BEHV3019 – Psychology of Language

Wait, what did you mean by that?

One of the more amusing things about language is how often conversations go slightly wrong.

Someone says something perfectly ordinary, another person interprets it differently, and suddenly you're spending five minutes explaining what you actually meant.

I've been thinking about this while studying language processing. Understanding language isn't simply a matter of recognising words and putting their meanings together. We also use context, prior knowledge, expectations, and other cues to figure out what someone is trying to communicate.

Sarcasm is a good example. Take the sentence "Well, that went brilliantly." Depending on the situation and the speaker's tone, it could mean exactly what it says or the complete opposite.

There's also something interesting about how we process language so quickly. We rarely stop to consciously analyse the grammar of every sentence we hear. Most of the time, we just understand it and move on.

I wonder how many misunderstandings could be avoided if we were all slightly better at explaining ourselves. Probably not as many as I'd like to think.