As I mentioned before, I’ve spent the last few days out of town, at a major conference for one of my other jobs. The conference was interesting to me as a phonetician, hearing all the various accents from around the country, but the most interesting (and funny) language moment occurred during the closing ceremonies.

A slip worthy of the ages

The conference, discussing Residence Hall life, took place on a college campus, and the 1000+ people attending were each assigned rooms in the Residence Halls on campus. So, everybody was staying in first-year dorms, with the same shared bathrooms, roommates, and tiny rooms as any incoming student would have. By no means were these luxury accommodations, but they didn’t have to be, we’re all used to Dorm life anyways, and what was provided was quite sufficient for the weekend.

Perhaps most wonderful Freudian slip I’ve seen in a long time happened during the closing ceremonies for this conference. So, myself and 1000+ other people are sitting in the main arena, and one of the conference coordinators is speaking to the entire group. He’s going through and thanking each different group or committee that made the conference possible, and then finally, he says (paraphrased) “I’d like to thank the University’s Housing and Conference services department for providing us with our unremarkable accommodations”.

A long moment passed, and then a good portion of the arena burst into laughter. He realized several seconds later what he had said, but by then, it was too late, and his correction was overwhelmed by the laughter, and his original meaning of “remarkable accommodations” was lost to history.

This is a truly amazing example of a “Freudian slip”.

Parapraxis 101

A Freudian Slip (or Parapraxis) is where one’s subconscious thoughts are somehow expressed on the surface through their words or actions. This often happens through name replacement (“I love you Laura” when Laura is your mistress’ name, not your wife’s), or through other “slips of the tongue” (“I would do anything to you” as opposed to “I would do anything for you”). No matter the form it takes, the most basic requirement for a speech error to be considered an instance of Parapraxis is that you end up communicating something you didn’t intend to but were likely thinking subconsciously.

According the Wikipedia article on Freudian Slips, Freud thought that these slips had a psychological meaning:

The Freudian slip is named after Sigmund Freud, who described the phenomenon he called Fehlleistung (literally meaning “faulty action” in German, but termed as parapraxis in English) in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud gives several examples of seemingly trivial, bizarre or nonsensical Freudian slips in Psychopathology; the analysis is often quite lengthy and complex, as was the case with many of the dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Popularization of the term has diluted its technical meaning in some contexts to include any slip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, often in an attempt by the user to humorously assign hidden motives or sexual innuendo to the mistake. It is not clear, however, what Freud considered an “innocent” mistake, or if he thought that there were any innocent mistakes. The enormous quantity of slips analyzed in psychopathology, many of which are banal or apparently trivial, would seem to indicate that Freud felt almost any seemingly tiny slip or hesitation would respond to analysis.

Context is everything

The social power of these slips lies in the context in which they occur. For instance, had we all been housed in a five star hotel and the speaker still said “unremarkable”, it might still be funny, but it’d be more of a simple speech error. The beauty of a Freudian slip comes from the fact that it reveals the truth (or one’s true feelings), even while a person tries to cover it up.

Because everybody knew that the accommodations were, in fact, quite unremarkable, when he misspoke, it was both extremely funny and extremely telling. He unconsciously violated the social norm as well as catching himself in his own distortion of the truth in front of 1000+ people.

So, the moral of this story is that you’re never safe from your own inner thoughts. Although some people can become very adept at lying (or mild distortion of the truth), a single speech error could pop up and blow your entire cover. You can pay close attention to your words, and try to suppress your subconscious, but sooner or later, everybody slips up.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Humor, Language and Thought, Psycholinguistics, Speech and Grammar Errors | 1 Comment


So, I stumbled across an interesting story on fark.com today (link requires totalfark subscription, as they decided not to publish this article). According to this article…

Knowledge of more than one language has been linked by Canadian researchers to a significant delay in the onset of dementia symptoms.

Fluency in two or more languages may be able to stave off cognitive decline because of the mental agility required to juggle them in day-to-day life, principal investigator Ellen Bialystok said.

“How you learn the language probably doesn’t make much difference; how good your grammar is probably doesn’t matter,” she said last night. “What matters is that you have to manage two complete language systems at once.”

According to this study, being bilingual or multilingual seemed to stave off dementia for an additional 4.1 years.

I think this is truly awesome. I’m a firm believer in language learning for fun and profit, but this is icing on the cake. I’d be interested to see if this increase in non-demented time showed up when you compared larger groups of, say, Midwestern Americans (generally painfully monolingual) with Europeans in mixed language areas.

Mind you, this isn’t the first time that the health effects of monolingualism have been discussed. A few years back, a French language school (in France) ran ads featuring the following (tongue-in-cheek) voiceover:

In Japan, very little fat is eaten, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In France, a lot of fat is eaten, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In India, very little red wine is drunk, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In Spain, a lot of red wine is drunk, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In Brazil, people have much more sex than in Algeria, and the heart attack rate in both countries is lower than in the USA.

In conclusion:
Eat.
Drink.
Have as much sex as you’d like.
What really kills you is speaking English.

So, get out there and learn another language, if you can. Just think, even if taking it drives you crazy for four years now, at least you know you’ll get four years of sanity back later. Ahh, the wonders of language…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Humor, Language Usage, Psycholinguistics | Leave a Comment


Hello everybody. I hope you all had/are having/will have a Happy (insert holiday/festival/winter activity) here. Sorry for the recent lack of posts, but I hope to get back on the right foot today.

One of our good friends/employees has a one-year-old little girl, and since she frequently brings her to work, I’ve been able to watch her develop language, and as a linguist, phonetics nerd, and a person, this fascinates me. Recently, she’s been expanding her phonetic inventory (the number of sounds she can make). So, (with her mother’s blessing), I’ve been making a point of listening to the sounds she’s making, and making a number of non-English sounds around her, just to keep her mind open to new things.

Now, a confession: O Human Research Committee, I have a sinned against thee. I’ve been told that any linguistic study with participants under the age of 18 requires around 6 months of Human Research Committee meetings, so listening to the sounds that a baby is making must truly be a cardinal sin. Of that, I am guilty. I beg your pardon, and will duly start pushing papers your way if I every intend to do anything more serious than writing a blog post with the information gathered.

Anyways, today, I was bantering back and forth with the baby and we got into some mimicry (“Can you say Da Da?” “Da Da!”). She’s pretty good with voiced consonants (like B, N, M and D), but I still hadn’t heard her make anything voiceless (like a T, K, or P). Since she’s pretty good with “Da Da”, I started asking if she could say “Ta Ta”, because the only difference between the two sounds is whether your vocal cords (more accurately, vocal folds) are vibrating while your tongue is against the roof of your mouth (try it). At first, she just kept saying “Da Da”, but then, she slowly began to make what sounded to me iike a very a different sound, an Unaspirated T.

This isn’t a sound that most English speakers can distinguish (it’s not a phoneme in English), but it does happen from time to time in certain contexts, like the T in “stick” or “stop”. Most English just hear it as a “D”, and the only reason I can sometimes hear it is because I’ve done a fair amount of training and practice for my various phonetics classes. It’s different from both the English “T” and “D”, but in a very subtle way.

Aspiration 101

This is the part where you get to make fun sounds. Put your fingers on your neck (guys, find your adam’s apple) and say “Ahhhhhhhh”. You’ll feel a vibration. That’s your vocal folds vibrating to give the A its sound. Now, keep your fingers there and say “Dadadadadadadada”. You’ll feel your tongue moving, but the vibration will be pretty constant. Now, try “Tatatatatatatata”. This time, the vibrations will feel like they’re going on an off, off during the T, on during the A. This is because, as I said above, T is a “Voiceless” sound, and D is “voiced”. (If you’re still interested, try the same with “Kakaka” and “Gagaga”, as well as “papapa” and “bababa”).

Now, put your hand in front of your mouth and say “Ta”, then “Da”. Did you feel that puff of air with “Ta”? That burst of air, the momentary delay between the release of the tongue and the start of the voicing, is called aspiration (Wikipedia Link).

Here’s a little hand-drawn graph to help show what the little girl did that astounded me so (click to enlarge):

Aspiration

In the Aspirated T (shown on top) like we have in English “Tap” or “Tip”, the voicing (wavy line) doesn’t really kick in until after the puff of air you felt, so there’s a brief period of time where the tongue is ready to make the A sound, but without the vocal folds vibrating.

In the English D (bottom), like in “Deck” or “Dock”, the voicing is more or less constant, throughout the closure of the tongue.

In the Unaspirated T, the voicing kicks in the moment the T is released, with no delay (or “Voice Onset Time”). That’s why it sounds so much like a D to English speakers, we’re really used to hearing that puff of air.

If you’d like to hear the difference, go to this site featuring the Smalley Phonetics exercises and click 7.13. Listen to the file, keeping in mind that the sounds in the first half labeled Unaspirated are P, T, and K, no matter what they might sound like.

What use would an infant have for a Korean Consonant?

This may seem like a really, really picky distinction. However, it’s actually used in lots of languages. In Korean, for instance, they have different letters for each T/D sound (aspirated, unaspirated, and voiced), as well as for K/G and P/B. Thus, the difference between an unaspirated T and a D could be the difference between two completely different words (like “Cake” and “Bake” in English). Remember, just because we don’t have the distinction in English, doesn’t mean that it’s not important.

So, back to the little girl. It seemed as though she did in fact contrast what I’m pretty sure is an unaspirated T with D (“say TaTa” versus “say DaDa”), and it seems like she really does see the sounds as different. However, this was all lost on her mother (for whom I had to draw the above graph), and who thought that she was just saying “dada” for everything.

The beauty of language acquisition is that eventually, the girl will learn to Aspirate like the rest of the English speakers, and might even forget that she ever could do otherwise. For now, though, I’m going to be watching her voice onset time closely and with great interest.

Maybe I’ll post a followup when her aspiration arrives. If I don’t post anything else, you can just assume that the Human Research Committee got me and banished me to the land of meetings and paperwork. I just hope there’s internet access there…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Phonetics and Phonology, Psycholinguistics | 4 Comments

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