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 […]
Language Processes
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
In October 2008, ‘Year2183’ posted a message on the anti-Muslim website ‘Gates of Vienna’, arguing that Muslims should be forcibly deported from Norway. Three years later, on 22 July 2011, the same individual posted and e-mailed a 1500-page document describing his extreme-right ideology and the extensive preparations that he made before killing 77 people in […]
Have you ever found yourself whispering something to yourself in the comfort of your own head? If you had, you’re not alone. Many people – but not all – do. This phenomenon is known as internal verbalization or inner speech. Curiously, people who don’t experience internal verbalization are surprised about the notion of others “listening” […]
The night before a big exam, college students may attempt to “study” by listening to their recorded notes while they fall asleep. They may feel that processing the information before sleep will help them remember it better the next day. A number of studies have shown this to be effective, even though it didn’t help […]
Imagine learning how to read and play music for the first time. It starts with a series of dots and lines thrown around on a piece of paper. Soon you learn how to interpret these so-called notes. You assign a letter name to each note, and then you figure out how to produce that note […]
George Bernard Shaw is credited for saying, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” It is not clear whether or not he actually said that, but the sentiment is clear that people have a tendency to place judgement or discrimination on the basis of accent or dialect. Accent is the way […]