Linguistically Aware

PhD student Jesse Weir talks with Dr. Anja Arnhold about the relationship between prosody and syntax, her path into linguistics, and how different languages shape the way structure and melody work together.

Continuing our conversation with Dr. Hracs, we explore how linguistics and epidemiology intersect, and how humanities scholars can move into data-driven fields like public health research.

Dr. Lindsay Hracs shares her journey from linguistics to leading data science in the Kaplan epidemiology lab, highlighting surprising parallels between the two fields and the cutting-edge research shaping her lab at the University of Calgary.

In this episode, Brooklyn sits down with James Geary - author of "The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism" to chat about the newly released second edition of this book. James tells us what aphorisms are, how he came to love them, and how this early form of language and literature persists in the digital age today of social media and AI chatbots!

James Geary is also the author of "Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It" (W.W. Norton), "I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World" (HarperCollins), and "Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists" (Bloomsbury). He is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.

In this episode, guest host Jesse Weir sits down with Dr. Lyn Tieu (University of Toronto) to talk about how we make meaning from more than just words. From gestures to emojis, Dr. Tieu’s research explores the surprising ways people draw inferences from non-linguistic cues. Tune in to rethink what counts as "language" in communication!

Want to learn the secrets behind sarcasm? In this episode, Brooklyn talks about her ongoing research on the perception of sarcasm. Specifically, she talks about a study where she had speakers vary the pitch of their voice in a very systematic way, and then asked listeners to rate how sarcastic it sounded to better understand what it is in someone’s voice that makes them sound sarcastic or not!

In this episode, Brooklyn sits down with Syed Sazzad Alam, a PhD student at the University of Calgary that studies phonetics - the study of speech sounds. In this interview, Sazzad talks about some of his research on how native English speakers perceive unfamiliar sounds from his own native language, Bengali!

In this episode, Brooklyn sits down with Francisco Ongay, a current PhD student studying syntax at the University of Calgary. Francisco studies how we use language to express time, whether it be past versus present (e.g., “I slept” versus “I will sleep”) or the duration of an event (e.g., “I slept for 8 hours”). In this interview Francisco talks about how we express time in several languages of the world!

In this episode, Brooklyn sits down with Jesse Weir, a current PhD student studying syntax at the University of Calgary. Jesse shares some brand new research on how gender bias in linguistics experiments might actually change the results of the experiment!

In these second part of our interview with Cheryl, Brooklyn asks her why she thinks she got the results she did in her recent study on how adults and children differ in their ability to infer the meaning of a sentence when it might be ambiguous.

Additionally, Brooklyn and Cheryl discuss the inherent interdisciplinary nature of linguistics and how it’s related to so many fields including psychology, philosophy, math, physics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence!