Amanda Ritchart is a native speaker of Southern Californian English, the dialect also known as "Valley Girl talk" — you know, the one that's, like, totally full of the word "like."

The dialect's most recognizable characteristic might be the rise in pitch that speakers use at the end of some sentences. When Ritchart, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, says her name, it sounds like a question: "Amanda?"

Valley Girl talk can give the impression that the speaker is unsure of what he or she is saying. Yet Ritchart and her former adviser, Amalia Arvaniti, suggest in one of the first rigorous linguistic studies of the Southern Californian variety of English that speakers are perfectly clear on the difference between a question and a statement.