For questions regarding the study of language, its representation in the mind, its role in psychological development, and its processing by the brain in applied tasks like reading.

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2
votes
3answers
70 views

Lexical Decision (Web-)App

I want to make a lexical decision experiment, is there any freely available software for this? A Javascript-based webapp would suit me best, as it would run in the browser without the need to install ...
2
votes
0answers
45 views

What are the most well-understood vocal animal languages?

There are many examples of animal language that involve vocal pattens or "grammar". For example, there is the the Bee dance, bird songs, whale songs, dogs. Bird vocalization includes both bird calls ...
2
votes
0answers
54 views

Why do we seem to have an internal drive to use different expressions(mostly when writing)?

How come we have so many words/phrases that share the same meaning? I suppose the most obvious answer to this would be that through communication between people with accent/language A and B, new ...
20
votes
1answer
298 views

The effects of bilingualism on colour perception

Peltola et al. (2012) showed that there are two types of bilinguals. Balanced bilinguals mix their two languages and are effected by linguistic categories from both. Dominant bilinguals seem to ...
2
votes
0answers
65 views

Causal reasoning(implicit models?) vs grammar of native language

I was reading about linguistic relativity and it struck me that there could also be differences in multilingual individuals and mono/bi-lingual individuals on how they derive/reason/create structure ...
16
votes
5answers
296 views

How long does it take to read X number of characters?

How does the time needed to read a sentence scale with the number of characters? Or does this time scaling depend on something more than just character count? For example, let $X$ be the number of ...
15
votes
0answers
161 views

How do emotions influence the language structures we use?

What are the verbal signs of subjectivity? I am doing research about the linguistic content of media (debates, talk-show, sport comments). It occurs that once the participant gets nervous or excited, ...
10
votes
1answer
830 views

How to get rid of subvocalization?

When I read a text written in latin alphabet and I want to understand what it means I usually transform each word into spoken word (internal speech) and then I transform it into meaning. I can't ...
10
votes
2answers
494 views

What is the effect of motherese on development?

Most cultures (Falk, 2009) have a special type of language that is used to talk to children: infant-directed-speech (IDL; or informally, motherese, baby talk). For instance, Fernald (1992) argues that ...
7
votes
1answer
99 views

Judgments of similarity between samples of writing

I was thinking last night about the possibility of an experiment that investigates the factors contributing to peoples' judgments of 'stylistic similarity' between two samples of writing. For example, ...
2
votes
1answer
198 views

When counting a given letter in sentences, why do people tend to omit occurrences in certain common words?

I have noticed that when I, and presumably others, count the number of times the letter F appears in the following passage: ...
11
votes
1answer
182 views

Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis apply to artificial (specifically programming) languages?

As a computer programmer, I have an intuition that the idea "language influences thought" is very relevant to programmers and programming languages. Is there any research that examines whether ...