Language Log

In today's newspapers and magazines:

"Newborns cry in their native language".
"Babies cry with an accent within the first week of life".
"Babies cry wiith the same 'prosody' or melody used in their native language by the second day of life".
"Newborn babies mimic the intonation of their native tongue when they cry".
"French babies cry in French, German babies cry in German and, no doubt, the wail of an English infant betrays the distinct tones of a soon-to-be English speaker".

The science behind these statements is in a paper released yesterday: Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke, "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language", Current Biology, in press. Does it support these journalistic generalizations? Before reading the paper, I give ten-to-one odds against, on the general principle that journalistic statements involving generic plurals are almost never true. Mesdames et messieurs, faites vos jeux. Let's spin the wheel.

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"Thought for the Day" is a four-minute reflective sermon delivered each morning on BBC Radio 4 at about ten to eight by some representative of one of the country's many religious faiths. On the first day of October the speaker was the Reverend Angela Tilby, Vicar of St Bene't's in Cambridge, England. (Bene't is an archaic shortened form of Benedict.) Developing a familiar theme from prescriptivist literature, she preached against adjectives. It was perhaps the most pathetic little piece of inspirational prattle I have ever heard from the BBC (read the whole misbegotten text here).

"Adjectives advertise," claims the Rev. Tilby, and "brighten up the prose of officialdom", but she was always "encouraged to be a bit suspicious" of them when she was a girl: "Rules of syntax kept them firmly in their place" (as if the rules of syntax left everything else to do what it wanted!). This was good, she seems to think, because "For all their flamboyance they don't really tell you much." Adjectives "float free of concrete reality" like balloons, and are guilty of "not delivering anything except, perhaps, hot air." Which aptly describes her babbling thus far. But now, inflated with overconfidence, she risks some factual statements. And steps from the insubstantial froth of metaphor into the stodgy bullshit of unchecked empirical claims about language use.

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Mark Liberman has been writing about the persistent misinterpretation of claims about statistical differences between groups with respect to some property — misinterpretations in which these differences (often small ones) are understood as general (and essential) differences between the groups. A little while ago, Mark suggested that reporting the differences by means of generic plurals ("Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do") promotes misunderstanding and proposed that such generic language be avoided.

In comments, Mark noted that changing the language of popular science reporting is not by itself going to fix an inclination to essentialist thinking (which is all over the place), though it might be a step in the right direction.

Mark looked at groups X and Y with respect to property P, focussing on statistical differences between X and Y. Let's say that members of X tend to have P to a greater degree than members of Y. Then there's a statistical association (perhaps a very weak one) between X and P. And most people have as much trouble understanding statistical association as they do statistical differences. Here, the characteristic error in reasoning is treating the association as invariant: all Xs have P (and no non-Xs do). Again, the error is all over the place, often showing up in objections to claims of statistical association. As in the following case from a September 30 NYT story "Dementia Risk Seen in Players In N.F.L. Study" by Alan Schwarz.

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Steven Woloshin et al., "Press Releases by Academic Medical Centers: Not So Academic?", Annals of Internal Medicine, 150(9): 613-618:

Background: The news media are often criticized for exaggerated coverage of weak science. Press releases, a source of information for many journalists, might be a source of those exaggerations.

Conclusion: Press releases from academic medical centers often promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health and do not provide key facts or acknowledge important limitations.

There's no indication that any of the 200 press releases in their sample was as bad as the infamous "Nobler Instincts Take Time" document from USC that set off a flurry of headlines like "Twitter makes users immoral, research claims". (For details, see "Debasing the coinage of rational inquiry: a case study", 4/22/2009.)  And even further out on the long tail of hooey are the virtuoso flacks who create scientific-seeming news out of little or no research at all.

But Woloshin et al. do conclude that investigators should "review releases before dissemination, taking care to temper their tone (particularly their own quotes, which we often found overly enthusiastic)". This is certainly good advice, though it's not much more likely to be followed than any other good advice that runs counter to its recipients' interests.

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It isn't often that I learn a new English word while reading the newspaper, but today's New York Times contains one: snarge. It means "the residue of birds that have struck an airplane" and is used by, and apparently was coined by, the people at the National Museum of Natural History who try to identify the birds that have had fatal encounters with airplanes. I leave to the imagination what future anthropologists will make of the existence of this term. They'll probably decide that 21st century Americans practiced a peculiar high-tech form of divination.

Over on The Loom, the blogging home of my brother Carl Zimmer, a discussion about bad science writing was sparked by a particularly noxious Esquire article. (The description of cardiologist Hina Chaudhry as "a lab-worn doctor-lady" is just the tip of the iceberg.) In the comments, David Fishman left the cryptic remark, "Consider the armadillo." Carl revealed that this was an in-joke dating back to 1989, when the two of them were budding science reporters at Discover Magazine:

Our editors always warned us against writing openings and transitions with words no sane person would ever utter. Which we epitomized as, "Consider the armadillo."

"Consider the armadillo" does indeed sound like journalistic hackwork, all the more because it's in the form of a snowclone. In one early formulation, Geoff Pullum defined snowclones as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." In this case, the crutch for lazy (science) writers goes all the way back to the New Testament.

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Yesterday's Zits:

For a teenage boy, according to this joke, the idea of cleaning up his own messes is so alien that learning to understand its expression in simple English is part of learning a foreign language. I suspect that the stereotype is at least somewhat unfair, in terms of age as well as sex; but this comic strip also mocks (and thus illustrates) a common tendency to equate language and thought.

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Why, for heaven's sake, do journalists simply make stuff up when the science involved in a story is linguistic science? When the photos of those planets orbiting HR 8799 in Pegasus appeared this week, the press reported correctly that the objects in question were gas giants like Jupiter. They didn't say that they were giant balls of feathers. But when writing about the death of the late lamented South African singer Miriam Makeba, The Economist asserted that "she could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language". Bob Ladd has pointed out to me that actually there are two asinine howlers in this. One, which I didn't immediately notice, is that we don't speak about Edith Piaf as being able to sing while making the uvular trills of the French language, because those sounds are part of the French language: they are perfectly ordinary consonants (r-sounds). She sings words that contain them, and if she didn't, she wouldn't be singing the right words. Well, the clicks of Xhosa are (for Xhosa speakers) perfectly ordinary consonants too. But the other thing is more serious: "epiglottal clicks" are a phonetic impossibility. In brief, clicks are produced with a suction action using the middle of the tongue, and the back of the tongue completely seals off the airway during a click. The epiglottis is way down near the larynx. It is literally impossible for there to be a click (i.e., velaric suction stop) articulated at or with the epiglottis. There are epiglottal sounds in some languages, but they are not clicks; and Xhosa doesn't have any epiglottals. The (anonymous) obituarist was simply slinging around phonetic terminology they had come across but did not understand. Shame on you, Economist. Hire a fact-checker. Or look things up on Wikipedia. Or ask Language Log.

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Those who follow LL's posts on the public presentation of science may be interested in a recent essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli , discussed in the Economist under the title "Publish and be wrong".

The original essay is Neal S. Young, John Ioannidis, Omar Al-Ubaydli, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science", PLoS Medicine.

In the past, Ioannidis has explained "Why most published research findings are false". And that's before the press gets hold of them.

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Now that the Large Hadron Collider is stumbling towards full operation, perhaps it's time to clarify how to parse (and interpret, and pronounce) its name. Is it the [large [hadron collider]] or the [[large hadron] collider]? Is it a device for colliding hadrons (in the way that a particle accelerator accelerates particles, and an atom smasher smashes atoms) or just a collider whose operation depends essentially on hadrons (in the way that a hydrogen bomb depends on hydrogen, and a lithium-ion battery depends on lithium ions)?) And is the main phrase stress on the last word ("collider") or on the middle word ("hadron")?

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In the section on "Theories of Language Development" in Karen Huffman's Psychology in Action, Wiley, 8th edition, 2005 (p. 303), we read that

… Noam Chomsky … suggests that children are born "prewired" to learn language. They possess neurological ability, known as a language acquisition device (LAD), that … enables the child to analyze language and extract the basic rules of grammar.
[…]
Although the nativist position enjoys considerable support, it fails to explain individual differences. Why does one child learn rules for English, whereas another learns rules for Spanish?

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So many complaints about science journalism appear here on Language Log that it is only proper that we should occasionally draw attention to a fine piece of popular science writing. One such, I think after one read-through, is Natalie Angier's "Gut instinct's surprising role in math" in The New York Times (hat tip to Barbara Scholz, who pointed me to it). It's reporting on a paper in Nature by Halberda, Feigenson, and Mazzocco, which supports the view that (in Feigenson's words) "your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math." There have been many Language Log posts on related themes, like "The cognitive technology of number" (July 11, 2008) and "The Pirahã and us" (October 6, 2007). There is intrinsic interest in what Angier reports: evidence that how good you are at subitization, the instinctive quantity-assessing ability you share with many animal species, is correlated with, and perhaps even determinative of, the extent to which you will readily develop abilities at linguistically formalized manipulation of mathematical concepts. But Angier's article also represents an instance of really good generally accessible writing about science, in a contemporary American newspaper. It can be done. Some science journalists put out good product. And not all journalism that touches on the cognitive and linguistic sciences gets grumbled about on Language Log.

Here's another interview-as-blog-post. This time the interviewer is someone writing a book, who has read some of the Language Log posts linked here and here; and the subject of the interview is "the new fashion for biological determinism in debates about differences between the sexes".

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Some more sociological platonism: Tamsin Osborne ("Are men happier than women?", New Scientist, 7/25/2008) explains that "I've just received the rather troubling news that I am doomed to be unhappy in later life". This turns out to mean that she will have a (very) slightly less than even chance of being in the happiest half of a gender-balanced sample of Americans older than 50 or so — and her way of expressing this is a typical (and thus interesting) example of the journalistic (and perhaps scientific?) tendency to turn small group differences into essential group characteristics.

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A few days ago, Arnold Zwicky expressed some annoyance at the New Scientist's cover story of July 19 ("Sex on the Brain", 7/22/2008). Arnold couldn't stand "to reflect on yet another chapter in this story", and I'm not especially enthusiastic about this either, especially because as far as I can tell, the New Scientist's story lacks any news hook. But this case raises a couple of points about the rhetoric of science journalism (and sexual science) that are worth making yet again, even though they've been made many times before.

Hannah Hoag's story appears under a headline that's really strange, if you think about it for a minute: "Brains apart: The real difference between the sexes". The implication is that all that stuff about genitals and the uterus, breasts and facial hair and larynx and so on, are fake or at least superficial differences — the "real difference" is in the brain. Furthermore, if the neurological differences are so much realer than all those differences in other body parts, then male and female brains must be really different, right?

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That's the title of the cover story (by Hannah Hoag) in the most recent New Scientist (19 July 2008). It begins:

ANYONE in a long-term relationship will tell you that, at times, men are indeed from Mars, and women are almost certainly from Venus. It's common knowledge that the sexes often think very differently, but until recently these differences were explained by the action of adult sex hormones or by social pressures which encouraged males and females to behave in a certain way. For the most part, the basic architecture of the brain, and its fundamental workings, were thought to be the same for both sexes.

Increasingly, though, those assumptions are being challenged. Research is revealing that male and female brains are built from markedly different genetic blueprints, which create numerous anatomical differences. There are also differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages between neurons. All this is pointing towards the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two.

Oh, spit! Here we go again, with reports of previous studies of anatomical and neurological differences (critiqued in a long series of postings here) interpreted as establishing categorical differences between the sexes and so echoing "common knowledge" in a crude way. I haven't the heart to reflect on yet another chapter in this story.

After reading about the evolutionary origins of (some brainstem pathways controlling) social vocalization, you might enjoy seeing what you get from people who get paid for explaining things to you, and have actual editors and stuff:

"Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins"; "Honey? Gurgle, gurgle"; "Researchers report toadfish sing to attract mates"; "When fish talk, scientists listen"; "We all sing like fish"; "Spread the word: Fish talk"; "Grunting fish tell of the origins of human speech"; "Grunting, humming fish joins ancient chorus";  "Study dates origin of vocal sounds"; "Cornell scientists discover how fish 'talk'"; "Talking fish"; "Mud-dwelling Toadfish Give Clues to the Origin of Human Speech"; etc.

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The latest xkcd:

Its title tag: "If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction."

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I'm not sure whether David Brooks has changed his mind about nature and nurture, or just has a short attention span. It wasn't long ago that he told us ("David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) that

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

But in his most recent column (David Brooks, "The Luxurious Growth", 7/15/2008), he's singing a different song:

It wasn’t long ago that headlines were blaring about the discovery of an aggression gene, a happiness gene or a depression gene. The implication was obvious: We’re beginning to understand the wellsprings of human behavior, and it won’t be long before we can begin to intervene to enhance or transform human life.

Few talk that way now. There seems to be a general feeling, as a Hastings Center working group put it, that “behavioral genetics will never explain as much of human behavior as was once promised.”

Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associations. It’s now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait. Instead, a specific trait may be the result of the interplay of hundreds of different genes interacting with an infinitude of environmental factors.

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Rudis Muiznieks, a skeptical cartoonist whose work appears at cectic.com, posted this strip on May 30:

The backstory:

"Parrot telepathy at the BBC", 1/28/2004;
"BBC's duplicity stuns Language Loggers", 1/15/2007;
"Invisible telepathic parrots", 6/30/2007.

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