People signal their gender identity by using gendered and gender-neutral pronouns pronouns. It’s increasingly popular to include one’s preferred pronouns in email signatures, Twitter bios, etc. This usage provides an opportunity to research how people understand language. In this interview, I speak with Jennifer Arnold (pictured below) about her paper on the topic recently published in Psychonomic […]
Language Processes
As a cognitive psychology professor, I have always loved showing students the never-failing McGurk effect in perception class. After all, who isn’t intrigued by how reliable this effect is? No matter how much you know about it and how many times you have seen or heard the stimuli before, it works. The McGurk effect is the experience […]
What’s scarier? Big bad wolf or bad big wolf? The three little pigs and little red riding hood and her grandma probably wouldn’t be bothered with the distinction. But there’s a natural order to language in which “bad big wolf” doesn’t sound quite right. The English language has various grammatical rules that speakers follow to […]
Everyone wants to be better at focusing, remembering, and problem-solving, right? The self-help market recognizes and exploits this and is teeming with brain games that promise a sharper mind. Many of these games are based on tasks that cognitive psychologists use to study working memory, the system involved in short-term processing and storage of information. Whether or […]
Experiencing different cultures and languages is one of the most exciting elements of living in a globally connected world. If you enjoy cross-cultural adventures or have lived in multiple cities or countries, you are probably familiar with processing English spoken in a variety of accents. In fact, next time you watch a movie, pay careful […]
As human beings, we are often moved to action based on moral messages. Adding a single moral-emotional word to a tweet (hate, greed, fight, safe, shame, etc.) increases the number of retweets by approximately 20% and moral content captures our attention. However, as researchers, deciding whether a particular newspaper article or social media post has a moral message […]
Everyday scenes in bilingual cities can be simultaneously perplexing and fascinating when experienced for the first time. Imagine sitting in a café and eavesdropping on a casual conversation between two friends at a nearby table. They can both speak in a different language, and do so smoothly and naturally, engage in code-switching where they transition from one to […]
When you sit down at the end of a long day and turn on Netflix, do you turn the subtitles on? If so, you are joined by many other viewers who prefer watching television and movies with the closed captions feature. In 2006, the Office of Communications in the UK found that 7.5 million people […]
Our 61st Annual Meeting is one month away! You’re probably well aware because you’ve been feverishly working on your pre-recorded poster or talk presentation to meet the pre-recorded video submission deadlines. The pandemic has necessitated that we no longer meet in Austin, Texas, as initially planned, but instead, we will converge virtually to discuss our research. As in […]
Compound words are funny creatures. They exist as words themselves, but also contain smaller words which have their own unique meanings. For example, the compound word butterfly refers to the pretty insect with wings, but it also contains the smaller words butter (yellow spread made from cream) and fly (move through the air). But how […]