Posts

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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9:00 PM | The Evolution of Speech: Learned Vocalisations in Mice

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.

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10:32 AM | The continuing rise of physics envy

A few weeks back, James posted a paper about the "Linguistic Big Bang". Now here's a paper about protolanguage and the linguistic "God Particle". I'm happy to see that physics envy in the linguistic community is far from dead!

October 08, 2012

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1:30 PM | What you missed on the Internet last week - 10/8/2012

My Nomination for the Ignoble Gibbons on helium. Fraud vs. Questionable Practices Neuroskeptic worries that discussions of reforming science often conflate fraud and questionable practices (like the file drawer problem), when probably they have different causes and different solutions. Of the two, Neuroskeptic argues, questionable practices cause more damage. Fake Standardized Tests BishopBlog worries that the DoE's new phonics test may be based on faked data.

October 07, 2012

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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-10-07

Wow, what deep seated fear must #WSJ have to criticise slave rebels for use of terror 250 years later! http://t.co/t6Z6y8dY #racism # What is it about reality shifting films like Looper, Matrix or Inception that make people call them "smart"? http://t.co/855nu5y5 # The Sinister Sausage Machine http://t.co/NQqzgKQY #metaphor negotiation of market place and uniformity in [...]

October 04, 2012

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8:55 PM | Limiting female participation: will it increase female participation?

Following some great work over at FeministPhilosophers to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conference events in Philosophy, an interdisciplinary action for gender equity at scholarly conferences has been doing the rounds over the last four days. It was proposed by Dan Sperber and Virginia Valian, who have also compiled an accompanying Q & [...]

October 03, 2012

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9:49 PM | Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups (featuring @hanachronism and @richlitt)

Last year Altmann, Pierrehumbert & Motter (henceforth, APM) released a great paper in PLoS One: Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups. Having referenced the paper extensively in my non-bloggy academic world, I thought it was about time I mentioned it on a Replicated Typo. Below is the abstract: Patterns of word [...]

Altmann EG, Pierrehumbert JB & Motter AE (2011). Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups., PloS one, 6 (5) PMID: 21589910

Citation

October 02, 2012

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1:30 PM | Advice for how to learn foreign languages

I am often asked for advice on how to learn second languages. I have written a few popular-press articles on the topic before, but these articles are mostly high-level advice, whereas the questions I usually get asked are specific (what books should I read, where should I study, etc.), so I thought it was time to write up the resources that I have found useful. First, a disclaimer: What I write below is based only on my own experience learning languages. While I am a language researcher, I […]

October 01, 2012

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4:00 PM | What you missed on the Web last week - 10/1/2012 edition

Forgetting kanji Japanese computer users say they are forgetting how to handwrite kanji due to computer use. The number has increased from 10 years ago. An important question not addressed is whether they can write more kanji using a computer now than people could write by hand 10 years ago. (Hat tip: LanguageLog) Another descriptivist/presciptivist debate What I learned from it: I'm not the only one whose idiolect does not distinguish between relative clauses beginning with 'that' and […]

September 30, 2012

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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-30

New on http://t.co/fghK93KI: The complexities of simple: What simple language proponents should know about linguistics http://t.co/emqUvR4e # Powered by Twitter Tools

September 28, 2012

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8:09 PM | The complexities of simple: What simple language proponents should know about linguistics

Background: From spelling reform to plain language The idea that if we could only improve how we communicate, there would be less misunderstanding among people is as old as the hills. Historically, this notion has been expressed through things like school reform, spelling reform, publication of communication manuals, etc. The most radical expression of the [...]

September 27, 2012

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9:33 PM | Predicting my h-index

A new article in Nature presents a model for predicting a neuroscientist's future h-index based on current output. For those who don't know, the h-index is the largest N such that you have N papers each of which have at least N citations. It does this based on your current h-index, total number of published articles, years since first article, the total number of journals published in, and the number of papers in Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS and Neuron. I'm not a neuroscientist […]

September 25, 2012

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6:27 PM | Language Evolution in 50 Words

Every week the British Interactive Group (BIG) (a skill sharing network for science communicators) have a competition among their members on the mailing list to explain a phenomenon in 50 words. This is known as the “Friday Phenomenon” and the person who does the best job at being both informative and engaging with such a [...]

September 23, 2012

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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-23

Remix as Milk to Chocolate | iterating toward openness http://t.co/EtdBEymr #metaphor #oer # Powered by Twitter Tools

September 22, 2012

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10:38 AM | “Hierarchical structure is rarely…needed to explain how language is used in practice”

How hierarchical is language use? Stefan L. Frank, Rens Bod and Morten H. Christiansen Abstract: It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show [...]

September 19, 2012

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4:04 AM | Strange language fact of the day

Apparently in some languages/cultures, it is common to call an infant "Mommy". Even a boy infant. I am told by reliable sources this is true of Bengali and of Tzez. Reportedly Bengladeshi immigrants try to import this into English and get weird looks at the daycare. I am told that this is actually relatively common and appears in many languages. And there are some phenomena in English that aren't so different. You can, for instance, say the pot is boiling when you in fact mean that the water […]

September 18, 2012

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12:12 PM | XKCD on prescriptivism

'nuff said.

September 17, 2012

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3:00 PM | Reality, that seamless stream

“The influence, upon our thinking, of a comprehensive scientific theory, or of some other general point of view, goes much deeper than is admitted by those who would regard it as a convenient scheme for the ordering of facts only. …scientific theories are ways of looking at the world; and their adoption affects our general [...]

September 16, 2012

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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-16

Amazon Doesn’t Want To Be More Like Apple, It Wants To Be More Like Amazon . com http://t.co/LYqoHSQm #metaphor # Powered by Twitter Tools

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6:17 AM | Do these pills make me look fat?

Early last year the Los Angeles Times published an article with the same title as this post - "Do these pills make me look fat?" Subheading: "Many women believe that oral contraceptives will make them gain weight, but doctors disagree." When I read the second line, my eyes practically bugged out. "Doctors disagree--?" With what [...]

September 13, 2012

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12:41 PM | Around the Internet: What you missed last week (9/17/2012 edition)

Chomsky OK, not technically last week, but here's a longish post critiquing Chomsky and a much longer, heated discussion in the comments, from BishopBlog. Replication A nice editorial on the important of replicating as a way of dealing with fraud. The New Yorker Still Hates Science (esp. Evolution) When I first heard the claim that the New Yorker was fundamentally anti-science, it came as a surprise. Then I thought back through what they publish, and it became less surprising. Now, […]

September 11, 2012

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6:35 PM | Jim Hurford: What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution? (2)

This post continues my summary of Jim Hurford’s discussion of two contrasting extreme positions on language evolution in his plenary talk at the Poznan Linguistic Meeting. Here’s the summary of these two positions from my last post: Position A: (1) There was a single biological mutation which (2) created a new unique cognitive domain, which [...]

September 10, 2012

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4:00 PM | Pricing conundrum

Before I went to Riva del Garda for this year's AMLaP, I picked up a travel guide on my Kindle. (If only such things had existed the years I backpacked in Eurasia. My strongest memories are of how much my backpack weighed. Too many books.) Oddly, the Lonely Planet Italian Lakes Region guide is the exact same price as the whole Italy guide. These local guides tend to be glorified excerpts of the country book, and since they both weigh the same...

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10:59 AM | Jim Hurford: What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution?

As I mentioned in my previous post, the 2012 Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM)features a thematic section on “Theory and evidence in language evolution research.” This sections invited speaker was Jim Hurford, who is Emeritus Professor at Edinburgh University. Hurford is a very eminent figure in language evolution research and has published to very influential and [...]

September 09, 2012

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6:29 AM | PLM2012 Coverage: Pleyer & Winters: Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research

Today James and I are giving a talk at the Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) on “Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research.” It’s a talk in a thematic section on “Theory and evidence in language evolution research”, which I hope to blog about a bit tomorrow. We’ll come back to our talk later on and [...]

September 08, 2012

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11:43 PM | PLM2012 coverage: Dirk Geeraerts: Evidence for Non-Modularity

The first plenary talk at this year’s Poznań Linguistic Meeting was by Dirk Geeraerts, who is professor of linguistics at the Geeraerts began his talk by stating that there seems to be a paradigm shift in linguistics from an analysis of structure that is based on introspection to analyses of behaviour based on quantitative linguistic [...]

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11:43 PM | PLM2012 Coverage: Dirk Geeraerts: Corpus Evidence for Non-Modularity

The first plenary talk at this year’s Poznań Linguistic Meeting was by Dirk Geeraerts, who is professor of linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium. In his talk, he discussed the possibility that corpus studies could yield evidence against the supposed modularity of language and mind endorsed by, for example, Generative linguists (you can find [...]

September 03, 2012

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1:54 AM | Estimating replication rates in psychology

The Open Science Collaboration's interim report, which will come out shortly in Perspectives in Psychological Science, is available. We nearly pulled off the physics trick of having a paper where the author list is longer than the paper itself. I think there are nearly 70 of us (if you scroll down, you'll find me in the H's). The abstract says it all: Reproducibility is a defining feature of science. However, because of strong incentives for innovation and weak incentives for confirmation, […]

September 02, 2012

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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-02

One person's reality is another person's metaphor. #metaphor #analogy # Philosophical realism is either obviously boring tautology or knot-tying maze of personal delusions. So what's the point. # Was dreading listening to this on #Wittgenstein & Heidegger but really enjoyed the discussion on #science & #philosophy http://t.co/E3mVYlrH # MetaphorHacker: Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice [...]

August 31, 2012

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4:25 PM | Around the Internet - 8/31

Publication A warning about the perils of preprint repositories. Statistical evidence that writing book chapters isn't worth the effort. (Though caveat: the author also doesn't find evidence of higher citation rates for review papers in journals, which I had thought was well-established.) One person who finds things to like in the publication process (I know, I don't link to these often). Neuroskeptic argues that we don't necessarily want to increase replication, just replicability. […]