Friday, July 27, 2007

Cocktail Party

Part of what is described as the Cocktail Party Effect is how during a noisy cocktail party, you will be able to hear someone say your name in a conversation that you weren't attending to. It's an interesting phenomenon raising questions of how much information we're processing that we're unaware of, and of whether anyone ever has cocktail parties anymore.

I mention this to point out the fact that I have become susceptible to the Cocktail Party Effect for raised variants of /ay/, whether [əy], [ʌy] or [ɔy]. Occasionally, I whip around knowing someone somewhere has just said [ʌyd.l].

No comments:

Post a Comment

Disqus for Val Systems