The Swedish chef: from Norway?!

In Språktidningen (”The language magazine” there is an article about the Swedish chef in The Muppet Show. Tomas Riad, a professor at Stockholm University, has taken a closer look at the tonal accents in the chef’s “Swedish”. The intonation reveals that the Swedish chef is neither from southern Sweden nor from Dalecarlia, but that he [...]

Um

I’m once again amazed by the fact that other people are interested in the same linguistic details I’m interested in. Sometimes they’re so interested they write a book about it! Michael Erard has written the book “Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean” which I bought and started reading yesterday. [...]

Essay topic

On Thursday my first essay synopsis is due. The course is “Phonology and Morphology”, and right now I’m trying to figure out how to connect my research interest (production and perception of pauses) to the course.
One idea is to look at realizations of filled pauses in speech, i.e. allophones of filled pauses. I’m not sure [...]

Wired article on autism

Wired magazine published this article on autism. I read it and I think it was interesting. Amanda Baggs, one of the women featured in the article, wrote some comments on her blog after the article was published.
The article discussed measuring intelligence in persons diagnosed with autism, specifically with two different intelligence tests: the Wechsler Intelligence [...]

European day of Speech and Language Therapy

Yesterday, March 6th, was the European day of Speech and Language Therapy. This day is supposed to bring more attention to the work of speech and language therapists, and the people who need their care. I was talking to some SLP colleagues the other day, and we agreed that still many people don’t know what [...]

Dialogue systems with autism

I went to see my supervisor on Friday, and we talked some about dialogue systems, which he does a lot of research on. He told me this interesting thing: when you sum up the mistakes a dialogue system makes, you end up with a list which more or less describes the communication problems that children [...]

A thousand words - or a few?

“A picture says more than a thousand words”. I think most of us have said or heard this, but maybe without giving it much thought. The implicit meaning is the more words you convey, the better. Is that always true?
Persons with communications impairments often need some sort of augmentative or alternative communication (AAC). Spoken language [...]

Language and personality

I’m reading Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, and came upon this quote:
We are a linguistic species — we turn to language to express whatever we are thinking, and it is usually there for us instantly. But for those with aphasia, the inability to communicate verbally may be almost unbearably frustrating [...]

Mathematics in sign language

I met a sign language teacher (my fiancé’s brother’s girlfriend’s brother’s girlfriend… the other day and she told me about a problem with the national math exams.
All children here have to take the national math exams. Children whose first language is sign language have a right to get the questions translated to sign language, [...]

Scrabble - what do you need to win?

I was thinking about which abilities you need to be good at Scrabble. Presumably you would need a rather good vocabulary and a good ability to re-arrange letters in your mind. Also you should need some strategical skills and logical thinking. But if you possess these qualities, will you immediately be good at Scrabble?
I found [...]