As I Said Before...

I said, you said: the production effect gets personal.

Saying a word out loud makes it more memorable than simply reading it silently. This robust finding has been labeled the production effect and has been attributed to the enhanced distinctiveness of produced relative to unproduced items (MacLeod et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36, 671-685, 2010). Produced items have the additional information that they...

I Said Goodbye to My Baby

Responsibility was mine The decision to part with my baby girl was the most difficult one I have ever had to make. It took months of talking to myself at night, soul-searching and much heartache, until I arrived at my decision. Of course, welfare workers, almoners and the adoption society made every effort to help, to advise and so on, but the ultimate responsibility was mine and mine alone. If...

I Said it First: Topological Analysis of Lyrical Influence Networks

We present an analysis of musical influence using intact lyrics of over 550,000 songs, extending existing research on lyrics through a novel approach using directed networks. We form networks of lyrical influence over time at the level of three-word phrases, weighted by tf-idf. An edge reduction analysis of strongly connected components suggests highly central artist, songwriter, and genre netw...

Catch Me Before I Kill More: Seriality as Modern Monstrosity

You said it before and you'll say it again: expectations of consistency in communication.

Repeated reference creates strong expectations in addressees that a speaker will continue to use the same expression for the same object. The authors investigate the root reason for these expectations by comparing a cooperativeness-based account (Grice, 1975) with a simpler consistency-based account. In two eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the expectations underlying the effec...