Scientists who study language say that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we hear certain words. For example, prior to the pandemic if you overheard someone talk about “knockdown prices” you would understand the meaning clearly. However, since COVID-19 added new words to our commonly used vocabulary, researchers say you are now more likely to hear “lockdown prices.”

According to Quartz, a team of researchers from Haskins Laboratories, a Yale-affiliated center for language research, as well as IBM research, NYU School of Medicine, and Central European University, conducted an experiment to see how people responded to the most frequently used words during the pandemic. They recorded 28 words but muffled some of them with coughs, or another sound, simulating the experience of hearing something spoken in a very busy environment.

The words spoken in one sample were “tempting,” “knockdown,” and “injection.” But after living through two and a half years of COVID-19 conversations, most listeners heard “testing,” “lockdown,” and “infection.”

Try this sample on YouTube and see if you also are among those that researchers say have been affected by “drastic, long-lasting cognitive effects in the way our brains understand these words,” which arrived with the pandemic.

“Our study, recently published in PLOS ONE, shows how likely we are to perceive these common words as a result of the pandemic — to the point that we expect to hear words like ‘mask’ and ‘isolation’ even when a different but similar-sounding word is actually spoken,” they wrote.

One useful application of the findings, said the researchers headed by Daniel Kleinman at Haskins Laboratories, could be in artificial intelligence to help build language-learning models that simulate our brains, says Quartz.

“More research will be needed over time to confirm whether these pandemic-related words will recede to their pre-pandemic frequencies in our mental lexicons,” wrote the researchers. “But the implications are clear: our brains rapidly adapt to the changing linguistic statistics of the world around us, and we predict and expect more common words compared to less common ones.”