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Yanny vs. Laurel: Meme of the Year?

Is anybody talking about anything else today?

First of all, the clip is, according to Sanker “not prototypical” of either laurel or yanny. It’s somewhere in the middle. Sanker said the l/y discrepancy might come from the fact that the sound there isn’t velarized—the speaker’s tongue isn’t touching the back of their soft palate (the velum), as many American English speakers do when they say an l. The middle consonant is definitely not an n, Sanker said, but you might hear one because the vowel in front of it sounds particularly nasal. People who hear laurel are hearing a syllabic l in the second syllable, which has some similarities to the vowel sound at the end of yanny. Both are sonorants—you could go on singing them until you run out of air, as opposed to an obstruent like p or t.

For the record, all the old ears in our household hear “Laurel” and all the young ears hear “Yanni”.

And although there are exceptions, that’s apparently pretty standard due to the  way that people lose the ability to hear higher frequencies as they age.

But technology to the rescue –  you can apparently pitch shift to hear the word you’re missing!

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