Home

Latest from the Blog

Does this mean anything to you?

In the past, I have discussed strange sentences like garden path sentences and Moses illusions. These sentences, while strange or inaccurate in some way, are ultimately grammatical. I find sentences like these particularly fascinating because they push the limits of what our brains will tolerate while reading. There is another type of sentence I encountered…

Gendered nouns

I received a comment a few weeks ago asking me why languages like French and Italian have gendered nouns. This is an issue that has been debated a lot in the literature, and there isn’t really a good answer at this point. But putting the why issue aside for now, let’s go on a quick…

Voice is stored in the vocal folds

I have talked a lot about voiced sounds in previous posts, but I have been ignoring one cool thing that you can do to trick your brain into hearing something unexpected. Before we can get to that though, I need to teach you about voice onset time. Voice onset time (or VOT) is a phonetic…