In this series of podcasts, Professor Andrew Nevins (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) explains how song lyrics can be misunderstood.
While slips of the tongue are well-known, slips of the ear have received far less attention. Professor Nevins has developed a database of 4000 naturally collected examples where the hearer is the source of miscommunication. Looking into recurrent slips reveals that our expectations can bias what we mishear, but within limits: the actual utterance and the misheard message must be phonetically close enough to allow our ears to deceive us.
Watch more videos in the series here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXXq6t7B9L_5wHCO6CrDCV5uzfMrEzlDh
Further info:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/linguistics/People/linguistics-staff/andrew_nevins
N.B. We are using excerpts of the Will Young's video under UK Fair dealing, which is is for the purposes of non-commercial criticism or review (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingdom_law). Here is the full original video and its licensing attributions:
http://youtu.be/WbrSLLv0AlA
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