Language Log

Connoisseurs of misnegation will not be surprised by cases where an author who uses three or four negatives in one proposition finishes up with one too many. Thus Jessica McGregor Johnson, Remembering Perfection – Everyday Inspiration for Living Your Spirituality, 2008:

It is also true that we are afraid of our emotions. Part of us believes that if we allow our sad emotions free reign then maybe we will never stop crying. I have news for you — no-one has never not been able to stop crying.

Ricardo Piglia, "Artificial Respiration", translated by Daniel Balderston:

The facts and evidence were so clear that it seems impossible that nobody has never noticed.

"Sussex or Sussex-Devons?", The Farmer's Magazine, Jan. 1870

I do not say for one moment that no one has not for the sake of an experiment crossed Sussex with Devon ; but that the improvement in the Sussex stock of late years is in consequence of crossing with the Devon, or any other breed, I entirely deny.

There's been a fair amount of media interest in a recent study suggesting that dyslexics are worse than controls at (certain kinds of) speaker recognition. This is an interesting study in itself, which is why it made it into Science. But I'm just as interested in its uptake in the popular press, which mostly ranged from "missing the point" to "catastrophic confusion" (and you may not be surprised to learn where on the spectrum the BBC's coverage landed, alas). I'll discuss the study itself here, and then take up the press coverage in another post.

Reader Sarah C pointed out an interesting turn of phrase in Jordan K. Turgeon, "Myths About Memory", The Huffington Post 8/3/2011:

According to previous research, when defendants wrongly committed of a crime were later exonerated by DNA testing, the primary evidence in the original case often came from an eyewitness. [emphasis added]

(Obligatory screenshot here…)

Most people believe they're better-than-average drivers. They also believe that, while many others are taken in by advertising messages, they themselves remain immune to persuasion unless it's with the full consent of their rational and thoughtful selves. Charming delusions. But surely we're not left defenseless, and awareness of the persuasive intentions of advertising must provide some sort of skeptical buffer against the daily onslaught of commercial messages that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Enough so, argued the late free marketeer Jack Calfee, that the myth of the vulnerable consumer is just that, and advertising should be regulated as little as possible in order to allow its salutary effects to permeate the economy. In his book Fear of Persuasion, Calfee wrote:

Advertising seeks to persuade, and everyone knows it. The typical ad tries to induce a customer to do one thing—usually, buy a product —instead of a thousand other things. There is nothing obscure about this purpose or what it means for buyers. Consumers obtain immense amounts of information from a process in which the providers of information are blatantly self-interested and the recipients fundamentally skeptical.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is in the business of regulating advertising, happens to agree with Calfee about the protective effects of identifying persuasion for what it is. Which is one reason why it's recently clarified its guidelines on endorsements to require that bloggers and social media users disclose any pecuniary relationship with the makers of the products they're shilling for—even if free stuff is all they're getting for their efforts.

In "Wow…?", 7/17/2011, I presented 10 isolated examples of "wow" or "oh wow" from published telephone conversations, and invited readers to judge the intensity and valence of each of the ten items (where "valence" is taken to mean the speaker's apparent negative or positive evaluation of the situation under discussion). There were 56 usable responses — I discarded another 5 or 6 because of  problems like 9 or 11 judgments instead of 10. I've done some simple analysis, described below.

The 56 sets of usable responses were well differentiated and fairly consistent: people evaluated these utterances in a lawful way. This kind of survey has promise as a source of input for efforts to learn the mapping between acoustic properties and human responses.

There's no obvious independent check on the "intensity" judgments, so the main question was how consistent they would be. In the case of the "valence" judgments, we can also look at the context to see how the speakers seems to be evaluating the state of affairs that they're responding to.

Robert Coren, in a comment on "X là là", 7/7/2011:

Surely the various shades of meaning of such exclamations are conveyed as much or more by tone of voice than by choice of vowel. I can certainly imagine saying "wow" to mean "That's really amazingly beautiful", and also saying "wow" to mean "Oh, that sounds really bad, I hope it gets better soon", and there being no doubt in my hearers' minds which one I meant.

It's not easy to boast, when you're a politician. Take for example Bill Clinton, who'd had a pretty good first term. But when it came time to campaign for his second term on the strength of his record, assertions about his accomplishments didn't get much traction. According to his advisor Dick Morris,

Clinton's achievements were a problem. In strategy meetings, he often complained that he had created seven million jobs and cut the deficit but no one seemed to notice. In speeches, he referred to the achievements awkwardly. Our polls showed audiences already knew about them or didn't believe they were true.

The solution, apparently, was a re-jiggering of language. Morris relates that communications strategist Bob Squier had the following bright idea:

The key…was to cite the achievement while talking about something he was going to do. For example: "The hundred thousand extra police we put on the street can't solve the crime problem by themselves; we need to keep anti-drug funding in the budget and stop Republicans from cutting it." Or: "The seven million jobs we've created won't be much use if we can't find education people to fill them. That's why I want a tax deduction for college tuition to help kids go on to college to take those jobs."

I did the stupidest thing in Bulgaria. I bought a new wallet. Never do that on a foreign trip. See if you can figure out why before you read on. (And yes, of course there's a linguistic angle.)

Molly Ireland, Richard Slatcher, Paul Eastwick, Lauren Scissors, Eli Finkel, and James Pennebaker, "Language Style Matching Predicts Relationship Initiation and Stability", Psychological Science 12/13/2010.

Previous relationship research has largely ignored the importance of similarity in how people talk with one another. Using natural language samples, we investigated whether similarity in dyads’ use of function words, called language style matching   (LSM), predicts outcomes for romantic relationships. In Study 1, greater LSM in transcripts of 40 speed dates predicted increased   likelihood of mutual romantic interest (odds ratio = 3.05). Overall, 33.3% of pairs with LSM above the median mutually desired   future contact, compared with 9.1% of pairs with LSM at or below the median. In Study 2, LSM in 86 couples’ instant messages   positively predicted relationship stability at a 3-month follow-up (odds ratio = 1.95). Specifically, 76.7% of couples with LSM   greater than the median were still dating at the follow-up, compared with 53.5% of couples with LSM at or below the median.   LSM appears to reflect implicit interpersonal processes central to romantic relationships.

This is interesting stuff, in my opinion. But so far, it's gotten relatively little uptake in the popular press. And in one of the few — rather obscure — pieces to mention this research, it was spun as a guide to dating success.

Back in February, I posted about a terrific symposium on bilingualism at the AAAS meeting ("What bilinguals tell us about Mind and Brain", 2/19/2011). Along with the symposium's abstract and a list of the participants, and some complaints about the AAAS's failure to make it symposiums accessible to a broader public by putting them on  line, I promised that "If I have time, I'll summarize some of this work in a later post" — which never happened.

One of the most striking topics covered in that symposium was the fact that bilingualism offers, on average, about five years of protection against the symptoms of Alzheimer's, apparently by creating a "cognitive reserve" in executive function that allows people to continue performing at a higher mental level for a given degree of brain degeneration. This research was the focus of a recent New York Times article: Claudia Dreifus, "The Bilingual advantage", 5/30/2011.

The article is in the form of a Q&A between the reporter, Claudia Dreifus, and the researcher, Ellen Bialystok. The content is excellent — clear, to the point, not hyped or spun for effect — and there are links to the research papers!

If you're one of the ten people who haven't seen the twin-baby-conversation video, here you go:

(Part 1 is here.)

Following up on Wednesday's Dinosaur comics post, Lera Boroditsky wrote:

Mark – Thanks for suggesting an important new research direction for my lab in your post yesterday.  Grammatical sexual orientation markers are definitely the next frontier.

In exchange, I offer an essay by Jakobson, which is brilliant, and not just because it begins with a meditation on the meaning of cheese. We recently tested his claim that personification in art correlates with grammatical gender.

Among the more than 150 interesting symposia at AAAS 2011, Section Z (Linguistics) sponsored five. I posted earlier about the symposium on "What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain". I'm adding a link today to another one, "From Freud to fMRI: Untangling the Mystery of Stuttering". Its abstract:

This symposium will track current developments in the study of stuttering, the fruit of recent collaborations among researchers in the fields of genetics, speech motor control, and language processing. Until the past decade, much of the research into this common yet poorly understood communication disorder tended to be narrowly focused on accounts within a single discipline, from psychoanalysis to learning theory to articulatory control to hemispheric asymmetry. In this symposium, we will provide examples of the cross-disciplinary research that is changing consensus on the probable basis for stuttering. Recent advances in genetics, brain imaging, and speech motor control will be discussed in terms of their ramifications for better understanding this elusive disorder as well as treating it more effectively.

And I'll assert again that the AAAS would do itself and (more important) its mission a service by putting slides and videos or audios of these symposia on the web, for free public access. I was happy to learn from Stephen Anderson that steps of this kind are now under consideration.