{"id":3677,"date":"2012-01-01T17:04:23","date_gmt":"2012-01-01T22:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3677"},"modified":"2012-01-04T16:20:08","modified_gmt":"2012-01-04T21:20:08","slug":"mad-libguistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3677","title":{"rendered":"Mad Libguistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the random things I happened to notice yesterday, in a list of people who passed away in 2011, was the name of Leonard Stern<\/a>, co-creator of Mad Libs<\/a>. (Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky marked the game's 50th anniversary here<\/a> on Language Log.) For those who've never seen it, Mad Libs is a word game in which one player prompts a second player for a list of words — give me a noun; ok, now an adjective; ok, now another noun, etc. — where the kinds of words needed are determined by labeled blanks that are situated in a little story that only the first player can see. In the second step of the game, the two players read the story together with the words inserted in their proper positions. The very first Mad Libs gave the following as an example:<\/p>\n

 \"_____________! he said ________ as he jumped into his convertible\r\nexclamation              adverb<\/em>\r\n______ and drove off with his __________ wife.\"\r\n noun                            adjective<\/em><\/pre>\n
(Footnote: I've borrowed the example from the game's Wikipedia entry<\/a>.)<\/p>\n
Thinking about Mad Libs last night after a bedtime conversation with my six year old, I've concluded that someone really needs to design a linguistics course entirely around Mad Libs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The night was chilly, and the conversation went something like this:<\/p>\n
Me: Ok, time to get those socks on your ears.<\/p>\n
Him: <giggle><\/p>\n
Me: Oh wait, you're right, time to get those socks on your… nose!<\/p>\n
Him: <louder giggle> There's two<\/em> of them!<\/p>\n
Me: Oh, of course, you're totally<\/em> right.  I'm being silly.  Better make sure you put them on your eyes.<\/p>\n
Him: <even louder giggle><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The juxtaposition of the two things, reading of Leonard Stern's passing and that bedtime conversation, got me thinking fondly back to doing Mad Libs as a kid, since just those sorts of \"put socks on your ears<\/span>\" mismatches are what made them hilarious. But then it also got me thinking about Mad Libs and psycholinguistics — I wondered if anyone has ever studied the direct connection there seems to be, in kids under the age of, say, ten, between the N400<\/a> (a brain response to semantic anomalies) and the funny bone. (If you want to get a little kid to laugh, start saying things like \"Mommy ate the swimming pool!\")  After a quick look, it turns out there's plenty of literature on the N400 and jokes or humor, e.g. this 2001 paper by Coulson and Kutas<\/a> (and see Kutas and Federmeier's  nice review article<\/a> for discussion of the N400 more generally).<\/p>\n
From there, it was just a short, perhaps slightly champagne-fueled leap to the realization that Mad Libs would make a great starting point for lots of other topics in Linguistics, too…<\/p>\n