickly, and therefore their brains adapt.