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 […]
Language Processes
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 […]
The idea that babies have capabilities beyond our recognition is one that has been expressed in many different forms across the years, such as in children’s television shows (e.g., Nickelodeon’s Rugrats and a few ill-fated movies (Baby’s Day Out, Baby Geniuses, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2). A common theme in these shows and movies is that […]
Warning: Some of the words in this post may be considered offensive. One beauty of the English language is the seemingly infinite possibilities when it comes to making new words. People seem to get especially creative when they’re coming up with new phrases for insults and curse words—the type of language that tends to be […]
As we go about our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to new information―news reports from a foreign country, politicians’ statements about domestic policy, a friend’s description of a new restaurant, and celebrity gossip. Some of that information is true and some is false. How do we remember which statements are true and which are […]
I find that the older I get, the more I “accidentally a word.” And that’s before we get to autocorrect. Sometimes, word processor errors coupled with collaborative editing on a document mean that someone types the same word in their highlighted text as occurs in the next section of the text. Or, occasionally, people will […]
It is truly remarkable what the mind can achieve through the process of reading. Take for example the message below. Were you able to interpret what this message says? Our ability to ‘read’ this combination of numbers and letters highlights the fact that reading (among other things) has become a deeply embedded feature of our […]