The Science of Misheard Lyrics or Mondegreens - The New Yorker PDF

The Science Of Misheard Lyrics or Mondegreens - The New Yorker 10/05/17 00:34
MARIA KONNI!VA
EXCUSE ME WHI" I KI# $IS

GUY
By Maria Konnikova December 10, 2014
Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival,

August, 1970.
M y sister has a rare talent

for mishearing lyrics.
When we were younger, song
meanings would often morph
into something quite dierent
from their original intent. In one
Wallflowers hit, for instance, she
somehow turned me and
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/science-misheard-lyrics-mondegreens Pgina 1 de 12
Cinderella into the incinerator.

My favorite, though, remains that
classic of the swing age, Drunk
driving, then you wake upa
garbling of the Louis Prima hit
that saw a brief resurgence in the
nineties, Jump, Jive, an Wail.
My sisters creation of a night of

drunk driving from jumping and
jiving is actually a common
phenomenon, with the curious
name mondegreen.
Mondegreen means a misheard
word or phrase that makes sense
in your head, but is, in fact,
entirely incorrect. The term
mondegreen is itself a
mondegreen. In November, 1954,
Sylvia Wright, an American
published a piece
writer, published
in Harpers where she admitted to
a gross childhood mishearing.
published
When she was young, her mother
would read to her from the
Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry, a 1765 book of popular
poems and ballads. Her favorite
verse began with the lines, Ye
Highlands and ye Lowlands /
Oh, where hae ye been? / They

hae slain the Earl Amurray, /
And Lady Mondegreen. Except
they hadnt. They left the poor
Earl and laid him on the green.
He was, alas, all by himself.
Hearing is a two-step process.

First, there is the auditory
perception itself: the physics of
sound waves making their way
through your ear and into the
auditory cortex of your brain.
And then there is the meaning-
making: the part where your
brain takes the noise and imbues
it with significance. That was a
car alarm. Thats a bird.
Mondegreens occur when,
somewhere between the sound
and the meaning, communication
breaks down. You hear the same
acoustic information as everyone
else, but your brain doesnt
interpret it the same way. Whats
less immediately clear is why,
precisely, that happens.
The simplest cases occur when

we just mishear something: its
noisy, and we lack the visual cues

to help us out (this can happen
on the phone, on the radio, across
cubiclesbasically anytime we
cant see the mouth of the
speaker). One of the reasons we
often mishear song lyrics is that
theres a lot of noise to get
through, and we usually cant see
the musicians faces. Other times,
the misperceptions come from
the nature of the speech itself, for MOST POPULAR
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poem or a song. What should be
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clear becomes ambiguous, and
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our brain must do its best to
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stream of sounds that is more a
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warbling than a string of
discernable words. We only learn Our Thirty Most Popular
when one word stops and the

next one starts over time, by
virtue of certain verbal cuesfor
instance, dierent languages have
dierent general principles of
inflection (the rise and fall of a
voice within a word or a
sentence) and syllabification (the
stress patterns of syllables)
combined with actual semantic
knowledge. Very young children
can make mistakes that shed
light on how the process actually
develops. In The Language
Instinct
Instinct, Steven Pinker points
Instinct
out a few near-misses: I am
The Language
heyv! as a response to Behave!;
Instinct
I dont want to go to your ami
in reply to going to Miami.
People immersed in an
environment with a new
language often initially
experience the same thing: a lack
of clear ability to tell what words,
exactly, should properly emerge
from the sounds that are being
spoken. Most likely, my sisters
unconventional talent stems
partly from the fact that English
is not our first language. For us,

on a basic level, word processing
will always be just a bit dierent
from that of native English
speakers.
A common cause of
mondegreens, in particular, is the
oronym: word strings in which
the sounds can be logically
divided multiple ways. One
version that Pinker describes
goes like this: Eugene ONeill
won a Pullet Surprise. The string
of phonetic sounds can be
plausibly broken up in multiple
waysand if youre not familiar
with the requisite proper noun,
you may find yourself making an
error. In similar fashion,
Bohemian Rhapsody becomes
Bohemian Rap City. Children
might wonder why Olive, the
other reindeer, was so mean to
Rudolph. And a foreigner might
become confused as to why, in
this country, we entrust weather
reports to meaty urologists or
why so many people are black-
toast intolerant. Oronyms result
in not so much a mangling as an

incorrect parsing of sounds when Do you have a tip for The New
context or prior knowledge is Yorker that requires anonymity and
lacking. security?
Other times, the culprit is the Send it via SecureDrop.

perception of the sound itself:
some letters and letter
combinations sound remarkably
alike, and we need further cues,
whether visual or contextual, to
help us out. In their absence, one
sound can be mistaken for the
other. For instance, in a
phenomenon known as
McGurk
the McGurk eect
eect, people can be
McGurk eect
made to hear one consonant
when a similar one is being
McGurk eect
spoken. Theres a bathroom on
the right standing in for theres
a bad moon on the rise is a
succession of such similarities
adding up to two equally
coherent alternatives. (Peter
Kay oers
oers an auditory tour of
some other misleading gems.)
oers
What usually prevents us from
being tripped up by phonetics is
the context and our own
knowledge. When we hear a

word or phrase, our brains first
cue is the actual sounds, in the
order in which they are produced.
According to the cohort model
one of the leading theories of
auditory word processingwhen
cohort model
we hear sounds, a number of
related words are activated all at
once in our heads, words that
either sound the same or have
component parts that are the
same. Our brain then chooses the
one that makes the most sense.
For instance, if Im talking about
the role of the syllable in
language comprehension, youre
also, on some level, thinking
about a silly-looking ball rolling
away. Youre also considering the
smaller snippets that form each
words makeup: roe, along with
roll; sill, along with silly and
syllable. Only after I say the
whole phrase do you understand
what Im saying. Songs and
poems, in some sense, lie between
conversational speech and a
foreign language: we hear the
sounds but dont have the normal
contextual cues. Its not as if we

were mid-conversation, where
the parameters have already been
set.
Along with knowledge, were

governed by familiarity: we are
more likely to select a word or
phrase that were familiar with, a
phenomenon known as Zipfs
law, according to which the
law
actual frequency of a word can
Zipfs
aect how seamlessly its
law
processed. If youre a member of
the crew team, youre far more
likely to select row instead of
roe from an ambiguous
sentence. If youre a chef, the
opposite is likely. One of the
reasons that Excuse me while I
kiss this guy substituted for Jimi
Hendrixs Excuse me while I
kiss the sky remains one of the
most widely reported
mondegreens of all time can be
explained in part by frequency.
Its much more common to hear
of people kissing guys than skies.
Expectations, too, play a role.
Youre much more likely to
mishear Cry Me a River as

Crimean River if youve
recently been discussing the
situation in Ukraine.
Mondegreens are funny, of

course, but they also give us
insight into the underlying
nature of linguistic processing
and how our minds make
meaning out of sound. In
fractions of seconds, we translate
a boundless blur of sound into
sense. It comes naturally, easily,
eortlessly. We sift through
sounds, activate and reject
countless alternatives, and select
one single meaning out of myriad
homonyms, near-matches, and
possible parsingseven though
speakers may have dierent
accents, pronunciations,
intonations, or inflections. And,
in the overwhelming majority of
instances, we get it right. To gain
a better appreciation of how
complex that constant
instantaneous interpretive dance
is, consider the problems of
speech-recognition software,
which, despite recent

improvements, still usually
generate a mix and muddle of
whatever a user was trying to say.
Our brains are exceptional

creators of logical meaning
even when its not quite the
intended one. Some
mondegreens are so plausible
become
that they can become
become the real
thing. Spitting image was once
a mondegreen, a mishearing and
become
improper syllabic split of spit
and image. (Spit is another term
for likeness.) When you eat an
orange, youre actually consuming
a naranj (from Persian and
Sanskrit). Your nickname is,
historically speaking an
ekename, or an additional name.
Who knows. Maybe someday,
when you do something for all-
intensive purposes, no one will
blink an eye. And, maybe in the
future, some avant-garde poet
will finally pen a verse to that
most lovely of women, Lady
Mondegreen.
Maria Konnikova is a
Maria Konnikova is a
contributing writer for
newyorker.com, where
regularly
she writes regularly
regularly on
psychology and science.
regularly
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The Science Of Misheard Lyrics or Mondegreens - The New Yorker 10/05/17 00:34

EXCUSE ME WHI" I KI# $IS

Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival,

M y sister has a rare talent

Cinderella into the incinerator.

My sisters creation of a night of

Oh, where hae ye been? / They

Hearing is a two-step process.

The simplest cases occur when

noisy, and we lack the visual cues

another begins, we dont actually 4. How Trump Could Get Fired

discernable words. We only learn Our Thirty Most Popular

when one word stops and the

is not our first language. For us,

in not so much a mangling as an

Other times, the culprit is the Send it via SecureDrop.

knowledge. When we hear a

contextual cues. Its not as if we

Along with knowledge, were

mishear Cry Me a River as

Mondegreens are funny, of

which, despite recent

Our brains are exceptional

Sign up for the daily newsletter:

Enter e-mail address

Reprints RSS Site Map Store SecureDrop

Cond Nast Digital

To get more stories Enter y

from The New Yorker,

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