Chapter 9 Web Links

A bunch of crash blossoms

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

The bloggers at Language Log make a sport of finding and posting crash blossoms—newspaper headlines that contain bizarre syntactic ambiguities. You can enjoy them by going to the link above and typing “crash blossom” into the search window.

The “disfluency effect”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba7wqN46-xc

In the online Language at Large feature Straining the Parser for Literary Effect, the possibility that complex hard-to-read sentences might engage deeper cognitive processing than easy-to-read sentences was considered. This idea was based on research about the “disfluency effect,” in which subtle cues like hard-to-read font can shift how language is processed. In this video, researcher Adam Alter discusses some of the findings related to this intriguing phenomenon.

The cognitive impact of bilingualism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOniN0PMyJg

In this video, researcher Ellen Bialystok discusses her work on bilingualism as an experience that changes the brain.