How do we recognize the written word? While this seems trivially easy to us, we need to remember that words that are quite close perceptually can be drastically different in meaning. Fin and fine, crew and crow, and deck and desk may look nearly the same but their meanings differ considerably. In the sentence “I […]
Language Processes
What is a tax? Is it a “burden”? Or a “civilization surcharge”? And which would you rather pay? Would you prefer to vote for someone who has a “heart of gold” or a “heart of blackness”? Is crime a “beast” that is “ravaging” cities or a “virus” that needs to be controlled? Metaphors allow us […]
A flashback from 30 years ago in my house with my mother yelling for me from another room, but before she ever gets to me, it goes a little something like this: “Garry, . . .Alex, . . .Patty, . . . Fluffy, . . . HEATHER, . . .have you taken the garbage out?” […]
For a long period of time in language research, people made the assumption that language processing and other aspects of cognition were distinct from each other. For example, most people have the impression that talking while driving is easy, even though talking on the phone can make driving more dangerous. In addition to the idea […]
Humans, to judge from the amount we laugh, are apparently the most comical species. We use laughter as the best medicine, we laugh all the way to the bank, and we laugh so hard we forget to cry. From “hahahas” and LOLs, to guffaws, chuckles, giggles, cackles, and snorts, humans do appear to be the […]
Currently the EU is officially working and speaking in 24 different languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Growing up in such an environment by necessity leads to a great number of people speaking more than just […]
When you chuang to close the chuang because you want to go to chuang: Modeling spoken word recognition in Chinese We noted earlier this week that Chinese is a language without inflection of verbs or nouns. That is, whereas in English you “walk” and Fred “walks”, in Chinese the same word would be used irrespective of who […]
Human beings today communicate in 7,000 different languages. Although many languages are expected to go extinct in the future because there are not enough people left who keep them alive, the ability to speak more than one language will continue to be in high demand. In fact, by some estimates, more of us are bilingual (i.e., speak two languages, […]
Signing a Swedish sound beats catching a ball: linguistic processing in sign language and working memory performance Imagine that you are discussing a familiar topic with a friend in a quiet room. If you are a neurotypical individual, understanding them and knowing what to say next may seem effortless. Now imagine that you are having […]
About 15 years ago, I tried computer speech dictation for the first time. I had a paper to write, and I thought speaking to the computer would be much more efficient than typing. It was a complete disaster; what appeared in my word processor bore no resemblance to what I was saying. Luckily I was […]