Why grammaMistakes In A Short Email Could Make Some People Judge You

Editor's Blog





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Who is more sensitive to email errors? Robin Hutton, CC BY-NC-ND

I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all.

We were curious: what makes our reactions so different?