Jessica Montag

Cognitive science. Language development. Psycholinguistics. Assistant Prof of Psychology at UIUC. she/her.

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@DrLearnasaurus I'm late to the party because I haven't been on twitter much over the last couple days, but I'll be there! Really looking forward to seeing all you cool people!

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

Read more about power law distributions:
https://t.co/AOr3n6e7U4
https://t.co/YFAf2gEmyO
https://t.co/5B91eNmz22 (Figure 9)

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

Depending on how you count and sample, somewhere around 800 words of (contemporary) casual adult speech or even child-directed speech contains 250 unique words. Power-law distributions are hard to wrap your head around.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

"A lexicographer estimated that the average 19th-century peasant used a vocabulary of 250 words, an educated person 5,000, and Shakespeare 27,780, though that last number is disputed” (Max Hastings, The Times)

Does that figure of 250 make origin of language seem less mysterious?

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@duane_g_watson This is completely impossible. Like, so ridiculously impossible that it can't be a mathematical mistake. Something is clearly being taken out of context or misinterpreted because if he thought about it for 20 seconds he'd realize how patently absurd this claim is.

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@GolfWriterKiel I lived in Wisconsin in 2012. The woman on the phone read the poll questions in the calm, no-frills voice that takes me like 8 tries to get right when recording psycholinguistic stimuli. I was impressed.

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@JuliaSchwarz_ac @GorillaPsyc Thanks! This is very helpful!

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

Jacki hasn't gotten any replies so does that mean you all are still using e-prime? Language production people, what do you use?

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@heidi_lorimor Cool, this is really helpful!

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@heidi_lorimor Thanks! Did using a keypress to stop audio capture on each trial work too?

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@mcmacdonald @GambiChiara @m_zettersten @MarkKoranda Really happy to see people drawing connections between these two papers!

[Martin Zettersten @m_zettersten]

Do we always say what we mean? Most lang production theories say we choose words based on our message, not ease. In our paper in Psych Science, lead @MarkKoranda, @mcmacdonald & I test whether production can be “good enough”, weighing both meaning and ease https://t.co/vBPUy4gq8V

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@duane_g_watson Until I remember the word for “pickle.” She must have thought I was some idiot American who was really picky about pickles. This is a silly story but maybe says something interesting about Japanese morphology.

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@duane_g_watson In Japan, server said pickles 漬物 (tsukemono) literally "pickled thing" and I thought she said つけ物 (also tsukemono) which would literally be "thing that’s put on" which I assumed was the word "topping." We go back and forth "what kind?""many different kinds" "but what kind?"

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

If it wasn't obvious, these are references to The Office.

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

Why yes, I am writing today. Why do you ask?

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@matthewmakpsy Fortunately, the EAR has been used for a long time in social, personality and health psych so many people in those fields did the hard work of talking to lawyers and IRBs to make sure this method is legal and ethical. We benefited a lot from that previous work!

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

Quick! What are the 5 most frequent words spoken by college students? If you're interested in the answer, check out my new paper w/ collaborators at UC Riverside that uses the EAR (Electronically Activated Recorder) to collect naturalistic speech samples from college students 1/8

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@john_slp Absolutely! I suspect it's because we probably say "the" more often when we are talking about things that aren't present in a shared environment, like when we're writing. Really highlights how even the simplest words vary in their use in speech & text.

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@matthewmakpsy There are *a lot* of legal issues and privacy concerns with EAR data, as you might imagine!

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

@matthewmakpsy Yep, it's amazing what you can deduce from the audio! We can't share the actual utterances (raw audio or transcripts) for participant privacy reasons. We have time info so we can track what words are said when, but we can't share the utterances for others to do those analyses :(

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

If you downloaded the paper yesterday (before July 15) you should re-download because we noticed and fixed a problem with Table 2. Here's the correct table!

[Jessica Montag @JessicaLMontag]

A big thanks and congratulations to the team at UC Riverside, led by Dr. Christine Chiarello and her student Dr. Alessandra Macbeth, as well as to my student @JacquelineErens 8/8