Language Log

In the comments to my post Orwell's Liar, Beth posted a link to Joseph William's article The Phenomonology of Error, and Mark reposted the link in a follow-up post here.

Well, I just finished reading the Williams article, and what I want to know is how the fuck an article riddled with errors could ever be published in a respectable journal…

Over at the Brainstorm blog ("Psychology Today Editors Flood the Blog Zone"), Matthew Hutson asks "What does Caroline Kennedy know that we don't?" This is about Caroline Kennedy's filled pauses, of course, but what struck me first about Matt's post is the way that the blog format allows a journalist to take a more personal approach to the news:

Using the phrase is a pet peeve of my mom's. She'll interrupt my dad and say, "No, I don't know–you haven't told me yet." I suppose the peeve has latched onto me, as I'm more aware than most people are of its use.

The Typalyzer website gives an instant and fun psychological profile of any blog based on the language used. Asked about Language Log, it says we're "scientists". It's true! It's true!

Although we are "intellectually curious and daring", we "might be pshysically hesitant to try new things." I admit it. I'm so pshysically challenged that I can't even pronounce it.

Further, we "tend to be so abstract and theoretical in [our] communication [we] often have a problem communcating [our] visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples." Yes, also true. Communcating has never been our strong point. Note to self: more conrete.

But ok, spelling aside, this stuff isn't bad at all, until you get to the next part of the analysis. Which is the most misleading picture of a brain since Dan Hodgins showed us where to find the Crockus:

That's why my brain hurts.

[Below the fold, a note for the curious on how the Typalyzer website works.

I was delighted to see this article at the NYT profiling a friend and colleague of mine, Jamie Pennebaker. You might also like to check out this website where he and his students analyze language use in a little preznitential contest thing that appears to happen for about two years of every four in the country I call home. (In return, it calls me a resident alien.)

If you're a linguist, I'm guessing you'll either love Pennebaker's work or hate it. Why might you hate it? Because he's a social psychologist who looks at at language in the most superficial way possible, eschewing all the tools of modern linguistic theory in favor of word counts. Not a tree in sight.

You might think that it does, from the headlines "Bilingual children stutter more – study", "Stutter risk for bilingual kids", "Study: bilingual kids more likely to stutter", etc. These stories report on a recently-published study: Peter Howell, Stephen Roger Davis, and Roberta Williams, "The effects of bilingualism on stuttering during late childhood", ADC Published Online 9 September 2008.

Howell et al. studied 317 children who stuttered, all of whom started school in the UK at age four or five, first came to a speech clinic between 8 and 10, and lived in the greater London area. For 69 of the 317, "at least one language other than English was spoken in the home". Thus 21.8% of the stutterers were raised in a home where a language other than English is spoken. In comparison, among schoolchildren of comparable age in the greater London area, the London Education Authority reports that 28.4% come from such homes.

But wait a minute: the percentage of stutterers who come from non-English-speaking homes is smaller than the percentage of kids in general who come from such homes? How does this translate into "Bilingual children stutter more", or "Stutter risk for bilingual kids"?

A few days ago, I received this poignant note from an anxious parent in Pittsburgh:

I have developed a serious interest in the origination of uptalking and methods to treat it. As absurd as it may sound, my daughter is a Ph.D. and lives in another city. When she visits me, she populates most of her explanations with uptalking. She is a psychologist.

When I am conversing with her I become extremely anxious since I have fixated on the uptalking and it puts me at a severe level of discomfort. I discussed it with her several times. She claims that it is a speech pattern she developed which is normal and that it is my problem. I noticed that many of her friends, all professionals including psychologists, attorneys and physicians also engage in uptalking. Though she vehemently denies that she can stop uptalking to me, when she is angry she speaks perfectly. It appears that it is a psychological insecurity requesting some sort of approval or affirmation from the listener that what the talker says is correct, approved by the listener or adequately explained to the listener.

My daughter recommended that I seek therapy and that it is my problem. Has any research been done to show that not only has the phenomenon of uptalking been documented and described, but that it can have very negative affects on the listener?

A lovely example of a word-substitution error, from David Kurtz's commentary in "TPMtv's View of Michelle's DNC speech":

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and uh below us is speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi
((uh)) and a coterie of other Republic- or Democratic leaders

Most people know that amphetamines and related drugs have been prescribed over the years to increase alertness and to fight fatigue (although caffeine apparently works about as well and is safer), to improve morale (although during WWII the Germans restricted its use because of addiction problems), as a diet drug, and for medical conditions from "idiopathic anhedonia" in the 1950s to ADHD today. Those who don't know this history can learn about it from Nicholas Rasmussen's "Life in the Fast Lane", The Chronicle Review, 7/4/2008.

Even more people know that amphetamines have long been used for recreational purposes, among subcultures as diverse as beats, hippies, and bikers; and that non-prescription uses have recently been spreading in the U.S. among several paradoxically unrelated groups, including rural whites, homosexuals, and students at elite colleges.

But few people seem to have picked up on the fact that improved alertness, focus and mood may not be the only reasons that amphetamines are popular as a "study drug".

A new paper on language and number cognition is in press: Michael C. Frank, Daniel L. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, & Edward Gibson, "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition", Cognition (in press 2008). Michael put the paper on his web site, and so you can easily get and read the whole thing.

A couple of days ago I reported on an article in last week's New Scientist, "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The New Scientist article reports on some neat experiments in an article in PNAS involving how people represent events non-linguistically, e.g. when miming. The main result, as the New Scientist reporter saw it, is that people mime in the order Subject, Object, then Verb, regardless of the word order of their native language, and that this provides evidence that this word order is "etched into our brains".

The PNAS article is "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally", by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. Unfortunately you or your institution needs a subscription (or $10) to see it. Fortunately, I've read the PNAS article on your behalf. And here I say "fortunately" only in the sense that I might have saved you money, and not with the intention of discouraging anyone from reading the original article: it's a clearly written and thought provoking scientific paper presenting a couple of clever little studies which garnered some neat results. (Have I mentioned before that there's no good reason why every clearly written and thought provoking  scientific paper presenting a couple of clever little studies which garnered some neat results is not free for everyone?)

So anyway, as I say, I looked at the PNAS article, and, well, I dunno. I'm glad New Scientist covered the story, and they got the main results factually correct, which is a good start, but it still looks to me like misleading reporting in New Scientist, though far from being the most egregious example we've seen here at Language Log.

Here's an article in yesterday's New Scientist: "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The ever eagle-eyed Ben Zimmer thrust it under our noses as we hung around the LL water-cooler this morning. My interest was piqued. It would be much easier to learn about language by playing charades than by using the extraordinarily laborious standard method, i.e. studying language.

The article reports on a new paper in the prestigious journal PNAS, "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally", by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. I've taken a look at the PNAS paper, but for now I just want to give you my immediate reactions to the New Scientist article. I'll follow up with some comments on the PNAS paper later.

In the study the New Scientist article reports on, subjects with various native languages look at pictures involving characters doing things to other characters, and then they mime what they saw. And the main finding the New Scientist article reports is that:

"Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction."

Cute! But now it gets a little weird:

"Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces."

Sridhar Srinivasan asks about an amazon.com review (emphasis added):

"…After seeing the reviews, I bought this book in new condition at a really cheap price. I couldn't be less satisfied. The book explains all details in clear detail, so that even talented high school students could understand the text. The images that accompany the text greatly reinforce the main ideas…. "

Sridhar observes that the author seems to mean "I couldn't be more satisfied", and wondered whether there's any connection between this and the idiom "I could care less", used to mean "I couldn't care less".

… if you can't read the word California?

And how can you (despite the above) read the word California anyway, when you're expecting to see instances of it?

I'm reporting here on a real case, that of my late partner Jacques Transue, who exhibited just this configuration of (in)abilities. Such extremely selective ability constitutes a paradox of neurology (neurolinguistic division), of the sort that Oliver Sacks delights in. The key idea is some sort of cognitive split between what we know, or are able to do, EXPLICITLY, and what's there IMPLICITLY.