Posts
November 07, 2012
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1:45 PM | New Experiment: Ignore That!
It can be very hard to ignore irrelevant information. I personally can't work when there is music with English lyrics playing (overheard conversations are difficult, too, so I don't often work in cafes, at least not without ear plugs).
There are a number of classic studies in psychology looking at our ability to ignore distracting information. For instance, suppose that you are asked to identify which direction the arrow in the middle of the sequence below is pointing:
You will
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November 06, 2012
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This year marks my 7th straight BUCLD, the major yearly language acquisition conference. See previous posts for my notes on Day 1 and Day 3.
Verbing nouns
Many if not all English nouns can be turned into verbs. The verb's meaning is related to the noun, but not always in the same way. Consider "John milked the cow" and "John watered the garden". In the first face, John extracts a liquid from the cow; in the second, he adds liquid to the garden.
Maybe this is just something we have to learn
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3:00 PM | Language fact of the day
The name that appears most often in Genesis is "Jacob", followed by "Joseph".
In other news, the most common word in Moby Dick is "the"; the most common noun (excluding pronouns) is, not surprisingly, "whale".
In Genesis, Moby Dick, and a number of other texts, three-letter words are more common than word of any other length (the one exception I've found so far is Moby Dick)
(Yes, I am learning to use NLTK, which so far I like a lot)
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This post continues my series on this years' BUCLD. While conferences are mostly about networking and seeing your friends, I also managed to attend a number of great talks.
Autism and homophones
Hugh Rabagliati got the morning started with a study (in collaboration with Noemi Hahn and Jesse Snedeker) of ambiguity (homophone) resolution. One of the better-known theories of Autism is that people with Autism have difficulty thinking about context (the "weak central coherence theory").
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November 03, 2012
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This year marks my 7th straight BUCLD. BUCLD is the major yearly language acquisition conference. (IASCL is the other sizable language acquisition conference, but meets only every three years; it is also somewhat more international than BUCLD and the Empiricist contingent is a bit larger, whereas BUCLD is *relatively* Nativist).
NOTE I'm typing this up during a break at the conference, so I've spent less time making these notes accessible to the general public than usual. Some parts may
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November 02, 2012
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11:34 AM | Spontaneous Imitation of Human Speech
Lately, there have been a string of news articles regarding animals imitating human speech sounds. First, there was an account of the nine year-old beluga whale named NOC who was recorded making unusually low, clipped bursts of noise. Then, today, news from the University of Vienna was reported of an asian elephant named Koshik using his [...]
November 01, 2012
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12:30 PM | Maybe first-borns aren't smarter after all
Although it is conventional wisdom that your birth order affects your personality, it's a hotly-disputed topic among scientists, and in fact my sense is that, if anything, a majority of researchers doubt the existence of birth order effects. Findings have been slippery: one study suggests that, for instance, first-borns are risk-takers, whereas another suggests that they aren't.
Birth Order & Intelligence
One of the most-researched topics has been intelligence: A wide variety of studies
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Kanazawa, S. (2012). Intelligence, Birth Order, and Family Size, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (9) 1157-1164. DOI: 10.1177/0146167212445911
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October 31, 2012
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10:54 AM | Taking the “icon” out of Emoticon
For some years now Simon Garrod and Nicolas Fay, among others, have been looking at the emergence of symbolic graphical symbols out of iconic ones using communication experiments which simulate repeated use of a symbol. Garrod et al. (2007) use a ‘pictionary’ style paradigm where participants are to graphically depict one of 16 concepts without using [...]
Garrod S, Fay N, Lee J, Oberlander J & Macleod T (2007). Foundations of representation: where might graphical symbol systems come from?, Cognitive science, 31 (6) 961-87. PMID: 21635324
Yuki, M., Maddux, W. & Masuda, T. (2007). Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43 (2) 303-311. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2006.02.004
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October 30, 2012
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I vowed never to look at any more spurious correlations. But there is time for one final foray into the word of acacia trees and traffic accidents. Some of my previous posts showed correlations between bizarre variables such as alcohol consumption and morphological complexity, acacia trees and tonal languages and the sonority of a language [...]
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I don’t think anyone’s posted this yet: 1st International Winter School on Evolution - March 11th – 15th, 2013 University of Lisbon The International Winter School on Evolution aims to better prepare a future generation for inter- and transdisciplinary evolution research by providing courses on cutting edge research in biological and sociocultural evolutionary sciences for Master, Doctoral and [...]
October 29, 2012
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The last poll asked people where they get their science news. Most folks reported that they get science news from blogs, which isn't surprising, since they were reading this blog. Interestingly, less than 10% reported getting science news from newspapers. This fits my own experience; once I discovered science blogs, I stopped reading science news in newspapers altogether.
I would report the exact numbers for the poll, but Blogger ate them. I can tell that it still has all the data (it
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What is the oldest linguistics department in the USA?
Language Log tries to figure it out. And out. This is more interesting than it sounds.
Oppan Chomsky Style
MIT students remake the world's most famous Korean music video. Chomsky cameos.
Are the McArthur Fellowships the world's most clever marketing scheme?
The Lousy Linguist wants to know.
Mitt Romney's speech patterns
Mark Liberman of Language Log analyzes the presidential hopeful's disfluencies.
If I'm not looking at you, you
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Timed to co-incide with Marieke Schouwstra’s PhD defense, there will be a workshop on investigating protolanguage at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands on the 30th November. Here’s the blurb: What did language look like in the early stages of language evolution? Recently, researchers have started to investigate this question in the lab, using human [...]
October 27, 2012
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6:20 PM | Prehistoric Autopsy
The BBC covers vocal tracts in Neanderthals! This episode also features everyone’s favourite blogging anthropologist John Hawks. Two other episodes are available of iplayer covering Lucy, which includes material on the communicative abilities of Macques, and another on Homo Erectus.
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3:58 PM | Faster fMRI?
A paper demonstrating a new technique for "ultrafast fMRI" has been getting some buzz on the blogosphere. Although movies often depict fMRI showing real-time activity in the brain, in fact typical methods only collect from one slide of the brain at a time, taking a fair amount of time to cover the entire brain (Neuroskeptic puts this at about 2-3 seconds). This new technique (GIN) can complete the job in 50 ms, and without sacrificing spatial resolution (which is the great advantage of fMRI
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Boyacioğlu, R. & Barth, M. (2012). Generalized iNverse imaging (GIN): Ultrafast fMRI with physiological noise correction, Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, DOI: 10.1002/mrm.24528
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October 26, 2012
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Thought y’all might be interested in the below. Quite a lot of language evolution stuff going on and some big names. DGfS Summer School – Language Development: Evolution, Change, Acquisition Date: 12-Aug-2013 – 30-Aug-2013 Location: Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany Meeting URL: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/dgfs_sommerschule/ Meeting Description: We invite advanced students (M.A. or Ph.D. level) in Linguistics and related fields to [...]
October 25, 2012
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2:30 PM | Is Dragon Dictate a believer?
I've been using Dictate to take notes on Talmy's Toward a Cognitive Semantics. One of the example sentences is as follows:
I aimed my gun into the living room. (p. 109)
I cannot by any means convince Dictate to print this. It prefers to convert "my gun" to "my God". For example, on my third try, it wrote:
I aim to my God into the living room.
Dictate offers a number of alternatives in case its initial transcription is incorrect. Right now, it is suggesting, as an alternative to "aim to my
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October 24, 2012
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2:33 PM | Perspective in language
Language often indicates perspective:
(1) Give me that.
(2) *Give me this.
The reason that (2) is weird -- by convention, an asterisk marks a bad sentence -- is that the word this suggests that whatever is being requested is close to the speaker. Consider also:
(3) Jane came home.
(4) Jane went home.
If we were currently at Jane's home, it would be more natural to say (3) than (4). Of course, we could say (4), but we would be shifting our perspective, treating wherever Jane was as the
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October 23, 2012
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1:00 PM | The toughest cop "alive"
At little while back, while walking down the street and minding my own business, I saw the following advertisement:
This looks like a scare quote; the implication is that Ace Ticket is nowhere near the best, that it is absurd to suggest that it is the best, which, I assume, is not what they were trying to convey.
One of my colleagues -- yes, I did send this around -- suggested that perhaps Ace Ticket hoped we would read this as a direct quote: somebody has called them the best, and they
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October 22, 2012
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Americans smarter than you thought
Or so says Mark Liberman, who analyzes some prominent examples of the "Fewer than X% of Americans knowY" meme.
Keep analyzing until you have a significant result
Joshua Carp, a Michigan PhD student, tried it out to see what would happen. Neurocritic has the skinny.
Not-final draft
PhD Comics reminds us that as nice as it feels to label a paper "FINAL.doc", you will pay for that good feeling shortly.
Brain mnemonics
Neuroskeptic suggests a few ways of
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October 18, 2012
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12:00 PM | New Experiment: Finding Explanations
Suppose that John is angry. This might be just a feature of his personality. It might be that something aggravating just happened to him. I suppose that is also possible that he took an “unhappy” pill. The point is, that there are many kinds of explanations.
I just posted a new experiment on the website probing people's intuitions about what kinds of explanations they expect for different kinds of events. Many thanks in advance to all who participate.
Participate in Finding
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October 17, 2012
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It has now been some time since Sean posed the research question as to whether a population’s consumption of alcohol can affect the structure of that population’s language. This hypothesis is born from the finding that alcohol consumption affects procedural but not declarative memory (Smith & Smith, 2003). This question was brought to the front of [...]
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In the last poll, I asked folks how much they revise their papers subsequent to first submission. A substantial majority said that they engaged in revisions that were "substantial" or "more than substantial". I was glad to hear that I'm not the only one.
October 16, 2012
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I’ve reposted this from http://www.evolutionarylinguistics.org/ as I thought it would be of interest to readers: Call deadline: 1 February 2013 Event Dates: 17-19 May 2013 Event Location: Lisbon, Portugal Event URL: http://evolutionarypatterns.fc.ul.pt/sub/cfa/cfa.html Call for bioinformaticians, evolutionary biologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, geologists, physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, sociologists, economists, and philosophers and […]
October 15, 2012
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A new paper, based on data collected through GamesWithWords.org, is now in press (click here for a pre-print). Below is an overview of this paper.
Unlike a proper name (Jane Austen), a pronoun (she) can refer to a different person just about every time it is uttered. While we occasionally get bogged down in conversation trying to interpret a pronoun (Wait! Who are you talking about?), for the most part we sail through sentences with pronouns, not even noticing the ambiguity.
We have been
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Hartshorne, J. & Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics, Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35. DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2012.689305
Brown, R. & Fish, D. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language, Cognition, 14 (3) 237-273. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(83)90006-9
Rudolph, U. & Forsterling, F. (1997). The psychological causality implicit in verbs: A review., Psychological Bulletin, 121 (2) 192-218. DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.121.2.192
Ferstl, E., Garnham, A. & Manouilidou, C. (2010). Implicit causality bias in English: a corpus of 300 verbs, Behavior Research Methods, 43 (1) 124-135. DOI: 10.3758/s13428-010-0023-2
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Check out the new poll (top of the right-hand sidebar).
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Last week, I visited my grandmother in upstate New York. Mostly we talked about family or the books we were reading, but at one point she gave a fiery defense of prescriptive language rules. "Language should be logical," she said.
My counter-argument was that this was a lost cause, because language is chock-full of irregularity. For instance, most modifiers of adjectives come before adjectives:
the very good book
the extremely happy girl
the rapidly rising water
the book that was very
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October 14, 2012
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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-10-14
Trying to "call things by their name" is stupid. Things don't have names for people. People have names for things. http://t.co/jUkt68uA # Powered by Twitter Tools
October 10, 2012
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Mice can learn vocalisations! A new article realised today on PLOS ONE by Gustavo Arriaga, Eric Zhou and Erich Jarvis, shows that mice share some of the same mechanisms used to learn vocal patterning in songbirds and humans.
