I'd written "The cat eats the mouse" on a strip of paper.
Romane underlined "cat." Because it's her favorite animal and the word felt most important to her.
I would have underlined "eats." Because that's the action — it's the word that explains what's happening between the cat and the mouse.
We hadn't underlined the same thing. And we both had a reason.
What AI does with a sentence
When an AI reads a sentence, it doesn't read the words one by one in order, the way you read a book. It tries to figure out which words are important for understanding the others.
In "The cat eats the mouse," the word "eats" changes everything. Remove it, and the relationship between the cat and the mouse disappears. The AI learns to spot these pivot words. It pays more attention to them than to the others.
This mechanism is called attention. It's one of the central ideas behind modern AI. Each word looks at all the other words in the sentence and decides how much they matter to it.
The activity
Prepare short, concrete sentences on paper strips — phrases a 6-year-old can read, with familiar words:
- "The dog eats Romane's cake"
- "The witch lost her red wand"
- "Meryl hid the cat under the bed"
Each player gets a different colored marker.
Instructions: underline the most important words in each sentence. Without explaining why, at first.
When everyone has underlined, compare. Do the same words come up? Who underlined what? Why?
Second round: for each disagreement, test it. Remove the underlined word from the sentence and read it out loud. Do you still understand what's happening?
That's the missing-word test. If the sentence falls apart without it, it's an important word.
What actually happened
Romane was underlining words she found beautiful or liked. "Cake" kept coming up. "Wand" too.
When I underlined "eats" in the first sentence and she objected, I cut the word out loud: "The dog Romane's cake." She thought about it. "Oh. You can't tell what's happening anymore."
We did that for each disagreement. Remove the word, hear what was left.
The rule emerged slowly. Important words are the ones without which the sentence doesn't hold together. Romane put it this way: "They're the glue words."
I told her that the researchers who invented the attention mechanism in AI had spent years trying to formalize exactly that intuition.
She shrugged. "They could've just asked a kid."
Meryl wanted to join in. I'd given him a red marker. He underlined every single word in every single sentence, pressing very hard. When I asked why, he said: "Because red is beautiful."
Not the same activity as Romane's. But he'd made his decision and was entirely consistent with it.
To finish
The paper strips stayed on the table. That evening, Romane took one and tried to build a sentence where every word was equally important.
She couldn't do it.
Is a sentence where every word matters equally still a sentence?