In Alyssa's case, it seems backward speech may have been the thing to take hold. A nun is usually someone who gives their life and career to the church. The back-slang term engendered a plethora of words, with the notable exception of yob. That cognitive combo helps explain why this tends to be an age of all sorts of "obsessions," some more useful than others: Justin Bieber, "Twilight," a particular video game. A fun clue for this palindrome word could be it’s something that a baby wears when they eat 2. Back-slang was a type of word-forming method in English used to construct humorous substitutions for words by reversing their letters or sounds during the 19th century. Around this age, Leavitt explains, kids are getting huge bursts of brain power, while at the same time honing their social skills. The foreign phrases, play on words, and oneliners sound funny. Most kids move on, but a few stick with it. Mafia spelled backwards is afam (hunger) and donuts spelled backwards is stunard (dunce). Starting at around age 8 and tapering off around 13, kids tend to become interested in playing with language - they might create their own language or make up one with a friend, or they might play around with backward speech. The point is: Backward speakers come from all sorts of backgrounds, although they do have a few things in common. "They tend to be kids who do very well in school, who are smart and who have a decent-size vocabulary, but they are not necessarily kids who have a spectacular memory," Leavitt says. "So it's a skill that they practice, just like the violin." He illustrates this fact with some brief sketches of a handful of those study participants: a Stanford professor, a woman in the UK's House of Lords, a "German striptease artist." The stripper, incidentally, used to include backward speech in her act, and sent Levine a tape so he could check it out. "The striptease itself wasn't all that interesting, but her facility of backward speech was really quite impressive," Leavitt says. "Backward speech is one of these things that seems to be an equal opportunity skill," explains Leavitt, who's now professor emeritus of pediatrics at University of Wisconsin, Madison. "In fact, I think that I am effectively bilingual, in the sense that if you were genuinely bilingual, nothing would be going on in your brain." In other words, Levine doesn't consciously think, "TODAY: Y-A-D-O-T." He's just come to innately understand that TODAY backwards is YADOT, sort of like a person bilingual in Spanish and English knows that the words "today" and "hoy" are different ways of saying the same thing.Ībout 30 years ago, Levine experienced a brief, weird brush with fame similar to the one Alyssa's experiencing now: He was a guest on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson and was, he says, "a huge hit in Japan." He was also one of the subjects of a series of studies done back then on backward speech, conducted by Lewis Leavitt and then-graduate student Nelson Cowan. It's like you're speaking another language," Levine says. "If this girl is doing it the same way I'm doing it, it's nothing. Nevaeh, which was derived from heaven by reversing the name heaven, recently made it into the top 100 female names in America. When asked what's happening in his mind when he speaks in backward gibberish, Levine can't say. You can also make other rules like leaving out the last vowel or something like that to make it harder. Levine, a research professor in philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park, can speak entire sentences backward, in the four languages he knows (that's English, French, German and Italian, if you're interested) and in languages he's unfamiliar with. But Andrew Levine can easily pu-eno Alyssa. But still - impressive, right? Absolutely. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.OK, fine, she is maybe saying "huh?" to buy time when facing some of the longer words - kaleidoscope, withdrawal, Lamborghini. The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists 5th Edition. If we missed one, please use our comment form to let us know. Reverse Pairs (Emordnilap Words)īelow please find a list of reverse pairs. They are sometimes referred to as a reverse pair. An emordnilap (palindrome spelled backwards) is a word that can be read differently in reverse – it is read one way forward and another way backwards.
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