Language Processes

Oh Barbie! Using auditory illusion to study speech perception

There are absolutely no swear words in Toy Story 3. This is something that probably should go without saying, if you’re even vaguely familiar with the Disney/Pixar approach to family entertainment. And yet, as I paused in my scrolling through a popular short video app, this was exactly the thought that skipped through my mind […]

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Flippity fetching fudge: Phonemes and profanity across languages

Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a […]

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The cognitive psychologists are coming! #psynom22

November is here. The leaves changed from green into vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds and carpeted the streets. The air chilled, so my winter clothes reappeared, replacing my summer clothes, as I braced myself for the colder months ahead. Root vegetables supplanted fresh salads on my menus. For me, an American in the UK, November […]

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Life outside the lab doesn’t come with a manual: Learning the grammar of real behaviour

While you might not think of it, your life and your experience of moving through the world is governed by innumerable sets of rules that you’ve learned. We tend not to think much about these rules or grammars, much less how we learn them, but they’re nearly as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Imagine […]

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Playing with words: How the Brysbaert lab developed a new battery of language tests

“The impious warbler delved into the paltry aperitif and anointed the pumice with ineffable rigmarole.” That’s a sentence with a lot of big words (and I hope it’s never been uttered before), but if you understood that I was referring to a nasty little bird that wiped some booze on a rock, then you may […]

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Neural processing of sarcasm – how’s that for a great title?

With the return of the sunny days of summer (save for our friends in the southern hemisphere), you might find yourself in a situation where, having invited your best friends for a barbecue, you forget the sausages on the grill and serve them, er, completely charred. Seeing the blackened meat, one of them snickers: “You’re […]

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Semantic fluency of novices and experts tells us about knowledge structures and networks

What do we know about the structures of our knowledge and its connectivity? Do they differ between novices and experts, especially on the topics of experts? Imagine if I asked you to come up with as many words as possible related to quantum mechanics. How many words would you generate? How about if you had […]

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Interview with new Digital Associate Editor Melinh Lai

I’m pleased to introduce you to our new Digital Associate Editor (DAE), Melinh Lai (pictured below). If you read her post authored in a guest capacity, you are already familiar with her.  In the interview with Melinh, I asked my now-standard DAE questions and was entertained by her thoughtful, clever, humorous responses and I suspect […]

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Comparing early and late signers’ links between spatial language and memory

If you watched the Academy Award winning film, CODA (trailer below), you’ll appreciate that the character who played the son is a native signer. That is, he learned sign language from his parents from the start. How do we learn spatial relations? It’s a fundamental ability we pick up early. Much of what we know […]

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I don’t know what working memory interference is, I’m a musician

Music and language share many cognitive features. Not surprisingly, it has been argued that they may have shared evolutionary origins and are present in every culture. I have a soft spot for cognitive studies in these two areas. When reading my earlier posts, you may notice that I covered topics such as bilingualism, the acoustics of emotions in the voice, […]

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