The Complete Psycho Babbles

A blog about psycholinguistics by Jessica Love, a psychologist and science writer at Northwestern University. Her most recent article “Reading Fast and Slow” appeared in our Spring 2012 issue.

• A Modest Proposal and a Goodbye
• Baby Got Rhythm?
• Solidarity in Confusion
• Wounded By Books
• English vs. English
• Reading Humans
• Perfect Memory (Webcomic #9)
• All Eyes on the Eyes
• Depends on How You Tell It
• For to Sound Folksy
• As an Aside (Webcomic #8)
• Nap Your Way to a Bigger Vocabulary?
• Describing a Visual World Without Vision
• Ethics Across Borders
• The Power of Um
• Anthropomorphic Trees (Webcomic #7)
• I Say Shutout, You Say Clean Sheet
• Not Enough Brain (A Webcomic)
• Who’s John Again?
• When Nouns Verb Oddly
• Out of Office (A Webcomic)
• How Many Words Does a Wordsmith Make?
• Leave Your Laptop Home
• Don’t Mock the Monocle (A Webcomic)
• Wave Your Hands and Say It Right
• A Reader’s Guide to Ha Ha (A Webcomic)
• Sneak Attacks (A Webcomic)
• How to Talk Shakespeare
• Here, There Be Ambiguity (a Webcomic)
• Think Like a Bilingual
• What Jorge Luis Borges Knew About Knowing
• Labels for People
• Emergencies in Spanish
• Are Our Screams, Sighs, and Giggles Universal?
• What We Don’t Read When We Read
• “You’re Saying It Wrong”
• What Does the Owlet Say?
• Why So Few English Words for Odors?
• Zugzwang in the New Year
• Spanish in the City
• The Powerless I
• The Search for Meaning in Sound
• The Disappearing Accent
• Much Reading. Wow.
• Compendiums of Everything
• Headless Bear Walks Up to Woman; Awesomeness Ensues
• Quick: What’s the Past Tense of “Pet”?
• On Expecting Things to Fall Apart
• Limericks That Leave You Hanging
• Common Ground in Video Games
• The Rules of Pleasant Conversation
• What makes Hemingway Hemingway?
• When Tech Turns Nouns Into Smarter Nouns
• Sharing Or Oversharing Online?
• Y’all Look Different From Up Here
• Tuesdays with Siri
• Are You Smarter Than My Cat?
• When Babies Bang
• The Internet is a James Joyce Novel
• Freshman, Meet Your Roommates
• On Zombie Eating
• Language in an Age of Seamlessness
• Picturing a Whole New Language
• Well, Hey There, Search
• A Dog With Two Names?
• Search: A Primer for the Rest of Us
• Tell the Riddle Right
• Friends Don’t Let Friends Listen and Drive
• No English, No Career?
• A Mind to Navigate
• N. K. Y. S. A.
• Where’s the “The”?
• Magic Fingers
• Time Traveling Through a Sentence
• CAPTCHA That Bot!
• The Internet Remembers
• Hardwired for Talk?
• Kiki or Bouba?
• My Feeling for 11 Is Almost One of Pity
• The Allure of the Intuitive
• The Allure of the Counterintuitive
• Dr. Doolittle Calling
• Ye Olde Blogge Postte
• Aquatic Cognition
• Of Mutant Mice—and Men
• What Your Child Watches When She Watches TV
• Demons Where Once There Were None
• Can Reading Be Unlearned?
• Your Baby Is a Statistician
• Why We Know So Little About High Achievers
• What Toddlers Know They Don’t Know About Plurals
• Derailed By “Who’s On First”
• The Liberal Grammar Fanatic
• Psychology and the Elite College Undergraduate
• Acting Like a Baby
• The Psychology of Playing the Part
• Much Ado About Acting
• Your Brain On Risk
• Big Toddler, Teeny Slide
• When Foreign Words and Native Accents Meet
• What Little Girls Are Made Of
• A Language Without Exact Numbers
• Babies Bamboozled by Numbers
• On the Psychology of Swearing
• Changing the World, If Only in Our Minds
• When the Mind Wanders, the Eyes Stay the Course
• Pilloried Prepositions
• How We Talk to Babies
• American Culture Makes Us Egocentric—Maybe
• So Totally On My Mind
• Little Scribes
• On Word Learning, Incidentally
• The Art of Word Learning
• Dude Sounds Like a Lady
• Language Finds a Way
• Survival of the Thriftiest
• Give Ishmael a Break
• When I See a Monkey Read
• On Drunk Speech
• Rules Versus Rules: What The New Yorker Got Wrong
• Extreme Empathy
• Does Language Change How We Experience Color?
• These Thoughts Were Made in American English
• Nounsy Nouns and Verbsy Verbs and Little Wugs Eat Ivy
• Golfers, Toothpaste, and How Not to Overthink
• Is the Future of English Bad Science?
• Calling All Psychonarratologists
• The Mind Paused / Not at All
• On Caddy-corner … Or Whatever That Word Is
• Oprah: 2, Attenborough: 0
• What Prestige Sounds Like
• Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sentence
• Should Two Constructions Diverge
• Submissive Sentences
• isthistytelhardtoreed
• What Actually Works
• When Words Are Neighbors
• Spelling and the Mind
• When Rosemary Should Be Rosy and Merry
• When Characters Speak Off the Page
• And I’m Like, Read This!
• The Grammarian Was a He
• The Spaghetti with a Dark Past
• A Cocktail Conundrum
• Nullified
• The Magazine Ran with Ink and Columns
• The Accented Among Us
• If It Talks Like the Truth
• Speech in Action
• Nailing It
• Aliens in the Mind
• The Lion, the Yurt, and the Xbox
• The Elephant in the Room
• Parse This
• Tyler Is Setting Up a Tent
• When the Upshot Is a Downer
• This Column Needs Edited