Watch and learn! Carefully selected media links will help bring key concepts and theories to life, preparing you for your studies and exams. 

Click on the following links which will open in a new window.

Video Link

• Stephen Pinker on Language pragmatics
  Why do people understand language better than computers do? The concept of pragmatics is explored.

Audio Links

• Without Language, Large Numbers Don’t Add Up.
  You may not think of language as being essential to math, but in this report from Morning Edition, you’ll hear how language is essential to understanding exact numbers.

• In Milliseconds, Brain Zips from Thought to Speech
  Morning Edition reports on research regarding what happens in the brain before we speak.

• Psychology Behind the Sudden Southern Drawl
  The psycholinguistic phenomenon known as “style shifting” is explored in a piece from Weekend Edition Sunday.

Web Resources

• Dr. Eliza
  “Eliza” is everyone’s favorite interactive, artificial therapist. Students are always intrigued by the way that Eliza effectively mimics human language use.
  Follow-up exercise: Encourage your students to “test” Eliza’s language capacity by responding to her questions with syntactically correct but meaningless sentences. (I’ve had great luck with “I feel purple today.”)

• Psychology of Language and Thought
  This page presents the text of an interview with Noam Chomsky in 1983.
  Follow-up exercise: Ask students to play the role of an interviewer and develop additional questions that they might have asked Chomsky about his ideas.

• Alex the Parrot
  If your students are interested in animal language research, this home page of the Alex Foundation contains some nice photos and useful links to information on Irene Pepperberg's research on communication and intelligence in African Grey Parrots.
  Follow-up exercise: Ask your students to research other studies of animal language on the web. They are sure to find a wealth of information on Washoe, Koko, and others.

• Lexical Decisions
  This offering from the Hanover College online cognition laboratory introduces students to the lexical decision task, and allows students to vary the type of priming stimulus used, the duration of the priming stimulus, and other variables.