Sociolinguistics: Gendered Language in Advertising

I stumbled upon this interesting set of word clouds used by toy ads for boys and girls respectively posted by Cory Doctorow on boingboing:

Upcoming Meeting, 4/11/11: David Medeiros

Here's the description for the talk to be given  at our next Linguistics Club meeting! (on Monday 4/11/10 at 7:30):

"We examine the relationship between phonological representations and  
articulatory planning, pursuing the hypothesis that speech errors  
during the production of a tongue twister are due not to motoric  
difficulty, but occur when dynamic aspects of planned proximal  
gestures overlap and interfere. We find that speakers produce  
relatively few errors when producing novel tongue twisters and  
comparatively more speech errors during subsequent productions in a  
masked self-paced reading task. This is consistent with the view that  
speech errors in a tongue twister task cannot be solely attributed to  
articulatory factors and supports a cascading activation model of  
speech production."

Did you know? - Discussion Groups

University of Michigan Undergraduates! You are in a really good linguistics department for an undergraduate student to be in. One word: variety. While many linguistics departments focus on one subfield (as those who attended Željko Bošković's colloquium lunch found out), ours has a wide variety of topics to choose from. This gives us as undergraduates the freedom to explore the entire field of linguistics to find out what we like. 
One way to take advantage of this opportunity is to take a wide variety of linguistics classes in many different subfields. However, a lot of us can't fit all the linguistics classes we want to take into our busy schedules. For those people, you should take advantage of Friday discussion groups in the department! They tend not to take a lot of commitment, and are welcome to everyone. Best of all, they give you an hour's worth of exposure to research in a specific subfield done by grad students and professors in our department. Or use the discussion groups to hone your already keen interest in a specific subfield! Here's a breakdown of the groups which meet (generally) on Fridays before colloquium lectures (some are more frequent). You can check the Linguistics Department calendar (we have a link on Links We Like) for more information:
Phonetics/Phonology  at 1:00 pm 
Syntax/Semantics at 2:00 pm
Historical Linguistics at 2:00 pm 
Sociolinguistics/Language Contact/Discourse Analysis at 3:00 pm
As of right now, only a handful of undergraduates take advantage of this awesome opportunity. Try it out!

Welcome!

....to the blog of the Michigan Undergraduate Linguistics Club!


We meet Monday nights at 7:30 in 403 Lorch (Next to Martha Cook and the Business School).

We love all things to do with language and share our studies in this field.

Our next event is  Monday, April 11th, at 7:30 at 403 Lorch.  On the agenda:
Professor David Medeiros will be presenting on Tongue Twisters, which are a fun mix of syntax and phonology!

We hope to see you there!