Talk the Talk

It's time to take a look back and see which words and phrases captured the zeitgeist of 2010. Many language groups have nominated their words of the year. Will any of them survive past January? UWA linguist Daniel Midgley names his picks on this week's Talk the Talk.

What’s the difference between animal communication and human language? How did humans develop the capacity for language? UWA linguist Daniel Midgley talks the talk with W. Tecumseh Fitch, professor of cognitive biology at the University of Vienna, and author of the new book ‘The Evolution of Language’.

This week, the Oxford English Dictionary dropped a bombshell: the first reference to Pavlova appears in a New Zealand publication, not an Australian one. How much do we know about the names of our favourite desserts? Why is a lamington called a lamington? And what are the international semantics of pudding? UWA linguist Daniel Midgley hits the pantry on this week's Talk the Talk.

New research is revealing our secret attitudes about accent. Our brains show different patterns when listening to people with different accents, and it impacts our judgments on how credible or trustworthy we find the speaker. But why do we have different accents? And why would we change the way we talk around other people? UWA linguist Daniel Midgley puts his laconic drawl to use on this week's Talk the Talk.

Programmer Nigel Leck has written a program that detects arguments against climate change on Twitter, and automatically responds with appropriate information. The climate deniers are often unaware that they're not dealing with a human. This is just the latest in a long line of 'bots' -- computer agents designed to have conversations like a human. How do bots work, and can they fool a human into thinking they're real people? UWA linguist Daniel Midgley -- or a reasonable facsimile -- joins us on this week's Talk the Talk.