language
dmunger | November 5, 2007Imagine that, over the course of a conversation with a friend from work, she makes the following two statements:
It's possible that my brother will be coming into town tomorrow
It's possible that our boss knows about the affair you had with the intern
(You might also have to imagine a more adventurous romantic life for yourself). Which of these two statements do you think your friend believes is most likely to be true? Let's make this a poll:
If I did a good job setting up this scenario, I should be able to predict the results of the poll. I'll get to my prediction in a minute.
First, let'…
dmunger | October 23, 2007
When Jim was about 13 months old, I happened to be enrolled in a graduate level developmental psychology class. Our big term paper assignment involved observing two children at different developmental stages. I decided it would be cool to do a "longitudinal study" of Jim's language development over the course of the semester -- my "two children" would be one person -- Jimmy (as we called him then), at the beginning and end of the semester. The period from 13 to 16 months old is often a very important period in language development, when many babies begin to understand not only words but also…
sb admin | October 12, 2007Via Metacafe, here's an audio/visual illusion involving reading lips and seeing voices (nothing to do with synaesthesia) called the McGurk Effect.
grrlscientist | October 11, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, linguistics, evolution, irregular verbs, languages
When I was an undergrad, I almost took a degree in linguistics because I was so fascinated by languages, especially by the rate and patterns of change that languages undergo. So of course, I was excited to read two fascinating papers that were published in this week's issue of Nature. These papers find that individual words evolve in a predictable manner and this rate of evolution depends upon their frequency of use. Further, this predictability can be defined mathematically.
To test this hypothesis, one group…
purepedantry | October 11, 2007Erez Lieberman et al. at Harvard are looking at the rate of change in words to see if words evolve:
Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in '-ed', as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.
Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2007Here's something I've been wondering about. Anybody know Arabic historical linguistics?
Al-qaeda is Arabic for "the base, basis, foundation, military base". Alkaid is the Arabic name for Eta Ursae Majoris, a star in the Big Dipper. It's short for al-qaid al-banat an-nac, meaning "the leader of the daughters of the bier", because the three stars of the Dipper's handle were seen as mourning maidens, wailing at the bier of their father who had been murdered by Polaris.
So qaida is foundation and qaid is leader. Are these words true cognates? Does Al-Qaeda have its own star in the sky? The…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2007
Over at David Nessle's, his witty readers are discussing translations -- more particularly, bad translations. I collect crap translations from English to Swedish, so I decided to offer some to you, Dear Reader. To make this palatable to non-Swedish-speakers, I'll add a second step to explain what the Swedish mistranslation means literally in each case.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Main character drives around on a rainy night looking for a place called Cornflower. Meeting someone, he asks for directions, but the other guy just drives off and our hero yells an insult after him.
"Excuse…
dmunger | October 3, 2007
A study doesn't have to be brand-new to be interesting. Consider the situation in 1992: It was known that adults are much better at distinguishing between sounds used in their own language compared to other languages. Take the R and L sounds in English. In Japanese, both of these sounds belong in the same category of sounds: both sounds have the same meaning, which is why it's difficult for native Japanese speakers to learn the difference between the sounds in English. In 1992, it was thought that this linguistic specialization occurred at about the age of 1, when infants learn their first…
dmunger | September 18, 2007Take a look at this video (QuickTime required). The screen will turn white for 1/2 second. Then a word will appear for about 1.5 seconds. Pay attention to the particular shade of gray the word is printed in. Next, a strip of five different grey squares will appear. Which square matches the color of the word?
It's a difficult task, but not impossible (we'll collect answers in a poll at the end of the post). A team led by Brian P. Meier had college student volunteers complete a similar task, and they were able to achieve 30 percent accuracy -- somewhat better than the 20 percent you would…
purepedantry | September 18, 2007A boy from Britain who had a case of viral meningitis had to undergo surgery to drain the fluid from his brain. When he awoke and recovered, he had a new accent:
William McCartney-Moore of York was struck down with viral meningitis last March and needed brain surgery after doctors found he had a rare strain called empyaema. "He lost everything," said his mother, Ruth. "He couldn't read or write, he couldn't recognise things, he had no recollection of places he'd been to and things he'd done and he'd lost all his social skills. He went from being such a bright, lovely, wonderful eight-year-…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2007Lately I've repeatedly come across two bits of English usage that look really wrong to me. Checking them up, it turns out that in one case I was right, in the other wrong.
Principle/principal. Many native English speakers of extremely high academic accomplishment don't seem to know that "principle" is a noun and "principal" most commonly an adjective. They will happily write "my principle objection is blah blah bla". Wroooong.
Jealousy/envy. In Swedish, the words svartsjuka and avund have distinct meanings. Svartsjuka (literally "black illness") is what you feel when you fear that your…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2007One of the brightest stars of Swedish literature is Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795). Much of his work is a kind of humorous beat poetry set to music, chronicling the lives of Stockholm drunkards and whores. Central themes are boozing, sex and death.
"You think the grave's too deep?
Well then, have a drink
Then have another two and another three
That way you'll die happier"
"A girl in the green grass and wine in green glasses
I feast on both, both gather me to their bosom
Let's have some more resin on the violin bow!"
But Bellman wasn't strictly speaking part of the underworld he wrote about…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2007The poet, philologist and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846) once wrote,
All bildning står på ofri grund till slutet
Blott barbariet var en gång fosterländskt
"All our learning must always stand on a slavish foundation
Barbarism is our single true heritage"
This was in the context of how nice Tegnér felt that the late-18th century reign of Gustaf III had been. This was somewhat controversial in the time of national romanticism, as the Gustavian era had been inescapably saturated by French cultural imperialism.
And Tegnér was right. As European countries go, Sweden was very late with all the…
dmunger | August 9, 2007When you have a conversation with someone, you're doing a lot more than just interpreting the meaning of the words they say. You're also trying to figure out what they intend to say and integrating that in to your understanding. You're working together with them to decide whose turn it is to speak. Your accents become similar. Your body movements become synchronized. You even scratch your nose at the same time as your conversational partner.
It makes sense, then, if you're both looking looking at the same picture while you talk, that you'll look at the same parts of the picture at the same…
cogdaily | July 16, 2007This is a guest post by Laura Younger, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
Take a look at these static images from a video clip.
Can you tell what the person is doing? It might be hard to make it out from these still pictures, but when you see the same thing in motion it becomes quite clear. Visit the Biomotion Lab and you'll quickly understand.
What you see is called a point-light display. Lights are attached to joints on the body and filmed while a person is performing an action. The animated display makes it surprisingly clear that this person is walking. But, could a…
omnibrain | July 10, 2007Everyone thinks the printing press led to increased literacy among the average man in the middle ages, but that just might not be the case. Dr Marco Mostert a historian from Utrecht University is instead suggesting that the availability of cheap paper was the main reason more reading material became available. While this isn't surprising the source of the new cheap paper is. It seems that, according to Dr. Mostert,
"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as…
dmunger | July 5, 2007A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings:
[originally posted on May 9, 2006]
The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can:
If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors,…
omnibrain | July 4, 2007It's kind of hard to imagine a child lying who barely understands language and is even less able to produce something understandable. And babies certainly don't have a very developed theory of mind! But like all areas of developmental psychology the trend is for people to be able to do things earlier and earlier and deception seems to be one of those universal abilities all humans have very early on. A Psychologist, Vasudevi Reddy, from the University of Portsmouth has identified seven different categories of ways that babies can deceive. The ways that babies deceive are essentially (…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2007The other day I suddenly understood the etymology of the word "helicopter". Many would probably try to take the word apart as heli-copter, which makes no sense. I mean, what does it mean to copt helis? "I am a copter and I sure love coptin' them old helis."
What you need to do is look at words like Pteranodon (meaning "tooth on wing"), Diptera (meaning "two-wings") and "helix". Helico-pter! Helix-wing! Suddenly there's a new nerdy option for the hyphenation of that word.
I once read a newspaper article about record producer Phil Spector, where he was poetically described as "helicopter…