Language Log

Recently in the news, a (not yet published?) study by Lauren Emberson and MIchael Goldstein, on why "halfalogues" are so annoying. Thus "Eavesdropping a waste of energy", ABC Science:

Ever wonder why overhearing a phone conversation is so annoying? American researchers think they have found the answer.

Whether it is the office, on a train or in a car, only hearing half of a conversation drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking, according to scientists at Cornell University.

"We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation, or 'halfalogue', than when listening to a dialogue," says Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated," she says.

A report from last Tuesday's Guardian begins thus:

Sarah Colwill initially found it amusing when a series of migraines caused her native West Country accent to be displaced by a Chinese lilt. But after a month, the joke is wearing thin for the 35-year-old IT project co-ordinator. "I have never been to China," she says. "It is very frustrating and I just want my own voice back."

Matthias Mehl et al., "Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations", Psychological Science, published online 18 February 2010:

Is the happy life characterized by shallow, happy-go-lucky moments and trivial small talk, or by reflection and profound social encounters? Both notions—the happy ignoramus and the fulfilled deep thinker—exist, but little is known about which interaction style is actually associated with greater happiness. In this article, we report findings from a naturalistic observation study that investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the amount of small talk and substantive conversations they have.

From reader GK:

One of your recent LL postings jogged an old memory. In the early 70s I sometimes hung out at Brown's college radio station, and one evening I was working on creating an ad in the production studio there. Somehow I managed (by accident) to set up the following situation: I was speaking into a microphone whose input fed into the record head of a reel-to-reel tape player, while listening to the output from the play head. I wore thickly padded earphones. The tape first passed the record head, then — after a fractional-second delay — the play head, so that I was hearing my own voice on that delay. Despite my best efforts, I could not utter an entire sentence, but would grind to a halt almost immediately. I wonder whether this effect has been observed in experiments (I would guess so). It's not surprising, of course, but I found it to be a powerful demonstration.

This effect is indeed well studied experimentally. It now goes by the name "delayed auditory feedback" (often abbreviated DAF).

Reader RC sent in an item from the Australian Law Journal that brings together several LL topics: the relations of language to  legal interpretation, computation, and nonstandard brain states.

Here is the seal whose inter-word dots are discussed in the quoted transcript:

Wikipedia explains what a "McKenzie Friend" is (and gives some background on DM). Beyond that, you're on your own.

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876.  In 1880, Mark Twain wrote a comic sketch about how strange it is to overhear one end of a telephone conversation.  A century and a quarter later, people have gotten used to the experience with landlines — or at least stopped complaining about it — but we still tend to perceive overheard cell phone conversations in public places as more distracting and annoying than real-life conversations, even when the real-life conversations are just as loud or even louder.

Now there's increasing experimental evidence that phone conversations are not only cognitively more troublesome than in-person conversations for outsiders, they're more difficult for participants as well. One recent study interviewed pedestrians who had just walked along a 375-foot path across an open plaza where a clown on a unicycle was riding around. Only 2 out of 24 cell phone users reported seeing the clown. In comparison, the unicycling clown was reported by 12 out of 21 people involved in real-life conversations as they walked the same path.

One of the papers that caught my eye at the just-complete LSA meeting in Baltimore was Abby Kaplan, "Articulatory reduction in intoxicated speech". Here's the abstract:

Voiceless stops are commonly voiced post-nasally and intervocalically. Such alternations are often attributed to articulatory ‘effort reduction’: a hypothesis that voiced stops are ‘easier’ in these environments. My experiment tests this hypothesis by comparing productions of intoxicated subjects with those of sober subjects, assuming that intoxicated subjects produce more ‘easy’ articulations. Intoxicated subjects did not uniformly increase voicing of post-nasal or intervocalic stops; rather, the range of voicing durations contracted for both types of stops. I conclude that considerations of effort do not straightforwardly predict post-nasal and intervocalic voicing: the traditional effort-based account of these processes must be refined.

In the comments on "The order of ancestors" (12/24/2009), there was some discussion about the possible role of gender bias in determining the preference for orders like "mothers and fathers" over "fathers and mothers".  This discussion faced a basic empirical problem: there were more plausibly-relevant principles (a long list of apparent semantic and phonological preferences) than there were facts to explain.

In this post, I'll review in more depth the evidence about the preferred orders of English binomial expressions for gendered categories of humans. This review will leave us in the same logical impasse.  Then I'll tell you about the clever solution found by Saundra Wright, Jennifer Hay and Tessa Bent in their paper "Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy", Linguistics 43(3): 531–561, 2005.

Reader MH wrote to ask "I was wondering if the following phenomenon is backed up by any data, and if so, if it's unique to English", with respect to a bit of Twitter social science, wherein happymrlocust asked

Tell me twitter, when you refer to your grandparents together, who comes first, the grandmother or the grandfather?

and learned that:

Possibly this is an english language thing, but most replies have been "grandma first". Which is very curious.

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.