Recent Posts

Pronouns in Bio, Pt. 1: What my cat can teach us about pronouns

Why are so many people these days talking about pronouns? What do they have to do with gender? How do you know what the correct pronouns are for something or someone? Let’s unpack what pronouns are and how their gender gets tricky.

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What is the brain doing when we are speaking and listening? Interview with Dr. Laura Giglio

Last year Laura Giglio defended her thesis ‘Speaking in the Brain: How the brain produces and understands language’. Luckily she was happy to answer some questions about it.

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Trying to find sound solutions

By 2050, around 2.5 billion people worldwide are expected to be impacted by hearing loss. This projection is mainly driven by the expected population growth and ageing. Hearing loss can result in difficulty following conversations and social isolation. In this blog, we explore what’s really important in understanding spoken language, and speculate on sound solutions of the future!

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How do people process the structure of language? Interview with Dr. Cas Coopmans

Last year Cas Coopmans defended his thesis ‘Triangles in the brain: The role of hierarchical structure in language use’. Luckily he was happy to answer some questions about it.

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The melody of speech

In spoken language, it’s not only the words we say that matter, but also how we say them. When we speak, we constantly produce small changes in the tone of our voice, how loudly we speak, or when we decide to pause for a bit (the technical term for these aspects of speech is prosody). How we speak can convey how we feel about something, but it can also affect the meaning of our words. As we will see next, the same sentence can have different meanings, just by changing how we say it.

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