Language Log

To follow up on our recent discussion of the effects of Alzheimer's disease on the writing of Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie ("Literary Alzheimer's"; "Authorial Alzheimer's again"), I promised to post about the broader linguistic background, starting with a discussion of the normal effects of aging. With respect to lexical issues, there's a useful, if complicated, summary graph in a recent review paper coming out of the Language in the Aging Brain project (Mira Goral et al., "Change in lexical retrieval skills in adulthood", The Mental Lexicon 2: 215–240, 2007):

(Note that these are schematic plots from their statistical model, not the average values being modeled, much less the trajectory of any individual. The data comes from a "longitudinal data from 238 adults, ranging in age from 30 to 94, who were tested … over a period of 20 years".)

The Philadelphia Eagles have been winning recently, and this led [Inquirer columnist] John Gonzales to pose a generic question yesterday on the philly.com sports blog You Talkin' to Me?:

The Eagles are on a nice little run right now. Someone asked [Eagles head coach Andy] Reid about that the other day, about why his teams seem to come on strong late in the season. (Maybe that's something we just imagine; conventional wisdom and all that.) He just sort of brushed it off without giving an answer. Surprising, I know.

You guys are smart(ish). Why do Reid's teams appear to play better at the end of the year? And who wins today's game?

In reference to my post "Literary Alzheimer's", Mark Seidenberg points out that the NYT might have chosen an earlier example of the same sort of investigation as one of the "Most Interesting Ideas" of 2005: Peter Garrard, Lisa M. Maloney, John R. Hodges and Karalyn Patterson, "The effects of very early Alzheimer's disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author", Brain 128(2):250-260, 2005. (This work was of course cited and discussed by Lancashire and Hirst.)

One of the items featured in the New York Times Magazine's "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas", under the heading "Literary Alzheimer's", is a summary of Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, "Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie’s Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia: A Case Study", presented at the 19th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, Cognitive Aging: Research and Practice, 8–10 March 2009, Toronto.

Some of this is pretty convincing:

Yesterday I mentioned Wason and Reich's 30-year-old paper on sentences like No head injury is too trivial to be ignored ("A Verbal Illusion", The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 31(4):591-97, 1979), and promised to sketch their argument. Here's their basic analysis, in their own words:

Following up on my post about the often-puzzling semantics of the pattern "No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB", here's an up-to-date list of LL postings on a cluster of related topics, which I will keep updated as the years roll by:

John V. Burke wrote to draw my attention to a phrase in Walter Kaiser's "Saving the Magic City", NYRB, 12/3/2009 (emphasis added):

Roeck's book, for which he has done an impressive amount of research, tries to be a number of things at once: it is an account of the social and intellectual world of the expatriate community in fin-de-siècle Florence; it continues the biography of Aby Warburg he began with his earlier book; it is a history of late-nineteenth-century Florentine urban development; it is a cultural history; it addresses a wide variety of ancillary topics such as anti-Semitism, anarchism, labor conditions, and economic trends; and it discusses the various aesthetic theories being formulated at the turn of the century. No detail is too small to escape Roeck's net, not even the plans formed in 1898 to produce artificial ice commercially in Florence.

This echoes the classic example "No head injury is too trivial to ignore", discussed by Peter Wason and Shuli Reich, "A Verbal Illusion", The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 31(4):591-97, 1979.

[Attention conservation notice: this post wanders a bit too far into the psycholinguistic weeds for some readers, who may prefer to turn directly to our comics pages.]

In a recent paper, Ansgar D. Endressa and Marc D. Hauser document a puzzling result: Harvard undergraduates fail to recognize the regularities in "three-word sequences conforming to patterns readily learned even by honeybees, rats, and sleeping human neonates" ("Syntax-induced pattern deafness", PNAS, published online 11/17/2009).

Randy Gallistel is famous for his demonstration that rats sometimes seem smarter than Yale psychology students, but if worker bees and sleeping newborns really out-test Harvard undergrads, that would be a new low for Ivy-league intellect. In this case, however, it's not really true. The insects, rodents and infants would surely also fail in the form of the task inflicted on the Harvard students, who in turn would surely succeed if tested in the same way as the other animals cited.

For Language Log readers able to get BBC television broadcasts, at this BBC page you will find details of a Horizon documentary on BBC 2 TV, scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) night, about why humans talk and where linguistic ability came from, with footage not only of the Grand Old Man of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, who thinks it just sort of came about by some sort of genetic miracle, but also of Edinburgh's Simon Kirby (believed to be the only Professor of Language Evolution in the world) and Hannah Cornish, who demonstrate an experiment showing that particular features of language (notably a variety of compositionality) can be experimentally induced to evolve in a single afternoon. No one here in Edinburgh has seen the program or knows whether it will sensibly convey the content of the research that Simon and Hannah have done (they are understandably nervous, knowing that by Wednesday morning their TV careers will have begun, but not knowing whether they are going to be famous for science or comedy or tragedy). All of us await with mingled anticipation and trepidation. But the only way to find out will be to watch.

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.

What language is this?

Here's a bit more context:

Josh Fruhlinger sends along today's entry in the "crash blossom" sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website:

SNP signals debate legal threat

Crash blossoms (as we've discussed here and here) are infelicitously worded headlines that cause confusion due to a garden-path effect. Here we begin with SNP, which British readers at least will recognize as the abbreviation for the Scottish National Party. Then comes signals, which can be a plural noun or a singular present verb; following a noun, most readers would expect it to work as a verb. The third word, debate, can be a singular noun or a plural verb, and if you've parsed the first two words as Noun + Verb, then you'll be inclined to take debate as the direct object of the verb. So far, so good. But then comes legal threat. What to do now?