language
jgoldman | June 24, 2010Last week, I asked on twitter, and then on the blog, about peoples' preferences for listening to music while doing various types of sciencey work, and conducted an informal survey.
Today I'll give you the (entirely unscientific) results, and in a few days I'll share what research has to say about music and work productivity.
Fifty three scientists (or scientists-in-training) completed the survey. I had predicted that music would be preferred in general, but that as language demands of the task increased, music preference overall would decrease. Since I'm doing this at home and don't have SPSS…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2010When a family migrates, the members who pick up the local lingo first and best are generally the children, and they soon become little interpreters. My wife wrote letters to the Swedish authorities for her Chinese dad from the time she was 11. And when time rolled around for the biannual talk with the teachers about each pupil's scholastic progress, she was accompanied by her sister (1½ years older). I hear that such a setup, with all that it means for power relations in the family, can be a big problem for men from more strongly patriarchal traditions.
We're planning Juniorette's seventh…
omnibrain | May 18, 2010Straight from Neatorama:
A research team at Hebrew University in Israel has developed a computer program that can recognize sarcasm with about 77% accuracy:
To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
The algorithms were then trained on that seed set of 80 sentences from the collection of reviews. These annotated…
edyong | March 19, 2010
We like to be in control of our own lives, and some of us have an automatic rebellious streak when we're told what to do. We're less likely to do a task if we're ordered to do it than if we make the choice of our own volition. It seems that this effect is so strong that it even happens when the people giving the orders are... us.
In a set of three experiments, Ibrahim Senay from the University of Illinois has shown that people do better at a simple task if ask themselves whether they'll do it than if they simply tell themselves to do so. Even a simple reversal of words - "Will I" compared…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2010
Scandinavians generally speak pretty good English. But every now and then you come across reminders that they are still very far from being native speakers. Witness this pail of wall-paper glue that I bought earlier today.
Dear Swedish glue-maker, "hernia" means brock and is defined as "the protrusion of an organ or the fascia of an organ through the wall of the cavity that normally contains it". Wikipedia continues, "By far the most common herniae develop in the abdomen, when a weakness in the abdominal wall evolves into a localized hole, or 'defect', through which adipose tissue, or…
grrlscientist | February 19, 2010tags: How to Swear Like a Brit, humor, funny, comedy, culture, British culture, cursing, swearing, language, streaming video
My spouse, who I was told was a "shy and nerdly British scientist" is anything but that! He is teaching me, a shy and nerdly American scientist, how to swear like a Brit, something that inspired me to share this video with you.
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2010The non-profit Center for Desert Archaeology is located in Tucson, Arizona and publishes a fine magazine, Archaeology Southwest. These generous people contacted me one day out of the blue and offered me a complimentary subscription. On Monday issue 23:3 (summer '09) reached my mail box on snowy Boat Hill, and I was soon enticed to read it from one end to the other thanks to its fine graphic design, its lovely photographs and its exotic theme. I learned a lot!
Archaeology Southwest 23:3 is dedicated to Paleoindian archaeology in Arizona, New Mexico and the Mexican state of Sonora. The…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2010Danes often have tripartite names, like famous Roman Iron Age scholar Ulla Lund Hansen or NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And I've been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids. So I wrote my erudite buddy, osteologist Helene Agerskov Madsen, and asked her to explain.
I learned that the system is not very old (~100 yrs?) and has already started to fall apart. But in its idealised form here's how it works. The middle name tracks a matrilineage and the last name a patrilineage. When a child is born it…
grrlscientist | January 20, 2010tags: Metaphorically Speaking, language, pattern recognition,conceptual synesthesia, cognitive dissonance, James Geary, TEDTalks, streaming video
Aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language: the metaphor. Friend of scribes from Aristotle to Elvis, metaphor can subtly influence the decisions we make, Geary says. This talk is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is because the speaker uses an extended metaphor to describe metaphors.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference,…
dmunger | January 14, 2010We've discussed synesthesia many times before on Cognitive Daily -- it's the seemingly bizarre phenomenon when one stimulus (e.g. a sight or a sound) is experienced in multiple modalities (e.g. taste, vision, or colors). For example, a person might experience a particular smell whenever a given word or letter is seen or heard. Sometimes particular faces are associated with specific colors or auras. Synesthesia is relatively rare, but the people who experience it are genuine: their perceptions are consistent and replicable.
But one question researchers haven't been able to nail down is…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2010Everybody knows that English has borrowed the words ombudsman and smorgasbord from Swedish. But did you know that rutabaga is another Swedish loan? And that it was borrowed from a rural Swedish dialect, not standard Swedish?
"Rutabaga" is an American word for the kind of turnip known to Englishmen and Australians as swede. Indeed, the plant hybrid probably once arose in Sweden. In standard Swedish, though, it's called kÃ¥lrot, "cabbage root" -- which is botanically speaking exactly what it is. "Rut-" in "rutabaga" is simply rot, "root". Bagge ("-baga") means "ram", and my speculation is that…
dmunger | December 22, 2009[Originally published in January, 2006]
Clicking on the image below will take you to a short Quicktime movie. Make sure you have your sound turned up, because I've recorded a few sentences that play along with the movie. Your job is to determine, as quickly as possible, if each sentence is grammatically correct -- while you focus your vision on the animated display.
This demonstration replicates part of an experiment conducted by a group of researchers led by Michael P. Kaschak. The researchers showed similar animations to a group of volunteers and asked them to make similar judgments…
grrlscientist | December 22, 2009tags: Speak Better English, German, comedy, humor, funny, satire, television, streaming video
The man in this television commercial reminds me of myself as I attempt to learn to speak German.
ddobbs | December 18, 2009If you need a neurohook, think language acquisition, attention, mirror neurons, make your pick. No need. This one wins on entertainment value alone. via the twitter feed of the fine writer P.D. Smith.
When you're done, tune into RadioLab's stunning piece on Hamlet's last utterings.
ddobbs | December 14, 2009
Dear Readers, here's your chance to weigh in:
Over at the Atlantic, David Shenk, a sharp writer who keeps a blog there called "The Genius in Us All," has posted a gentlemanly smackdown ("Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off") that he and I had via email last week regarding the "orchid-dandelion" metaphor I used in my recent Atlantic piece, "Orchid Children" (online version title: "The Science of Success"). Every metaphor has its limits, and David Shenk, a highly capable writer, recognizes that well. Yet he thinks this orchid-dandelion metaphor is fatally flawed, at least as I use it…
dmunger | December 10, 2009I attended an unusual middle school. It was designed on an "open concept," with the idea that there should be no walls between classrooms. Social pressure would keep the noise levels down, because if kids got too loud, then their peers in other classes would encourage them to hush up. This actually worked most of the time, but one day one of the English teacher's classes was getting out of hand, and after trying several ways to get their attention, she resorted to something a big more dramatic. In a very loud voice, she simply said
SEX!
Her class, and several classes nearby, instantly stared…
edyong | December 7, 2009Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies.
By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…
edyong | November 11, 2009Today, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind permission from Roger Highfield, and with edits incorporating new discoveries since the time of writing.
The FOXP2 Story (2009 edition)
Imagine an orchestra full of eager musicians which, thanks to an incompetent conductor, produces nothing more than an unrelieved cacophony. You're starting to…
edyong | November 5, 2009Telling the difference between a German and French speaker isn't difficult. But you may be more surprised to know that you could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.
These differences are apparent just three days out of the womb. This suggests that they pick up elements of their parents' language before they're even born, and certainly before they start to…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2009
Runologist James E. Knirk has published a report on the recently found Hogganvik rune stone. His transliteration is
[?]kelbaþewas:s(t)^ainaR:aaasrpkf
aarpaa:inanana(l/b/w)oR
eknaudigastiR
ekerafaR
His translation is
Skelba-þewaR's ["Shaking-servant's"] stone. (Alphabet magic: aaasrpkf aarpaa). ?Within/From within the ?wheel-nave/?cabin-corner. I NaudigastiR [="Need-guest"]. I, the Wolverine.
So there isn't actually an explicit lord-retainer relationship in the text, just a guy whose name includes the word for servant, thewar. It also occurs in two names inscribed on weaponry from Danish…