BLIP Bites

Bite-Sized Research Reports from the BLIP Lab

The Point of Pitch

  • ” We have known for a long time that people who don’t speak Chinese have difficulty learning how pitch is involved in the meanings of Chinese words. In Mandarin Chinese for example, “mā” (said with a high, steady pitch) means ‘Mum’. But don’t confuse it with “mǎ” (said with a low dipping pitch) or you might accidentally say “Horse”. … Read more

Bouba & Kiki in the Himalayas

  • Recently, BLIP Lab teamed up with a fieldworking linguist, Dr Lauren Gawne, to investigate a curious property of language – the bouba/kiki effect – and to find out if everybody in the world does it the same way, or if the language we speak also influences the connections between hearing and seeing. … Read More

“oo” and “ee” in Cherokee

  • “Our recent paper published in Royal Society Open Science asked whether letters look like their sounds. We looked at languages from all over the world, and throughout human history. […] We wanted to know if people could guess which letter was which. If yes, it would show that modern English-speakers can find something meaningful in the way that distant and ancient people created shapes to match their sounds – perhaps we all rely on similar sensory information.” … Read more

The shape of words you haven’t seen

  • (coming soon)