What is the connection between the spelling of a word and its meaning? Does the fact that the words “lead” (the metal) and “lead” (to go in front) are spelled the same somehow make them more similar in meaning than they would be if their spelling differed? A recent paper by Peleg and colleagues published in […]
Language Processes
We have no difficulty picking “rat” as the odd one out from the set “goat – deer – rat”. This ready access to semantic structure in our memories supports many essential cognitive capabilities. It allows us to be guided in our current understanding and behavior by prior knowledge and experience. For example, if we learned […]
We all take speech for granted. We are able to say things to others without thinking about how we do that. We may struggle to know what to say when we are left speechless, but once we gather our thoughts, we can utter them without difficulty. Once you consider speech production more carefully, however, it reveals its full complexity. In […]
When the cat barks and the guitar has a bow: Neurocognitive signatures of processing perplexing text “A mouse was looking for something to eat while a bigger animal was waiting to hunt it.” What’s your best guess about which animal was lurking over the unfortunate mouse’s shoulder? I suspect you would be surprised if the […]
There are some 40,000,000 foreign-born people living in the United States today. Most of those people hail from Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean, and their native language is therefore most likely not English. And indeed, it is not uncommon for people in the U.S.—and also the U.K., Canada, and Australia—to speak English with a […]
Human beings communicate in nearly 7,000 different languages. A surprisingly—and perhaps concerningly—large number of those languages is “endangered”, with nearly 500 (or 6%-7%) being listed by UNESCO. Scholars have warned that “World languages are now rapidly being lost”, and like the loss of species diversity, this language extinction has been attributed to economic development—the more successful a […]
Do you ever lie? Many people would consider this to be a highly confronting question, not only because all of us (sometimes) lie but also because we believe that there is a general moral imperative not to lie. There is actually considerable debate about the moral imperative against lying among philosophers, and it is easy to come up with […]
Why do our hearts ache, and why do we get butterflies in our stomachs? Why is a word or phrase always on the tip of your tongue? Words that convey strong emotions often involve bodily organs (e.g. my heart aches, I have butterflies in my stomach), and we speak of kind people as being warm. […]