From the New Yorker issue of July 6 & 3, 2026, under the heading “A critic at large” (on-line, 6/29/26, “What happened to your face: How the human countenance become something to study, edit, optimize, and scan”; in print, 7/6/26, “Regression to the mien: How mirrors, selfies, and surveillance have changed what we make of our faces”) by Cal Revely-Calder (with some subheads added by me):
Archive for the ‘Psycholinguistics’ Category
Reading the face
August 17, 2026Yesterday’s mishearing
August 9, 2026The headline news yesterday (8/8) was about a Jetstar plane nearly colliding with a Qatar Airlines plane at the Sydney airport. But what I heard from my tv was about, omigod, a Death Star plane. Death stalks Sydney.
Well, jet and death are in fact quite similar phonologically and so are easily confused. Meanwhile, the Australian economy airline is fresh news for me, while I’ve been steeped in Star Wars stuff since 1977. So everything tips my perceptions towards death.
How long is it?
February 25, 2026This 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.
Prediction can override evidence
July 2, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate July, ok a day late, life has been difficult, here in the Dispossession Zone (I worked from 4 to 8 am today sorting stuff in this house to get rid of, this after coming back to life, solid food, and unsoiled clothing after three days of nasty intestinal affliction, so I am one weary bear — but clean, and looking forward to sushi for lunch), oh have I mentioned the construction workers tossing pieces of junk down from the sky (well, the roof), accidentally cutting off the electricity, and generally lobbing bombs into my daily life?
But enough of street entertainment. Time for a brief note from my correspondence, a query to AMZ the psycho/sociolinguist from someone — call them X — reporting on an odd experience that they had and hoping I could illuminate it, and give the phenomenon it illustrated a name.
The event: a speaker — call them Y — reached a point in their presentation where their audience would expect them to utter an expression E, but instead uttered an entirely different expression E′, which was, however, prosodically similar to E — E′ had, so to speak, the same melody, but not the same words, as E — but, with the exception of my correspondent X, apparently no one in the audience noticed what Y did; they seem to have understood Y to have said E, rather than E′, and so showed no sign of confusion or surprise (while X was astonished).
What happened there, and what was that called?
Alaskan prime
January 1, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025
From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):
Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?
The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?
Apostrophobia
November 16, 2024Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:
Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?
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.)
The phantom on the football field
July 16, 2024The phantom is a player named Ocho Quatro, who materialized yesterday for an old friend reacting to my posting “The coming duodecfest”, on occurrences of the number 84. I stashed a note about their Facebook comment away, for following up this morning. When Google kindly led me, slantwise, to Chad Johnson. Yes, you have a right to be puzzled by that, just as I was until I read Johnson’s entry in Wikipedia.
So this will be (yet another) posting on the fragility and mutability of human memory, and on associative thinking as providing access to those memories.
But first, what led my friend to Chad Johnson: some facts about the man, from Wikipedia:
How an Australian film-maker evokes tennis
September 14, 2023Or: the marvels of associative memory.
Previously on this blog, in my 9/12 posting “Two tennis-playing Zwickys”:
My old friend Ellen Sulkis James, musing on my name, e-mailed today:
I just read about someone else whose last name is Zwicky — think it was someone involved with tennis.
Memories are often fugitive and hazy. Perhaps that’s what’s going on here. My searches for people named Zwicky with a tennis connection pulled up only two, both of them most unlikely to have come to ESJ’s attention
Ah, it turns out that the Zwicky in question is not tennis-related but — whoa! — film-related. This isn’t as bizarre an error as would first appear; we can in fact chalk it down to the nature of memory (in which personal associations between things play a big role).
I will explain.
35 years of the CHSP
March 18, 2022Announcements now out with the program for the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing — that is, the 35th meeting of the Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing — at UCSC, the University of California at Santa Cruz, on 24-26 March.
The CHSP 2022 logo, with its mascot Chuspie; Chuspie appears to be a sea otter (clutching a statistical distribution), unrelated to the UCSC mascot Sammy the banana slug
Two nomenclatural matters: the designation of the conference’s subject as human sentence processing; and the change in this year’s title, the 34 preceding meetings having been the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The purely historical reference to CUNY (specifically, to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where the conference was founded in 1988, by Janet Dean Fodor) now having been elided.