Posts
May 22, 2013
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Earlier this week, I blogged about our new VerbCorner project. At the end, I promised that there would be more info forthcoming about why we are doing this project, about its aims and expected outcomes, why it's necessary, etc. Here's the first installment in that series.
Computers and language
I just dictated the following note to Siri
Many of our best computer systems treat words as essentially meaningless symbols that need to be moved around.
Here's what she wrote
Many of our best
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May 21, 2013
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What do verbs mean? We'd like to know. For that reason, we just launched VerbCorner, a massive, crowd-sourced investigation into the meanings of verbs.
Why do we need this project? Why not just look up what verbs mean in a dictionary? While dictionaries are enormously useful (I think I own something like 15), they are far from perfect. For one thing, it's usually very easy to find counter-examples even for what seem like straight-forward definitions. Take the following:
Bachelor: An
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May 16, 2013
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12:30 PM | A Critical Period for Learning Language?
If you bring adults and children into the lab and try teaching them a new language, adults will learn much more of the language much more rapidly than the children. This is odd, because probably one of the most famous facts about learning languages -- something known by just about everyone whether you are a scientist who studies language or not -- is that adults have a lot less success at learning language than children. So whatever it is that children do better, it's something that
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Hakuta, K., Bialystok, E. & Wiley, E. (2003). Critical Evidence: A Test of the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition, Psychological Science, 14 (1) 31-38. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.01415
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May 15, 2013
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How do we
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May 13, 2013
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You, sir, have tasted two whole worms. You have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the quad. You will leave Oxford by the next town drain. -- Reverend Spooner.
There is an old tension in psycholinguistic (or linguistic) theory, which boils down to two ways of looking at language comprehension. When somebody says something to you, what do you do with that linguistic input? Is your goal to decode the sentence and figure out what the sentence means, or do […]
Gibson, E., Bergen, L. & Piantadosi, S. (2013). Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1216438110
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May 10, 2013
May 08, 2013
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1:30 PM | Do You Speak Korean?
Learning new languages is hard for many reasons. One of those reasons is that the meaning of an individual word can have a lot of nuances, and the degree to which those nuances match up with the nuances of similar words in your first language can make learning the new language easier; the degree to which the nuances diverge can make learning the
new language harder.
In a new experiment, we are looking at English-speakers learning Korean and Korean-speakers learning English. In particular, […]
May 07, 2013
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9:37 AM | The cellar door of science
When communicating science, jargon can be a barrier to understanding. On the other hand, there are some terms in the language of science which are quite beautiful as words for their own sake. Often, they have quite evocative meanings, too. [1] Could words which are inherently nice to hear or read be a useful hook for grabbing an audience? I'm particularly partial to the word "aurora". It has the added advantage of being associated with several beautiful phenomena, but I... Read more
May 06, 2013
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Evolutionary psychology has always been somewhat controversial in the media for reasons that generally confuse me (Wikipedia has a nice rundown of the usual complaints). For instance, the good folks at Slate are particularly hostile (here, here and here), which is odd because they are also generally hostile towards Creationism (here, here and here).
Given the overwhelming evidence that nearly every aspect of the human mind and behavior is at least partly heritable (and so at
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May 04, 2013
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6:41 PM | Multiplying Dimensions at TEDxCERN
Yesterday was the first ever TEDxCERN event. I was lucky enough to take part as a volunteer in the social media team. [1] I spent the day live-tweeting and live-blogging about the event, as well as generally running around helping speakers, stage managers and so on. It was a lot of fun, and got me thinking about lots of new ideas. Credit: Alex Brown If you go down to the woods today... For those of you who don't know,... Read more
May 02, 2013
May 01, 2013
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A few months ago, I posted the results of That Kind of Person. This was the final experiment in a paper on pronoun interpretation, a paper which is now in press. You can find a PDF of the accepted version here.
How it Began
Isaac Asimov famously observed that "the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" That quote describes this project fairly well. The project grew out of a norming study.
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Joshua K. Hartshorne (2014). What is implicit causality?, Language and Cognitive Processes,
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April 29, 2013
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Find call for Participation below. “Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”. 15 – 20 September 2013, Cortona, Italy http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013 The Evolutionary Linguistics Association (ELA) is proud to announce its second summer school in Cortona on Music and the Origins of Language. The school is intended for read more...
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2:13 PM | Everlasting Love
I just got back data from a survey in which we asked people to estimate how long different emotions are likely to last. We'll use this information to design a future experiment looking at how people expect emotions to be encoded in language. In the meantime, what struck me is that of all the emotions we asked about, the one that people expected to last the longest was "being head-over-heels in love". Which is awesome.
(Image courtesy of Faizal Sharif)
April 26, 2013
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10:38 AM | Speaking Science on the Pod Delusion
Given the title of this blog, you might not be too surprised to learn that I (very) occasionally do a bit of speaking. Generally, these occurrences are on topics that interest me (and hopefully you, too!), including science and science communication. My newest piece is an audio adaptation of my recent post about jargon, which the lovely, award-winning folk at the Pod Delusion podcast were kind of enough to include in their latest episode, which is out today. Here's the... Read more
April 23, 2013
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1:30 PM | New Experiment: The Vocab Quiz
Curious how good your vocabulary is? I just posted a new experiment that will tell you. There are 32 questions. At the end, you'll see your score and how it compares with others who have done the experiment. This should be a fairly hard test. I piloted it on around 40 people, and only a few managed to get all the questions right. Then I made it harder. You can find the experiment here.
What is the purpose of the experiment?
We are interested in why some people have better vocabularies […]
April 22, 2013
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12:08 PM | Numerical vs. analytical modelling
Multi-agent models have been a close companion of evolutionary linguistics since its resurgence in the 90s. (There’s too much fuzzy terminology in our field but for me this term subsumes the study of the evolution of Language with a capital L as well as language evolution, i.e. evolutionary approaches to language change.) I’d probably go read more...
Baronchelli, Andrea, Felici, Maddalena, Loreto, Vittorio, Caglioti, Emanuele & Steels, Luc (2006). Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems, Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2006 (06) DOI: 10.1088/1742-5468/2006/06/P06014
Jäger, Gerhard (2008). Language evolution and George Price’s “General Theory of Selection”, Language in flux: dialogue coordination, language variation, change and evolution, Communication, mind & language 1 53-80. Other: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~gjaeger/publications/leverhulme.pdf
Platt, John R (1964). Strong inference, Science, 146 (3642) 347-353. Other: 10.1126/science.146.3642.347
Nowak Martin A, Krakauer David C & Dress Andreas (1999). An error limit for the evolution of language, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 266 (1433) 2131-2136. PMID: 10902547
Nowak, Martin A, Komarova, Natalia L & Niyogi, Partha (2001). Evolution of universal grammar, Science, 291 (5501) 114-118. PMID: 11141560
Reali, Florencia & Griffiths, Thomas L (2009). Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277 (1680) 429-436. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1513
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April 21, 2013
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10:41 PM | Why do kidneys need cells?
"Why do kidneys need cells?" This question was asked of me while I was volunteering in the At-Bristol science centre. It was the October half-term, and we had a number of Hallowe'en-themed activities for visitors to try out. At Hallowe'en, you might expect something about ghosts and ghouls, but that's not real science. So instead, it was all about the human body and its gory anatomy. A popular stand was "make your own blood", where we would ask visitors what... Read more
April 17, 2013
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10:32 PM | Since you asked… April 13
The world of Internet search terms is a weird place. From predicting flu trends based on people looking up their symptoms (which may be a bit more complicated than first thought), to activists raising awareness of the unpleasantness of Rick Santorum and the EDL, search terms reveal a lot about People On The Internet. In this monthly series, I've been highlighting some of the weirder search terms that have landed people on this blog. I do this partly for the... Read more
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12:30 PM | New Experiment: The Language & Memory Test
There is a close relationship between language and memory, since of course whenever you use words and grammar, you have to access your memory for those words and that grammar. If you couldn't remember anything, you couldn't learn language to begin with.
The relationship between language and memory is not well understood, partly because they tend to be studied by different people, though there are a few labs squarely interested in the relationship between language and memory, such as the Brain
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10:34 AM | Should Diederik Stapel write a blog?
When I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Diederik Stapel was contemplating writing a blog, the response was not as negative as he and I (as well as one other person I had mentioned this to) had imagined.It is clear that people are still angry at Stapel. But anger is not a very useful emotion at this point. It’s a little bit like “Praying for Boston.” Praying is not really helping anyone (as Richard Dawkins likes to remind us) but it may make people feel good about themselves. By the
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April 16, 2013
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9:56 PM | Scientific coathangers
As well as being the French word for "coathanger", porte-manteau is used in English to mean a word built using bits of other words (though we spell it portmanteau). A classic example is "brunch" - not quite breakfast, not quite lunch. As it happens, Manteau is also the French word for "mantle" in geology. The mantle is Earth's layers, between the core and the crust. So you can see how the word for "coat" and "layer" are the same. However,... Read more
April 15, 2013
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2:30 PM | New Experiment: Collecting Fancy Art
Over the last few years, we've run a lot of experiments online at GamesWithWords.org, resulting so far in four publications, with a number of others currently under review at various journals. Most of these have experiments have focused on how people process and interpret language. I just posted a new experiment (Collecting Fancy Art) that is more squarely focused on learning language. Language learning experiments are somewhat tricky to do online, since they tend to take longer than the […]
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12:21 AM | Lab Notebook: Social Networking
The problem with websites is they quickly become obsolete. A few years ago, I updated the website to make it easier to share pages, adding buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. A little while ago, I noticed that the Digg button wasn't working anymore. Then the Twitter button disappeared.
I just updated the website, switching from native buttons for social networking systems to ShareThis. ShareThis has the advantage of incorporating every social networking system you've
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April 13, 2013
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9:18 AM | How we use metaphors
I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them. I wrote about that quite a few years ago in: Lukeš, D., 2005. Towards a classification of metaphor use in text: Issues in conceptual discourse analysis of a [...]
April 10, 2013
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I was planning a post on E. O. Wilson's recent flight of fancy, "Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math", in which he tells potential future scientists that knowing math isn't all that important, but it turns out Jeremy Fox has already said everything I was going to say, only better. It's a long post, though, so here are some key passages:
Wilson’s claim that deep interest in a subject, combined with deep immersion in masses of data, is sufficient, because hey, it worked for Charles Darwin, is
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April 09, 2013
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10:16 PM | International Journal of Lousy Research
Jeffrey Beall's blacklist of "predatory open-access journals" -- discussed in yesterday's New York Times -- provides evidence for my long-standing suspicion of any journal named "International Journal of ..." There probably are some good journals named "International Journal of...", but I don't know of any off-hand. And there seem to be an awful lot of bad ones, probably for good reason: An internationally-recognized journal doesn't have to say so. So almost by definition a journal […]
