Archive for the ‘Language production’ Category

How long is it?

February 25, 2026

This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:

The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez 

on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.

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Posted in Academic life, AI, Double entendres, Jokes, Language processing, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Stanford | 2 Comments »

Misplaced geminates

October 21, 2024

A new low-water mark in my erroneous ways: my 10/19/24 posting “striking language” actually appeared on this blog with a, um, striking typo in its third word, the surname of my old friend and colleague Ellen Kaisse (as I type it now, letter by letter, very slowly, so as to get it right on the first try; my rough drafts are veritable forests of typos, the product of seriously disabled fingers working at the speed of my thoughts). What my readers saw when this posting first appeared:

From Ellen Kaiise in e-mail to me

One of my typo specialties, the misplaced geminate (more on misplaced gemination below). What’s new about this example is that I failed to notice it through at least five passes of editing. And just now, when I looked at the stretch of text above, I had a moment when I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Presumably because the spelling wouldn’t affect the pronunciation in English: Kaise, Kaisse, Kaiise, Kaiisse,  they’d all be pronounced /kes/. Compare this to the examples gogling, goggling, googling, googgling; in real life, again from my hand, the second of these occurred as a typo for the third, and the first two would be pronounced differently from the last two, so the error leaps out from the page.

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Posted in Errors, Language production, Spelling, Typos | 2 Comments »

From the annals of error: the spelling ATMIDDEDLY

July 21, 2024

— For Vicki Fromkin, may her memory never grow less

ATMIDDEDLY for ADMITTEDLY, in my typing up a posting a couple of days ago. Which is, first of all, an (inadvertent) exchange of the consonant letters D and T. And then involves maintaining the positions for single vs. doubled consonant letters, in the frame

Aℒ1MIℒ2ℒ2EDLY (where ℒi is a variable over letters)

A complex error that highlights the kind of mental planning that goes on in writing or typing text: I had to choose the two letters ℒ1 and ℒ2 (and get them in the right order); and at the same time choose which one of them is single and which doubled. (For a refreshing change from some of the other spelling errors I’ve looked at recently, this one has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the positions of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard.)

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Posted in Errors, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Spelling, Typos | 4 Comments »