Sarcasm, a type of irony, is inescapably embedded in the internet today, with ironic language of some kind being ubiquitous on Facebook, Twitter, in blogs, in news articles, and more. Computers, unlike people, often fail to detect sarcasm, which has the notable quality of often meaning nearly the opposite of what was written. For example, […]
Language Processes
How many U.S. presidents can you name? (Apologies to our international audience.) Regardless of how many you can recall, I would bet that among the ones you did remember are Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Trump, Obama, and Bush. I would also bet that among the ones you did not remember are McKinley, Hoover, and Cleveland. Don’t […]
Asking your waiter what beers are on tap should come with a trigger warning, because the simple question may trigger a cognitive challenge. From Heineken to Becks and some other local boutique IPAs whose names you cannot even pronounce, the list can be so extensive that you are put into frantic rehearsal mode just to […]
The spelling rules of English are by far the most challenging aspect of learning to read, of reading, and of writing. Anyone who has seen a child’s spontaneous writing has seen all kinds of creative misspellings. Adults, of course, are also not immune to spelling errors. Spelling is so strange in the English language that […]
What’s the first thing that comes to mind in response to “Italian”? Lots of things probably, from Lamborghini to cannelloni and Bertolucci. Perhaps you also thought of how Italians talk. Even if we don’t speak Italian, we probably know that Italians do a lot of talking with their hands: in case you have any doubt, […]
You may have heard that the United States had a presidential election last year. You may have also heard that the winner of that election was an outsider, a “straight-talker,” and an anti-establishment candidate. Enough material to fill the Library of Congress has been written on the content of what (first candidate, and now) President […]
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, maybe with your spouse, your co-worker, or a student, and based on their response (or lack thereof) you ask yourself, “Did they even hear a word I said?” In the American movie, Rush Hour, the actor Chris Tucker posed the question a different way, “Do you understand […]
Your tone of voice can tell others a lot about what you mean. Which intonation you use in a sentence matters and your intonation can help listeners figure out the critical difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!” This is only one of a number of examples showing just how the same words […]
Everyone “has an accent”—even if you think you don’t. Most likely, your accent is influenced by both your cultural identity, socioeconomic status, and other social processes, as well as more cognitive processes like emulating another person’s style in a conversation. Accents are such a strong indicator of social factors that they get associated to stereotypes, […]
Hearing other people speak a foreign language can be dizzying. How can they speak so fast? Why don’t they pause between words, like we do? Actually, foreign-language speakers do pause: but despite how it sounds to us in our native tongue, spoken language is not neatly broken up by silence between words. Not convinced? Take […]