The View From Carnegie 210

Students waiting for the sub! (for more pictures, follow the link at the end of the entry).

Last week's Cognitive Group meeting had three headliners--Maria Kennihan, Rachel Learned, and a sub from The Whole Darn Thing Sub Shop.

Maria presented the design of her senior comp for which she will begin testing soon. The group helped her refine some of the stimuli she will be using for her study. Maria's study occurs across two sessions, and the group discussed the challenges of such a design and brainstormed ways to encourage participants to return for a second session.

Rachel also presented her senior comp for which she has just finished testing. Specifically, Rachel testing approximately 70 first year students about the first year experience. As part of that interview, Rachel asked her participants to tell her "something, anything you wish..." about approaching professors during office hours and about what they do with their friends on campus and in the Meadville community. Rachel was particularly interested in how her interviewees would respond to the use of two interviewing techniques. For some participants, Rachel first engaged in small talk, for others she began the interview as soon as the informed consent was signed. Also, for some participants, Rachel took notes during the interview; for others she did not. Rachel hopes to determine whether notetaking during interviews has a negative effect on the interviewee's experience of the interview and of her as the interviewer. This question became of interest to her during her work with the admissions office on campus where the common practice is to make sure not to take notes when meeting with visitors to campus. Furthermore, Rachel hopes to examine the interaction that might occur between the use of small talk and notetaking. Specifically, she expects to find that interviewees will rate the interview experience most positively when small talk is used and no notes are taken. She also expects that the experience will be rated most negatively when small talk is not used and notes are taken. Finally, she expects that the negative impact of notetaking will be mitigated by the positive effect of the use of small talk. The group asked Rachel about what her testing experience was like and Rachel shared some of the challenges she faced trying to keep her interview as similar as possible across each participant without having her behavior seem too unnatural.

Finally, the idea of a 'Cognitive Group Presents' Night was discussed. Professor Knupsky and Professor Wiseman are hoping to have the Group sponsor an evening during which senior psychology students can present posters of their work. The Group thought this would be a great way to showcase the hard work of the seniors and would provide an opportunity for other students to see how the projects turned out and to perhaps get ideas for future projects.

For more pictures from our meeting, please continue reading...

Posted by Aimee Knupsky at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Allard, E. R., & Williams, D. F. (2008). Listeners' perceptions of speech and language
disorders. Journal of Communication Disorders. 41, 108-123.

As a person who has a speech impediment I take great interest in the perception of myself and others that also suffer from speech disorders or disfluencies. My research project for this class will somehow touch upon these stereotypes and I hope to carry this research into my senior comp project. The journal article "Listeners' perceptions of speech and language disorders" Allard and Williams, will serve as my basis for this research. In this article there was a comparison between five voice samples; no disorder, articulation disorder, fluency disorder, voice disorder, and language disorder. The different disorders were rated for several different factors, most notably employability and stress level. The obvious outcome of greater acceptability for the no disorder condition was proven, but the variability in approval of the other disorders were highly variable, and mostly unexplained. This particular study did not examine the effect of race, gender, age, or any other possible variable in the outcome. My hope is to replicate a similar research project taking into account some or all of these variables.

The very concept of a course entitled "Language and Social Cognition" deals with exactly that, the way users of language are perceived for a variety of different reasons. In class we tend to concentrate on conversation roles, word misuse, and other mishaps and nuances of spoken language. The study of speech disorders is the extreme end of the social cognition language spectrum but still very much applies how one is judged based on language skill and use in daily life.

Click here to read the article

Posted by Vincent Donofrio at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On page 378 Roberts states that "We speak of America as the melting pot, but the speech communities of this continent are very far from having melted in one." I couldn't agree more with this statement. As often as we say that America is a "melting pot," how much of our culture is really a blend of the cultures of its inhabitants? With respect to language, I think it's hard to have one dialect or accent that represents the entire continent. Roberts gives examples of dialects that a child learns at home with the family, and how that dialect changes when school starts. When I started kindergarten I'm sure that I was exposed to a different dialect than that of my family, and this was especially prevalent in places such as the school bus. I was exposed to more slang than I would have been at home, and even that tended to evolve as I was growing up. Roberts also discussed dialects related to region of the country and social class, and I think that's something that we notice all the time. When someone's speech is very different from our's, we tend to try to figure out what region of the country they are from. I think that differences in dialect as related to social class might not be looked at as much, but there are definitely differences that help us make a distinction between intelligent and not-so-intelligent speech. Overall, it seems as though we are constantly comparing our speech to that of others, but it's hard to determine who speaks the best English. Since language is relative to the environment, region, social class, etc., how do we determine who speaks the best English?

Posted by Wendy Paddock at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I thought that those chapters from Language were very interesting, but rather revealing of our human tendency to be jerks (to put it bluntly). It's difficult, despite my recent education, to not "gather information" from others based on their dialects, but I guess that's reflective of 21 years of training. I guess that that my question is trying to tease out some of why such a high percentage of people dislike or admire others, based solely on their vernacular. I know there are elements of "I vs. thou" and group inclusiveness and all that. I was thinking that maybe the phenomenon of "picking up accents" from spending time with people from other speaking backgrounds may reflect a need to bond with the person you're speaking with (since, in this case, you're bothering to talk to this person for extended periods of time) and not merely some form of "prosody training" (although they're not mutually exclusive). In the chapter, Speech Communities, Paul Roberts takes the reader through some of the mini-revolutions of language that most American children undergo as they grow up. Sometimes the accent the person grows up with isn't something he/she is all too proud of, but most people don't go out and just "pick up" a new one (unless you count Madonna). Is this out of a loyalty to those he/she grew up with? I'm not saying that anyone should have to change the way they speak to get along, but some people have a discomfort with their accent. With everything else in language seemingly so automated to make us successful socially, accent switching isn't really such a mechanism.

Posted by Tamara Belden at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Roberts highlights features that form speech communities such as age, geography, education, occupation, and social position. Differences in thsese features lead to language variation. Then, Roberts considers social class to be the great shaper of speech communities. Similarly, Macaulay points out to the fact that students from upper-class communities are more likely to do better in tests, to be successful in their jobs, and to be more intelligent.

I was wondering why social position has such a crucial impact on our performance even though we study - generally speaking - in the same educational institutions. Don't you think that in a way or another intelligence is inherited, at least partly? Or is it the way of growing up children that has the significant impact?

My second question: To what extent are we able to correctly guess a speaker's social background? And what are our conclusions based on?

Posted by Hussein Bani Khalid at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I cringed at writing that very title, with its double (well triple) negative (at least it logically makes sense) and good instead of well. Many of the points from "What Makes Good English Good?" made sense in terms of communication, but did not explain my problematic title. If I or anyone use words that are not considered "correct" it is still wrong, even though the meaning and communication is in actuality not harmed. For example, I would be surprised to find someone who was confused at the meaning of a sentence if who was used instead of whom (or vice versa). However, double negatives, though also annoying, do not make sense. In math (and logic) not a negative equals a positive. My question here, is why do we make such a fuss about good, proper English, especially in speaking? What is more interesting to me is that no one, including grammar extremists (myself included), speaks correctly all the time. (And yes there may be errors in this post as well). Writing is a bit easier because we can check ourselves, proofread, and oh yes, spell check! Considering all of this, why do we judge people who use incorrect grammar (or make grammatical mistakes, not speech errors) especially in instances that do not really impact meaning (good vs well,and who vs whom)?

Posted by Rachel Learned at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I take particular interest in the understanding that what is considered good English is completely dependent upon the situation in which it is used. By seemingly dissmissing all set "criterion" of what make up good English, what are we left with other than that which serves us best in communicating, the very essence of language.

All of us have taken English courses at some point in our education and especially here at Allegheny we are drilled with the finer nuances of English grammar, usage, and word choices. It is sometimes hard to forgot that this training is for the most part useful only in professional and academic settings. The notion put forth by Robert Pooley that says good usage is determined by "choices that are the least distracting to the fewest number of people" is intriguing to me. I feel like this kind of flies in the face of the language snobbery we have become so ingrained to feel. To this extent, I personally agree with Charlton Laird who said "good usage requires wide knowledge and tasteful discrimination". Therefore it's not necessarily the rules of English that we learn that really matter, but more so, social ettiquette and knowledge of ones surrounding.

Because "academic speak" has become commonplace in our lives, do we often seem condescending when speaking to others of lower education or status? What kind of exposure is best to acquire this "wide knowledge and tasteful discrimination"?

Posted by Vincent Donofrio at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Roberts writes that, "Baby talk is not so much invented by the child as sponsored by the parent." This makes sense since we are just excited to hear children speak at all, and any nuances they have are deemed cute. I've rarely been around young children, so it's easy for me to talk, but I wonder why adults positively reinforce incorrect speech (such as the muzzer-mother example used). They must realize that as soon as their children enter the "real world" of kindergarten, they're going to be isolated for their speech differences. Adults also seem to lay the groundwork for baby talk when they goo-goo at babies. If those are some of the first words that newborns hear, then why shouldn't they assume that those sounds have actual meanings? In fact, I imagine it wouldn't be too far fetched for babies to think that their names might be goo-goo since adults usually say that into their faces and don't use it in conversation if the baby isn't around. This whole concept probably is the cause of the speech patterns that occur between twins. I don't know much about it, but I think that different types of speech are more prevalent in twins because they reinforce whatever speech oddities the other might have by just reflecting them back to each other. Since the public will be quick to pounce on these unusual patterns, and they will be more heartless about it, shouldn't parents try to correct these issues early and eliminate the problem? Or do they become so used to them they don't consider them "incorrect" any longer?

Posted by Jen Wilmore at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The writers begin by briefly reviewing a morphemic level of word representation rather than a lexical, which I believe refers to full-word storage. These two versions of representation are linked when the theory is broken into two categories: prelexical and supralexical representation. Prelexical hypothesizes that a word is broken into its morphemes before being fully activated, whereas supralexical suggests that the word is first seen in its full, lexical form, and then the morphemes are activated.
Just as words that are in similar contextual categories (such as boat and dock) prime each other, words and morphemes are primers. An example used is â??departure,â?? which primes â??depart.â?? However, in the case of â??brother,â?? it does not prime for â??brothâ?? because it is different both phonetically and semantically.
The article then moves on to French, which gives every noun a gender. In 89.5% of the cases, the gender is arbitrary (for instance, the word â??girlâ?? would not be arbitrary because the noun is inherently gendered). The authorsâ?? experiment-fueling question revolves around how gender is lexically stored and recalled. When there are clues to the gender, when they follow rules, the gender is more easily accessible than when the gender is an exception to a rule or strictly based on memorization.
One of the topics we discussed in class was whether our lexicons are stored based upon rules or upon individual words. Although we couldnâ??t decideâ??no surprise, neither can scientistsâ??this seems to a similar question applied to gendered words in French. Is each word stored separately with its own gender, or do we process each based upon the rules that we know? Of course most wordsâ??those without constructions that point one way or anotherâ??are exceptions to any of the rules and must just be memorized. The idea that those that follow a pattern may be processed faster seems to favor the idea that we function better with guiding rules.
Although I wonâ??t get into the details of the experiments, the results are important. As far as I understand, the first experiment showed that as a word is broken into its morphemic parts, its gender is also activated. Both experiments demonstrated, as earlier hypothesized, that when the gender is congruent with a pattern from the rest of the language, the gender is accessed quicker. The second experiment further supported the firstâ??s findings that a wordâ??s gender is accessed along with its morphemic parts.
The results of the three experiments are best summarized in Fanny Meunier, Alix Seigneuric, and Elsa Spinelliâ??s own words, which, at least, will ensure that I donâ??t misrepresent their findings. They write, â??Overall our results clearly show that during gender identification, nouns made of morpheme-like units are decomposed. When the units carry conflicting gender information, gender decisions are delayed. Our results also allow to define more precisely the nature of the information chunk that is extracted and that have been previously called â??endingsâ??: morphological suffixes.â??

read the article

Posted by Jen Wilmore at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Jesper Hermannâ??s article, â??The Language Problem,â?? he brings up the point that language doesnâ??t exist without people who understand it because it is an entity whose ends are more important than its means. It doesnâ??t merely exist as marks on a piece of paper or as sound wavesâ??it exists as a meaningful connection between the people using it and the world. All three partsâ??people, language, and worldâ??mutually influence one another. There is no set meaning for an individual word because we can never know exactly what a wordâ??say pumpkinâ??means to anyone else. Our prototype, formed by our own experiences, is certainly not identical to everyone elseâ??s. We discussed this in class, and I think decided that it is both a limitation to language and a fortunate trait because otherwise it would limit our own imaginings to words. It might almost seem as if everyone had clipart stored away in their minds, and that would definitely remove much of languageâ??s productive quality.
Hermann cites what William James saw as one of languageâ??s biggest failings, which is that one person can come to the wrong conclusion from what another says. In other words, one personâ??s description will not perfectly put his idea into the listenerâ??s mind. This leads to miscommunication or incorrect assumptions, a major cause of conflict. This continues into the idea that using the same adjective to describe many nouns can then converge to create a noun out of that adjective. The example used is beautiful into beauty. Beauty, however, is too abstract to genuinely understand, and its meaning is derived simply from our history of nouns called beautiful.
The individuality of language makes it difficult to study. Some argue that you cannot study a language without taking into account who is thinking, speaking, and listening (and, I would argue, the time, place, and medium) of the communication because all of the above affect word choice. This seems to turn the studies into individual ethnographies, which collect more detailed information, but they may give science very little objective information to work with because every situation will be different. Standardization in language is hard to come by. Then again, it seems like this is an issue that most areas of psychology are dealing with, so in the end, it makes sense that linguists face the same problem.

article here

Posted by Jen Wilmore at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was searching a few research journals, and stumbled upon this article.: http://0-www.springerlink.com.allecat3.allegheny.edu/content/h46l24xq002p0212/fulltext.pdf

The word "correction" really caught my eye. This study involves dictation instead of free, natural speech, but it still brings up many interesting points. Also, the study relates to our latest class discussions in two important ways. One, because of our discussion with various types of speech errors and their meaning. Two, because of the study's involvement with technology where participants talk to a computer.

The study requires participants to dictate a paragraph to a computer, and then correct the errors. The participants were given the opportunity to correct their errors in one of four ways: voice command (uses speech command to correct word), redictation (selects the error and repeats the word), alternates list (uses a mouse to open a list of other words), or soft-keyboard (selects the error and clicks in letters via the keyboard on the screen).

The two correction mechanisms that were more successful were redictation and selection of a list of alternatives. Using a list of alternatives was the most satisfying method (highest ratings of "I like it") but was not as accurate as the redictation. However, in the soft keyboard condition participants were slightly faster, but overall rated it highest on "I had control".

The one most associated with typical speech correction in social situations is the redictation. This was the most frequently used strategy, and most popular overall. It scored slightly higher on both satisfaction statements regarding control and enjoyment.

I was very interested to think about correcting our errors in everyday speaking. Of course, we do not always catch our or other's speech errors. However, when we are aware of our mistake, what cognitive impact does this have on our speaking and thinking? The study's conclusion shows annoyance with dictation software, and how we do not quite have the capability to make it natural on participants. However, is this more of a concern or issue with not catching your speech errors? Would participants catch their errors if they were not looking at the screen typing their words as they were speaking?

RANDOM AND JUST FOR FUN

So, one of my new obsessions is http://icanhascheezburger.com/ . I've found a couple pictures that are just hysterical. One uses "correct" English, the other uses their typical "cat speak". I was just thinking about why certain uses phrases were funny, especially when used on pictures. As in, why are both funny when they use different types of language? This isn't a serious question, just something funny and kind of relating to language.

Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

Enter the ICHC

Posted by Rachel Learned at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Language Log is a really cool site to visit. I was perusing the blog for some leads on a topic for this From the Field and I stumbled upon a hot, ongoing debate about "could care less" vs. "couldn't care less." A good place to start rummaging through this argument is Mark Liberman's entry, entitled "The Care Less Train Has Left the Station." Several familiar names have gotten in on this debate, including Arnold Zwicky and Steven Pinker.

For probably the hundredth time this semester, I've been reminded (thankfully) what linguistics is really about. My issue with the phrase was coming from some form of academic elitism, cloaked in a concern for "logic" (which is sort of silly, given that language is arbitrary). Steven Pinker has little concern for logic and instead argues that the prosody of "I could care less" is more conducive to conveying sarcasm. Mark Liberman disagrees, claiming the there is no standard of sarcasm in English, that there's nothing inherently sarcastic about the pronunciation that Pinker lists (I could CARE LESS), and further, that the prosody of that phrase isn't consistent in the first place. It's also an important not that an original definition does not equal it's most correct version. Further, for me personally, there are plenty of "illogical" phrases that go unchecked, such as "That'll teach you not to tease the alligators," vs. "That'll teach you to tease the alligators." I'm not really irked by either version, probably because someone I'd like to judge harshly hasn't uttered the "wrong" one since the discrepancy became salient.

Eric Bakovic checked out Richard Lederer's (Bakovic's public radio station co-host) claim that about half of the population uses either version of the phrase. Bakovic surveyed Google, finding that "Lederer's estimation jibes pretty well with Google. Searching for the strings "could care less", "couldn't care less", and "could not care less", I got 160,000, 131,000, and 19,200 ghits, respectively. Lumping the last two together, we get something pretty damn close to a 50-50 split."

Posted by Tamara Belden at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So...I was really excited to see a reference to Language Log in our reading for today. As I mentioned at the beginning of the semester, it's a really cool site to visit if you are fascinated with language and the things people say.

For our purposes, however, it is the Eggcorn Database that is maintained by (among others) Arnold Zwicky (also from Language Log) that caught my attention for our discussion.

Posted by Aimee Knupsky at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was really interested in the section of chapter 9 on malapropisms. On page 207 Erard states that 99 percent of the time, our malapropisms belong to the same grammatical category as the words we meant to say. If you mean to say a verb, your malapropism will generally be a verb, etc. 87 percent of the malapropisms had the same number of syllables, and 98 percent had the same stress pattern. Erard says that because of this, the sentence that contains a malapropism doesnâ??t automatically become ungrammatical. What he says makes sense, but if thatâ??s the case, how easily do we catch the malapropisms in other peopleâ??s speech? And would we be even more likely to miss the mistakes in our own speech?

I was kind of confused about the concept of eggcorns. If an eggcorn isnâ??t a spelling error, a hearing error, or an â??idiom blendâ??, what is it? I know that Iâ??ve used a couple of the examples Erard gave, such as â??for all intensive purposesâ?? instead of â??for all intents and purposes.â?? I can see how phrases like these can get passed on, especially when they sound so similar to the correct phrase that itâ??s hard to realize that itâ??s a mistake in the first place.

Posted by Wendy Paddock at 5:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Chapter 8 highlights interesting facts and implications of different kinds of slips. For the first time I hear about "slips of action," although I experienced them a couple of times. Most interesting is that slips of the tongue are not merely language errors. We can call them "valuable revelations" and insights that tell us more about how our cognitive system breaks down language into smaller linguistic units. Additionally, they help predict children's progress in the course of language acquisition and even reflect on their personalities and creativity (chapter 9).

As we have slips of the action, slips of the ear, slips of the keyboard, and even slips of the hand (for sign language), and given that even children can correct themselves, why is it that we tend to be more critical to slips of the tongue?

Another question:
Erard mentions that we don't hear some slips or tend to hear the common errors. Based on this assumption, to what extent the conducted research is objective? And how can we succeed in collecting a tangible, reliable corpus?

Posted by Hussein Bani Khalid at 4:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm pretty excited to have learned the term "eggcorn." A pet peeve of mine is when people misspeak the phrase "I couldn't care less" as "I could care less." I get annoyed by the this omission because the point of the phrase is lost--I care so little about that, that it's physically for me to care any less. Anal-retentiveness aside, I'm not sure what can be learned from the phenomenon of eggcorns. Is it simply that people mishear a lot of language and don't pay much attention to what colloquialisms mean?

Posted by Tamara Belden at 4:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On page 217, Erard states that when children are three or four they have grammatical abilities like that of adults. However, most interestingly, he also states that "Even so, children by that age will not yet have learned to say "uh" and "um" like adults - they introduce sentences with pause fillers but place them inside sentences rarely." I stopped, re-read the sentence, and paragraph a few times. Did Erard really mean to say learn? Do children learn to say "uh" and "um" in different ways? And, what does this imply about starting your sentences with um?

On another (and somewhat personally annoying note), one of my professors said "ummm mooo". And then she explained that her elementary school teacher would make her reverse her "ums" by saying "moo". The elementary school teacher said that if you begin a sentence with "um" you obviously have nothing intelligent to say. Of course, this upset me because of this class and the book we are reading. I explained to the class about our class, and how pause fillers actually do have important uses, cognitively and for the listeners. Then, one of the girls in the class said "that's just someone's opinion." It was strange to me how someone could not believe that "um" and "uh" can truly be useful. Of course there are societal implications of saying "um" and "uh" every other word (as my classmate pointed out) but since we subconsciously ignore most of them, is it really such an issue to try to eliminate them from our vocabulary?

Basically, what are the implications of the research on "um" and "uh" (including what researchers have found with children's pause fillers), especially in regards for teachers and speech classes?

Posted by Rachel Learned at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Everyone says the wrong word, thinking that they're totally correct. At Improv my friend is famous for being at an operating table and asking for a scapula or saying he submitted a survey anomalously. As a child I thought that a volleyball was "out of bounce," which made sense to me. My brother was impressed by our great grandmother's longlivity. On pages 210 and 211 of Um... Erard brings up a few other examples, such as the ever-popular "all intensive purposes." He also talks about how families have their own language in some ways, which I've definitely experienced, and from a few comments in class, it sounds like everyone has had those. In Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John Wood writes about how his mother tells his father that he is "barking up the wrong dog," and when Wood tries to correct her, she just says that they know what she means. Sure. When I say "sawdust" my friend knows I mean "buzzkill," even though at this point I know what the real term is. That's sort of a tangent from where I was actually going originally.
With "all intensive purposes" and similar situations, I realized how important it is to understand the breakdown of words when people talk since they don't use pauses. When my parents use phrases from foreign languages, I always imagine that the entire phrase is just one word, but it doesn't matter because over time I understand the meaning from its context and use it myself. So maybe breaking speech into individual words isn't that important when it comes to phrases and terms. What's the real difference between (one of my brother's) "in lieu thereof" and "in loo vera" (except that the first makes semantic sense to those who have never heard the term before) if they both "mean" the same thing in context? Phrases or cliches that people hear over and over hardly carry their original meaning unless we add onto them. For instance, no one thinks twice about the metaphorical meaning of "he stabbed me in the back" unless we add onto it by saying something such as "he stabbed me in the back just between the shoulder blades." Suddenly the term that was just words becomes vivid, and we remember that the phrase that once had metaphorical meaning has become commonplace and almost meaningless. Sayings such as that one and "can't swing a dead cat" or "steal my thunder" are fascinating because no one thinks about their meaning anymore or question their origins. Was something once measured by swinging dead cats? Interesting... I guess the final thoughtful question I have at the end of this rambling concerns how much we actually think about what we say and hear and how often we actually say something unique. Perhaps that's the charge of creative writers, and it's up to them to create tomorrow's cliches.

Posted by Jen Wilmore at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was just curious to see how our class would fair on the this test I came across a few years ago. It's relatively simple, just count the number of f's in the following sentences:

The fast fox ate a pair of pears. When Frank came home to his fort, the fast fox pulled the pin of his pious grenade.

It seems a ridiculously simple task, but see how you fair. Comment your count, if you're feeling confident.

Posted by Tamara Belden at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Polite social society is comprised of many things that most of us are taught from a very young age. Erard uses examples of characters in litterature and plays, such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's, The Rivals to demonstrate what a fool one can make of ones self when attempting to appear more intelligent then they actually are. The very term Malaprop, a french trerm (mal a propos) meaning innapropriate, was popularized by such a fictional character, Mrs. Malaprop.

These types of slips are characterized by the use of similar sounding word, with a sometimes extremely different meaning than what was intended. This error is based entirely on sound similarities, and has nothing to do with meaning, resulting in a selection that is still a word. These errors are most often made by people that are overreaching their position, social class, or level of education; they are typically considered slips of the tongue. The formation of "folk etymologies" can easily lead to malaprops where a word or phrase was misheard once and continues to be used because the speaker has convinced themselves it is correct. This type of error is known as an eggcorn, which is a mistake itself of the word acorn. Eggcorns differ between people, families, and social circles; and also in that they maintain most of their meaning and make some sense. Do you have any words or phrases that you repedetly make mistakes with? Where did these errors come from?

With the advent of communication technologies such as text messaging and AIM, we all find ourselves shortening and misspelling words for speed and connivence. I often find myself carrying this practice over into my professional speaking and writing. Are we simply setting ourselves up for a new era of malaprops and eggcorns that haven't existed in the past?

If these errors of misuse are evident to educated people, what keeps them from correcting the speaker? Is it polite instinct that tells the listener to bite thier tongue, or is it uncertainty about the correctness of their accusation? What is to come of our language if malaprops and eggcorns are allowed to persist uncorrected? What if the person doing the correcting is inncorrect?

How might these language tendencies help or hurt a non-native English learner?

Check out the Eggcorn Database, which contains nearly 600 example of eggcorns.
(link is currently down, will be up soon... http://eggcorns.lascribe.net)

Posted by Vincent Donofrio at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we were talking about verbal blunders and TOTs last week, I found it interesting to let you know about a kind of weird experiment done by Simner and Ward (2006). They conducted their experiment on 6 participants with synaesthesia. It is a condition where people have cross-wiring between senses in their brains, which means that they might experience sounds as images, numbers as colours, or words as tastes.

What Simner and his colleague wanted to know is whether synaesthetes can turn tastes into words, given that they can do the reverse. To do so, in the lab they tried to induce a TOT in these participants by showing them images of unusual objects. They indeed succeeded in inducing a tip of the tongue. Then, they asked the participants what words they tasted on their tongues before recalling the name of that object. What was amazing is that these people, in trying to remember, did taste words that could match up with the word in question.

Simner and Ward suggest that this sort of experience might be active in all of us, but we are unconscious of it. What do u think? Have you had such an experience before?

You can read the whole article on the following link:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/on-tip-of-tongue-blocked-memories.php

Posted by Hussein Bani Khalid at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I happened to write in my blog that I was enjoying Um. . . by Michael Erard and Mr. Erard himself commented on my post to say hello and ask about our class.

[ Check It Out ]

The opinions expressed on my blog are not necessarily those of my classmates or the Allegheny College Community.

Posted by Tamara Belden at 2:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Agnes, from the wonderfully weird mind of Tony Cochran.

At Cognitive Group this week, Angie Ricciardi shared her senior comp research. We had the opportunity to view her stimuli and discuss her research design. When testing is completed, Angie will get back to the group with her results. Also at the meeting, Professor Wiseman presented us with the stimuli for Maria Kennihan's comp project so that the group could provide feedback. We had quite a great brainstorming session.

Speaking of which, I just found the Creative Tools Website. The goal of the site is to inspire people to use "randomness to create order." Of particular interest is the suite of brainstorming tools they provide including a random word generator that generates random words of varying difficulty. I have to say that while the "very uncommon" category was difficult, the "obscure" category was ridiculous! I am hooked on this website and am convinced it could be used in a future senior comp project. Check it out!

Posted by Aimee Knupsky at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)