{"id":33364,"date":"2017-06-21T12:07:02","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T17:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=33364"},"modified":"2017-06-21T16:00:13","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T21:00:13","slug":"faimly-lfie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=33364","title":{"rendered":"Faimly Lfie"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the parents are psycholinguists, the children get exposed to some weird stuff.<\/p>\n

For example, the Stroop effect (words interfere with naming colors, e.g. GREEN<\/span> RED<\/span> BLUE<\/span>) makes a great 4th<\/sup> grade science project; 9 year olds think it\u2019s hilarious<\/em>. There are lots of fun versions of the task (e.g., SKY<\/span> FROG<\/span> APPLE<\/span>) but prudence dictates avoiding this<\/a> variant in which taboo words like FUCK<\/span> COCK<\/span> PUSSY<\/span> produced greater interference than neutral words like FLEW<\/span> COST<\/span> PASTA<\/span> (p < .01).<\/p>\n

Or, the kid knows that \u201cI see that the clothes on the floor in your room have risen a couple of feet above sea level\u201d means \u201cclean up the mess, please\u201d but also that this is an indirect speech act because the form of the utterance (an assertion) differs from its communicative intent (a request). \u00a0Thus enabling exchanges such as \u201cCan you take out the garbage???\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIs that an indirect speech act?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I confess that we have actually had dinner conversations about the Transposed Letter Effect, the finding that with brief exposure, subjects frequently misperceive a stimulus such as ODRER as ORDER. \u00a0It happens in real life, as in the sign on the left and the company logo (French Connection UK) on the right.<\/p>\n

\"\" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 <\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The explanation for the effect is interesting–well, I thought it was–having to do with statistical properties of English orthography and the fact that ODRER is closer to ORDER than to any other word. There's a simple demo of the phenomenon here<\/a>, if you're interested.<\/p>\n

For birthdays and other events greeting cards with terrible wordplay are just low hanging fruit. A recent Father\u2019s Day card connected to my interest in accent and dialect:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m told that this is an old joke, popular in summer camp several years ago. Still, it does manage to alert a person to how much American regional accents can differ. \u00a0On this occasion I psycholinguisplained that it also illustrates the folly of trying to reform English spelling to make the correspondences between spellings and pronunciations consistent, as in Finnish and most other alphabetic writing systems: there would need to be different spellings for each regional pronunciation of even simple words like NICE.<\/p>\n

On the inside the card said I was \u201cRat nas\u201d.\u00a0 Which is what you call kids who participate in dinner conversations about speech acts and spelling reform.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the parents are psycholinguists, the children get exposed to some weird stuff. For example, the Stroop effect (words interfere with naming colors, e.g. GREEN RED BLUE) makes a great 4th grade science project; 9 year olds think it\u2019s hilarious. There are lots of fun versions of the task (e.g., SKY FROG APPLE) but prudence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,253],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-psycholinguistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33364"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33393,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33364\/revisions\/33393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}