Language Log

Alan Greenblatt of NPR wonders why news outlets insist on continuing to draw attention to the blindness of Chen Guangchen, the Chinese activist who recently escaped house arrest and who has been at the center of international attention this past week.

Greenblatt writes (NPR online; 5/4/2012):

Chen has been repeatedly referred to as "the blind activist" or "the blind activist lawyer" by news outlets such as The New York Times, The Associated Press and The Washington Post. The Economist's current cover story is headlined "Blind Justice."

On Wednesday, NPR decided not to label Chen a "blind activist"….

Descriptions of Chen as blind may have stuck in part because of the way he burst into broad Western consciousness last week—not through his longstanding campaign against China's one-child policy, but by escaping house arrest and trekking 300 miles to Beijing. The fact that he is blind made the story that much more dramatic.

"We're sticking with 'blind' because Chen's name might not be familiar to readers, but they may be aware that there's a 'blind activist' in trouble," says Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy.

But it doesn't seem like a useful shorthand to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and regular contributor to NPR's Fresh Air.

"It was relevant, obviously, in reference to his escape," Nunberg says, "but the continued use implies a relevance that just isn't there. I don't think it's a 'PC' thing – the point would be the same if he were, for example, 6′7″."

Andrew Dowd, the intrepid and renowned hunter of syntactic rarities, has finally managed to find a "Russia sentence" captured on video. There are bound to be some of you out there who didn't fully believe that people walk around saying nonsensical things like More people have been to Russia than I have. You needed harder proof. Well, here it is, on YouTube, and what's more, the speaker is an experienced broadcaster confidently compering a TV panel game:

At around 30 seconds in, you can hear and watch Stephen Fry (he of the unbearably prissy recent BBC language program Fry's Planet Word) say: It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks.

SC, a native reader of British headlinese, was baffled by the noun pile-up "Coin change 'skin problem fear'" on the BBC News web site, because he hadn't previously encountered the story.

Sindya N. Bhanoo, "Real Words or Gibberish? Just Ask a Baboon", NYT 4/16/2012:

While baboons can’t read, they can tell the difference between real English words and nonsensical ones, a new study reports.

“They are using information about letters and the relation between letters to perform the task without any kind of linguistic training,” said Jonathan Grainger, a psychologist at the French Center for National Research and at Aix-Marseille University in France who was the study’s first author.

We've had discussions here lately about whether certain bits of sound coming out of Rick Santorum's mouth are to be taken as evidence of his bigotry ("Blah people", 1/6/12; "The return of 'Blah people'"?, 3/30/12). Santorum's position has been that certain racially-loaded gaffes were merely inadvertent slips of the tongue that reveal nothing about what he intended to communicate. Whenever there's a debate like this, in which the speaker disavows intent for certain utterances, two questions come up:

1) Did the speaker really intend to say what he said, and is only now back-pedaling to avoid the consequences?
2) Even if he didn't intend it, does the slip say something meaningful about his inner thoughts and attitudes?

Many people believe that unintended slips do reveal something about a person's hidden beliefs, taking a Freudian view of speech errors, though there's actually no evidence that this is true. I've used Santorum's most recent slip (in which he uttered the syllable "nig" while launching into criticisms of Barack Obama) as an opportunity to give a short lesson on speech errors over at Discover Magazine's blog, The Crux.

But the discussions here on Language Log have mostly dealt with Question 1, the issue of intent. So I'd like to say something more about that.

For the background of this discussion, see "The QWERTY effect", 3/8/2012; "QWERTY: Failure to replicate", 3/13/2012; and "Casasanto and Jasmin on the QWERTY effect", 3/17/2012. In their reply to me, C&J make three basic points:

• "We’re not concerned with Liberman’s subjective evaluation of the QWERTY effect’s size or of our study’s importance."
• "The QWERTY effect is reliable. Replication is the best prevention against false positives. In this paper, we demonstrated the QWERTY effect *six times*: in 5 corpora (one of which we divided into 2 parts, a priori), in 3 languages, and in a large corpus of nonce words."
• "There’s a reason why scientific results go through peer review, and why analyses are not simply self-published on blogs. If there were a review process for blog posts, or if Liberman had gone through legitimate scientific channels (e.g., contacting the authors for clarification, submitting a critique to the journal), we might have avoided this misleading attack on this paper and its authors; instead we might have had a fruitful scientific discussion."

In other non-replication news lately: There's been a pretty kerfuffle this month in social psychology and science blogging corners over a recent failure to replicate a classic 1996 study of automatic priming by John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows. The non-replication drew the attention of science writer Ed Yong who blogged about it over at Discover, and naturally, of John Bargh, who elected to write a detailed and distinctly piqued rebuttal at Psychology Today.

The original paper reported three experiments; the one that's the target of controversy used a task in which subjects unscramble lists of words and isolate one word in the list that doesn't fit into the resulting sentence. The Bargh et al. study showed that when the experimental materials contained words that were associated with stereotypes of the elderly (e.g. Florida, bingo, gray, cautious), subjects walked more slowly down the hall upon leaving the lab compared to subjects who saw only neutral words. The result has been energetically cited, and has played no small role in spawning a swarm of experiments documenting various ways in which behavior can be impacted by situational or subliminal primes. The authors explained their findings by suggesting that when the concept of a social stereotype is activated (e.g. via word primes), this can prompt behaviors that are associated with that stereotype (e.g. slow walking).

LL readers will not be surprised to learn that Daniel Casasanto and Kyle Jasmin disagree with my evaluation of their work on the "QWERTY effect". Yesterday afternoon, they added a comment to that effect on the original post. Since relatively few of the people who read that post are likely to see their comment, I'm reproducing it below. I'll respond at some later point.

Following up on "The QWERTY effect", 3/8/2012, I got this email earlier today from Peter Dodds:

Rebecca Rosen, "The QWERTY Effect: The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language!", The Atlantic:

It's long been thought that how a word sounds — it's very phonemes — can be related in some ways to what that word means. But language is no longer solely oral. Much of our word production happens not in our throats and mouths but on our keyboards. Could that process shape a word's meaning as well?

That's the contention of an intriguing new paper by linguists Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto. They argue that because of the QWERTY keyboard's asymmetrical shape (more letters on the left than the right), words dominated by right-side letters "acquire more positive valences" — that is to say, they become more likable. Their argument is that because its easier for your fingers to find the correct letters for typing right-side dominated words, the words subtly gain favor in your mind.

There's a lot of media uptake for this work: Rachel Zimmerman, "Typing and the meaning of words", Common Health; "QWERTY Keyboard Leads to Feelings about Words", Scientific American; Rob Waugh, "Why just typing 'LOL' makes you happy: People like words made of letters from the right-hand side of the QWERTY keyboard", Daily Mail; Alasdair Williams, "The 'QWERTY Effect' is changing what words mean to us", io9; "The right type of words", e! Science News; Dave Mosher "The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words", Wired News; Rebecca Rosen "The QWERTY Effect: The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language", The Atlantic, etc.

Kazutaka Kurihara & Koji Tsukada, "SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback", arXiv:1202.6106v1 [cs.HC], 2/28/2012:

In this paper we report on a system, "SpeechJammer", which can be used to disturb people's speech. In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stop speaking. Furthermore, this effect does not involve anyone but the speaker. We utilize this phenomenon and implemented two prototype versions by combining a direction-sensitive microphone and a direction-sensitive speaker, enabling the speech of a specific person to be disturbed. We discuss practical application scenarios of the system, such as facilitating and controlling discussions. Finally, we argue what system parameters should be examined in detail in future formal studies based on the lessons learned from our preliminary study.

Keith Chen's recent proposal that the grammar of tense marking in a language has a causal effect on future-oriented financial and health behaviors is too intriguing to resist talking about. In fact, it reminds me of the words of a prominent linguist who once announced during his talk: "The explanation in question is almost certain to be false. However, if it were true, it would be incredibly interesting, so we have no choice but to explore it."

I'm not sure that this is the best argument for, say, how research funding should be allocated. At least, I've never had the guts to put that in a grant proposal. But if Language Log isn't the place to explore almost-certainly-false-but-incredibly-interesting-if-true ideas, then I don't know what is.

"Santorum Spokesperson Refers To Obama's 'Radical Islamic Policies'", TPM 2/20/2012:

Rick Santorum spokesperson Alice Stewart slipped up on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports Monday afternoon when talking about President Obama's environmental policies. Instead, she called them Obama's "radical Islamic policies."

Santorum communications director Hogan Gidley told TPM that Stewart "misspoke." Andrea Mitchell said that Stewart called her to say she slipped up. "She had repeatedly said during that same interview ‘radical environmental policies’ and she said she slipped when she apparently said [it]."