40 Fun Facts About Speech and Language

Which gas makes a voice squeaky because sound travels nearly three times faster through it than through air?

Helium speeds up sound inside the vocal tract, which raises its resonances. The vocal folds vibrate at the same rate as before, so the pitch stays put and only the voice's timbre changes.

Which ape, raised by Francine Patterson, learned signs adapted from ASL and kept a pet kitten called All Ball?

Koko was a western lowland gorilla born at San Francisco Zoo. She made the cover of National Geographic twice, and a 1985 picture book about her kitten became a bestseller.

Which teacher spelled 'water' into Helen Keller's palm in 1887 while cool water ran over her other hand?

Anne Sullivan was only 20 and visually impaired herself when she arrived at the Keller home. Keller later called the day they met her soul's birthday.

Ventriloquism takes its name from Latin words meaning 'to speak from' which part of the body?

The belly is where ancient ventriloquists were thought to house the spirits of the dead. The act began as a religious practice, with stomach noises read as messages from beyond.

Which pseudonym was given to the Los Angeles girl found in 1970, aged 13, after a childhood locked in isolation?

Genie had been shut in a room from about 20 months old and was barely spoken to. Linguists studied her for years, but she never fully acquired a first language.

Which part of the brain handles most language functions in about 96% of right-handed people?

The left hemisphere also leads for language in most left-handers, though in a smaller share of them, roughly 60 to 70%.

Which slip of the tongue, swapping sounds between two words, is named after an Oxford don and priest?

A spoonerism honours William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College. Most of the famous examples were probably invented by his colleagues and students as a pastime.

In which language can the syllable 'ma' mean mother, hemp, horse or scold depending on its tone?

Mandarin is the world's most widely spoken tonal language. Each tone has its own contour of rising and falling pitch, so the melody of a syllable is part of the word.

Which constructed language did eye doctor L. L. Zamenhof publish in 1887 as a universal second tongue?

Esperanto, meaning 'one who hopes', began as part of Zamenhof's pen name, Doktoro Esperanto. Early adopters liked the word so much that it became the name of the language itself.

Which term for the fear of public speaking comes from the Greek word for 'tongue'?

Glossophobia joins the Greek glossa, tongue, to phobos, fear. Beta-blockers are sometimes prescribed off-label to dampen its physical symptoms before a talk.

Which organ at the top of the windpipe houses the vocal cords and sits lower in adults than in newborns?

The larynx starts high in a newborn's neck and descends as the child grows. Besides making sound, it guards the airway against food going down the wrong way.

Damage to which brain region, named after a German physician, leaves speech flowing but empty of meaning?

Wernicke's area is one of the brain's two principal language regions. People with damage there talk with normal flow and rhythm, yet often cannot follow what is said to them.

A cleft, seen in about 1 to 2 of every 1,000 births, is an opening in the upper lip or which structure?

The palate is the roof of the mouth, and a cleft there opens into the nose. Surgeons usually close it before a child is eighteen months old.

The Adam's apple is the peak of which cartilage, the largest of the nine in the voice box?

The thyroid cartilage is built from two halves that meet at the front of the throat in that familiar peak. The bump is more prominent in males.

Which speech impairment distorts sibilants such as s and z, and has a wet-sounding 'slushy' variety?

A lisp of the interdental kind has the tongue tip poking between the front teeth. The 'slushy' lateral kind sends air over the sides of the tongue instead.

Which loss of language, most often caused by a stroke, has an Ancient Greek name meaning 'speechlessness'?

Aphasia follows roughly a quarter to a third of strokes. It disrupts language itself, so reading and writing can suffer along with talking.

Which learning disability, once known as word blindness, was named in the 1880s by a German eye doctor?

Dyslexia got its name from Rudolf Berlin of Stuttgart, a few years after Oswald Berkhan first described the condition. It often comes to light only once a child starts school.

Which unit of sound level honours the Scottish-born teacher of the deaf who patented the telephone?

Decibel means a tenth of a bel, a unit named after Alexander Graham Bell that is seldom used on its own. The Bell telephone system adopted the name in 1928 for measuring signal loss along its lines.

Which creaky register of the voice, the lowest there is, is widely associated with young American women's speech?

Vocal fry lets air bubble slowly through loosely closed folds with a popping, rattling sound. Sean Connery's James Bond is a classic example of the same creak in a male voice.

Which language of Nelson Mandela's people is known for its click consonants, written with c, q and x?

Xhosa has between 15 and 21 click consonants, depending on the speaker and dialect. Its Bantu ancestor had none: the sounds came from contact with Khoisan-speaking peoples.

Which linguist argued that grammar is partly inborn, attacking B. F. Skinner's view of language as learned behaviour?

Noam Chomsky pointed to a 'poverty of the stimulus': children hear far too little speech to account for the rich grammar they end up knowing.

Which gene, found in a British family with a severe speech disorder, was dubbed 'the language gene'?

FOXP2 was the first gene tied to speech and language, tracked down in a household known only as the KE family. Songbirds need it too, for learning to copy a tutor's song.

In which country did deaf pupils brought together around 1980 create a new sign language in the schoolyard?

Nicaragua's teachers took the children's gesturing for mime and a failure to learn Spanish. An American linguist called in during 1986 found a language taking shape instead.

Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish that carries up to five kilometres across ravines, comes from which islands?

The Canaries' island of La Gomera has taught Silbo in its schools since 1999. A practised whistler is known as a silbador.

Which illusion, first described in 1976, makes a listener hear 'da' when 'ba' is dubbed over lips saying 'ga'?

The McGurk effect was found by accident, when Harry McGurk had a technician dub mismatched sounds onto video for a study of how infants perceive language.

Which word for a misheard song lyric did writer Sylvia Wright coin in 1954 from a ballad she misheard as a child?

Mondegreen was the 'Lady' Wright thought she heard in a Scottish ballad that her mother read aloud. The real words only said where a slain earl's body was laid.

Which Washington school for deaf students, chartered under Abraham Lincoln, gave American football the huddle?

Gallaudet University's players began to huddle because opponents were reading their signed play calls. Classes there run in both American Sign Language and written English.

Which term describes a bilingual shifting between two languages in one conversation, as in Spanglish or Hinglish?

Code-switching was dismissed by many scholars in the 1950s as a substandard way of talking. Since the 1980s most have treated it as a normal product of knowing more than one tongue.

In Herodotus, a pharaoh raised children in silence to find the oldest language; their 'bekos' was Phrygian for what?

Bread, the pharaoh Psamtik I decided, proved the Phrygians an older people than the Egyptians. Later researchers suspect he read too much into a baby's babble.

Which name, borrowed from Hebrew, is given to the weak unstressed vowel that phoneticians write as a rotated e?

Schwa is the faint 'uh' that opens the word 'about'. The Hebrew vowel mark that lent it the name, shva, is often silent in modern Hebrew.

Which term names the smallest meaningful unit of a word, three of which make up 'unbreakable'?

Morpheme covers both free units such as 'break', which can stand alone as words, and bound ones such as 'un-' and '-able', which never appear on their own.

Which branch of linguistics studies how context shapes meaning, such as how people mean more than they literally say?

Pragmatics was first set apart as a field of its own in 1938 by Charles Morris. Philosopher Paul Grice later explained how listeners work out what a speaker is implying.

Which consonant, the catch in the middle of 'uh-oh', often replaces the letter t in Cockney speech?

The glottal stop is made by briefly shutting off the airflow at the vocal cords. Long seen as a Cockney trait, it has since spread into standard British pronunciation.

Which term describes a toddler's clipped two-word sentences such as 'cat here', typical from about 18 months?

Telegraphic speech is named after telegrams, which were charged by the word, so senders cut every word they could spare. Toddlers likewise keep the nouns and verbs and leave out words such as 'the' and 'is'.

Which phenomenon, discovered in 1909 by a French throat specialist, makes people involuntarily speak up in noisy places?

The Lombard effect is so automatic that clinicians use it to catch people who are faking deafness. Birds and monkeys also call louder against background noise.

Which term do linguists use for the intonation, stress and rhythm of speech, the features that can signal sarcasm?

Prosody carries what the words alone leave out: whether an utterance is a statement, a question or a command, and how the speaker feels while saying it.

Which term names two vowel sounds gliding together in one syllable, as in each syllable of 'no highway cowboys'?

Diphthong comes from the Ancient Greek for 'two sounds'. English 'ah' is a single steady vowel, while 'ow' slides from one vowel position to another.

Which term names the sing-song, high-pitched speech adults use with infants, much like the voice they use with pets?

Motherese is slower than ordinary talk and built from shorter sentences. Some researchers prefer to say 'parentese', since every kind of caregiver does it.

Which word names the habit, linked to California's Valley girls, of ending statements on a rising pitch?

Uptalk, formally the high rising terminal, is older than its Californian image. It seems to have been noticed in Australia, New Zealand and Britain as early as World War II.

Which condition of motor and vocal tics did neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot name after his own intern?

Tourette syndrome is popularly tied to blurted swear words, but that symptom occurs in only a minority of cases. Far more common tics are blinking, coughing and throat clearing.