language
dmunger | March 17, 2008There is a growing body of evidence that very young children -- too young even to talk -- still know plenty of words. When our kids were very young, it was quite clear that they knew the meanings of many more words than they could actually produce. When they couldn't speak at all, they understood words like "Mommy," "bottle," and "diaper." When they were older and could say those words but not complete sentences, they understood more complicated phrases like "go into the kitchen and bring me your sister's sippy cup."
But is there something special about words? Or could babies learn to…
dmunger | March 13, 2008Psychologists often complain that neuroscientists get a disproportionate share of the glory when the mainstream media reports on their studies. It seems to some that an important new psychology study is often neglected or ignored entirely, while neuroscience studies of similar importance are hailed as "groundbreaking." What is it about pictures of brains that are so appealing?
A while back, were excited to hear of a study which promised to show that people are more impressed by neuroscience explanations of research results than nonneural psychology explanations. Paul Bloom's article about the…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2008At PZ's suggestion, I've twiddled some knobs behind the scenes to force the blog to speak utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1. This will hopefully allow you guys to write even stranger comments than usual. Maybe I'll even be able to stop writing stuff like "& a u m l ;" Please try it out! Såy sömëthïng ïn Swëdïsh! Mattias, have you any lewd suggestions to make in Koiné Greek? Is anyone able to rattle off a few lines of Arabic love poetry? Go nuts, y'all!
dmunger | March 3, 2008You might expect someone's cultural background to influence their speech, their appearance, their musical tastes, and the foods they like. You'd probably also expect culture to have an impact on values and beliefs, on stories and traditions. But what about their bodies -- not just physical features like skin color or hair texture, but attitude towards the self? If culture touches on so many aspects of an individual, perhaps it can also impact the subtle ways people think about of their own bodies.
Consider this fairly well-established difference between Euro-Americans and Asian Americans:…
edyong | February 28, 2008
Chimpanzees may not be able to recite Hamlet or giving rousing speeches but there is no doubt that they are excellent communicators. They exchange a wide variety of sophisticated calls and gestures that carry meaning and can be tailored to different audiences.
The sophistication of chimp communication doesn't stop there. Jared Taglialatela from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has found that chimp signals and human speech are both strongly influenced by the same area in the left half of the brain - a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).
In humans, the left IFG is home…
purepedantry | February 28, 2008Language Log details the results of this fascinating experiment. The researcher was looking at second language acquisition, and in order to have a control she tested the native-speakers on the gender of particular words in French.
The assumption would be the native-speakers would all agree on the gender of the words, but she found that among the native-speaking teenagers native speakers -- and to a greater degree among teenagers -- there was widespread disagreement:
Ayoun was investigating second-language learning of grammatical gender in French -- a major difficulty for learners from non-…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008
I'm a big fan of Danish archaeology. In my opinion it is the best in Scandinavia, both regarding the sites they have and what they write about them. This love of Danish archaeology has been a strong incentive for me to learn to read Danish easily, though I still have a very hard time understanding it when spoken. (Rumour has it that Danish babies learn to speak on average several months later than other European ones, simply because it's so hard to discern any words in their parents' fond gurglings.)
Swedish and Danish aren't really separate languages in the sense that e.g. French and German…
dmunger | February 14, 2008I don't need words to think about the shape of a car, or how to throw a football, or the taste of a chocolate chip cookie. In fact, things like that are probably easier to think about without using language. That's why the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that language is necessary for conscious thought -- doesn't hold up. But even if language isn't required for some domains, it's still possible that it is required for certain types of mental processes. It may even be required for some thoughts that aren't obviously related to language.
Some research suggests that understanding…
dmunger | February 5, 2008A particular source of dread for politicians is how to respond to negative campaigning or other information impugning their character. By responding, they might only bring attention to an issue that voters hadn't even recognized: "Contrary to my opponent's claims, I have stopped beating my wife, and I haven't consumed more than a fifth of hard liquor in a single sitting."
Worse, many studies have found that even unequivocal denials fail to register in memory. In one study, participants read a report about the possible cause of a fire: a room full of oil paint and pressurized gas cylinders.…
dmunger | January 29, 2008Two facts are true about young children: they sleep a lot more than adults, and they learn language at an astonishing rate. How can they learn so much when they're sleeping so much of the time? Perhaps sleep itself enhances learning. In fact, a number of studies suggest that naps actually enhance learning in adults. What about kids?
A team led by Rebecca Gómez developed a clever test to see if 15-month-olds learn language faster when they've had a nap. At 15 months, most infants understand a lot of language, but don't produce much. But of course, each baby learns at a slightly different rate…
dmunger | January 24, 2008When you know something, is that different from remembering? Both types of thoughts are clearly part of the memory system, but is there really any difference between the two concepts? We often use the two terms nearly interchangeably: I might say "I remember Suzanne had her purse when we left the restaurant because I saw her pull out her phone at the bus stop," but I might equally say "I know Suzanne had her purse on the bus because she was gabbing on the phone the whole ride home."
But the subtle linguistic difference between the two terms isn't meaningless. We might know George W. Bush is…
dmunger | January 22, 2008When we first moved to the small suburban town we still live in, we quickly realized we needed to buy a second car. Nora and Jim were just one and two and a half years old, only barely beginning to understand language. After we made our purchase, sometimes we drove in the old car (a Subaru station wagon), and sometimes in the new car (a Plymouth minivan). Since neither child could pronounce words as complicated as "minivan," they had to come up with their own way to refer to the vehicles. They called the Subaru the "red car" and the van the "blue car."
But there were many other ways they…
aardvarchaeology | January 14, 2008Western European archaeology is largely a humanistic tradition where many scholars have little knowledge of the natural sciences. For instance, I myself haven't studied natural sciences in any organised way since high school. Still, in my field, I'm known as an unusually science-orientated guy. (Just look at me now, merrily blogging away at Sb.) I believe that human societies are to a fairly large extent shaped by human nature, which has long been controversial in anthro circles. I also favour stringent methods of data collection and analysis: archaeology should study and interpret its object…
dmunger | January 10, 2008There was a lot of buzz online a couple months back when an article entitled "Moniker Maladies" made what seemed to many to be a startling claim: Baseball players strike out more often when their names start with "K"; Students with the initials "C" and "D" get worse grades than others.
Actually, this effect, known as the "name-letter effect," has been known for several years. If your name -- even your last name -- starts with T, you're more likely to live in Tacoma or Tulsa than San Francisco or Springfield. Chris at Mixing Memory wrote an excellent summary of the research, so I won't repeat…
dmunger | January 7, 2008The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- stated in its strongest form -- claims that language determines thoughts: if a language doesn't have a means of expressing a particular idea, then people speaking that language can't even conceive of that idea. This strong form has long since been rejected: There are plenty of thoughts we can have without having the words to express them.
But there is also little question that the available words do have an important impact on our thoughts. If a language doesn't have a way to express numbers above 10, for example, then that would probably result in a somewhat…
dmunger | January 3, 2008During my brief tenure as a high school teacher, one common suggestion I got from supportive colleagues was to "make your tests teaching tools." "That's often the only time you've really got your students' attention," they suggested, "so don't neglect the opportunity to teach them something."
What they meant is that you shouldn't use misleading or false information in tests as a "trick" to make sure they grasp the material: your test might be the only thing students remember from a unit.
But there's another reason testing is important for learning. For decades researchers have known that more…
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2007Scandy readers will be very familiar with this. As we learned from "Hatten Är Din", "Ansiktsburk", "Fiskpinnar" and other Turk Hits back in 2000, you can get wonderfully absurd results if you listen to a song in a foreign language and pretend it's actually sung in your mother tongue.
Now, a talented Ansiktsburk poet has subtitled, in English, a typically over-the-top music video from southern India. Unbelievable stuff!
"Have you been high today?
I see the nuns are gay
My brother yelled to me
'I love you inside Ed!'"
omnibrain | December 11, 2007Well... it looks like ScienceBlogs is now in German - I really wish I could read it! I'm sure it's very interesting though. So now that we've taken over Germany who should be our next conquest be for global domination? We're attempting to take over the world one language at a time. Head over to the official Sb's blog, 3.14 to weigh in on the next language.
dmunger | December 6, 2007When we are trying to understand what someone is saying, we rely a lot on the movement of their face. We pay attention to how their faces move, and that informs our understanding of what is said. The classic example of this is the McGurk effect, where the same sound accompanied by different facial movements gets interpreted differently.
Take a look at this short video clip (QuickTime required) of me talking, with my voice muffled by what sounds like cocktail party conversation:
Can you understand what I'm saying? What about after I stop moving? Can you understand me in the second part of…
dmunger | November 7, 2007Children follow a consistent pattern when they acquire language. Instead of learning the most common words first, they start by learning a disproportionate number of nouns. In the youngest talkers nouns form up to 60 percent of their vocabulary, compared to just 40 percent of the vocabulary of a typical 2 and a half year-old (who now knows over 600 words).
This pattern applies in many different languages, even Mandarin and Korean, where verbs appear in more prominent positions in sentences. The phenomenon is so universal that it has led some theorists to speculate that acquisition of non-noun…