This is another drawing by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. Moon has been a scholar of the Ig Nobel Prizes since she was a young teenager.
This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Linguistics Prize awarded in 2007 to Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
That research is documented in the study “Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.
Coming: the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
Ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be introduced at the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, on September 12, 2024. The ceremony will happen at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It will be webcast live, in English and also (in a separate stream) with Japanese captioning.