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…
Aphasia
Normally I try to talk about lighthearted topics so I can throw in the occasional pun and keep this whole thing entertaining for myself. I won’t be doing that today, but I do feel that this topic is incredibly important, and more people should know about it. Today I will be talking about acquired aphasia.…
New York’s Hottest Club
Toward the end of 2021, I had the opportunity to work on a super fun personal project that I have been excited to talk about. I was able to closely examine the speech of Bill Hader over a period of years and directly compare that speech to one of his most famous recurring characters on…
There is snow way that is true!
It is winter here in Canada. As I write this, I am home visiting some family for the holidays which is of course a blessing in these still uncertain times. Here in Alberta the temperatures have dipped down below -40 Celsius at times (which is the same in Freedom Units) with snow falling almost every…
Things are getting tense
Pitch is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit. Some people have high pitched voices and some people have low pitched voices. Have you ever thought about what pitch means though? Sure, we know when someone’s voice sounds high pitched, but what is the reason for that high pitch? You can probably sort…
The rules of conversation
Happy New Year everyone. It feels good to get back into a rhythm of writing these posts now that I have a bit of free time on my hands again. I wanted to start off 2022 talking about… talking I guess. Something that we do everyday! The subtle art of conversation. Conversations can be hard…
Language acquisition is for babies
A few weeks ago, I spoke a little bit about some techniques used in infant language research. Someone had asked me to elaborate a bit more on how infants acquire language sounds. I thought the best way to begin this would be to talk about the order that these sounds are acquired before getting into…
Spoonerisms and you
Have you ever woken up in the morning and found yourself shaking a tower when you really should be taking a shower? Or maybe you are accidentally mending the sail instead of just sending the mail. You have probably run across a few of these kinds of speech errors and laughed at how silly they…
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Talking Linguistics 