Carrie Ankerstein plays with two myths about language:
1. that women talk more than men (they don't);
2. that Germans have trouble with the "ash" vowel (as in 'bad') because they are imitating an archaic British accent.
Carrie's research, and that of others, shows that when a foreign language has a sound that our native language does not, we use the next closest sound -- which is why it sounds like German say 'bed' when they mean 'bad'.
Carrie is originally from Wisconsin and now she's a senior lecturer in English Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. She has a BA in German Linguistics, a Master's in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Psycholinguistics.
