Language Log

That's the head that the New Scientist chose for the print version (in the 21 June issue) of its story (by Andy Coghlan) on the Savic/Lindström studies that Mark Liberman reported on here on Language Log (with a link to the New Scientist's 16 June on-line version, which had a different head: "Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex"). Mark noted that different publications headed their stories in different ways: as the discovery of a similarity between gay people and straight people of the opposite sex; as a discovery about homosexuals; or (mostly) as the discovery of a similarity between homosexual men and heterosexual women. Now the New Scientist has promoted the "decided at birth" or "born that way" interpretation of the experiments from the story's lead paragraph to its head.

And it featured the story in an editorial

It's a queer life

We need to ditch the idea that homosexuality is unnatural

Yesterday ("Sexual pseudoscience from CNN", 6/19/2008), I promised to follow up with a discussion of Jennifer Connellan et al., "Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception", Infant Behavior & Development, 23:113-18, 2000. This post fulfills that promise. But first, I want to say something about the appropriate role of such studies in influencing public opinion and forming public policy.

Scientists mostly understand the dangers of overinterpretation and the importance of replication and triangulation. The public mostly doesn't. Unfortunately, journalists and editors also mostly don't understand these issues — or at least they act as if they don't. As a result, the role of science in the marketplace of opinion is seriously degraded by popular prejudice and by lobbyists for various commercial and ideological interests. I hope that this post, aside from any intrinsic interest that the content may have, will provide some material for discussion of those points.

The old oppositions between girls and boys — sugar and spice vs. snips and snails — continue to be reinforced and extended in the popular press by sexual pseudoscience. For example, Leonard Sax's false claims about boys' inferior hearing are front and center again in Paula Spencer, "Is it harder to raise boys or girls?", CNN.com/health, 6/17/2008:

Why don't boys seem to listen? Turns out their hearing is not as good as girls' right from birth, and this difference only gets greater as kids get older. Girls' hearing is more sensitive in the frequency range critical to speech discrimination, and the verbal centers in their brains develop more quickly. That means a girl is likely to respond better to discipline strategies such as praise or warnings like "Don't do that" or "Use your words."

There's been a lot of discussion, both in the mainstream media and on the intertubes, of a study that came out a couple of days ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, "PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects", PNAS, 6/16/2008.

And in this case, the study's rhetorical reception is more interesting than the study itself.

At scienceblogs.com's Evolving Thoughts, the philosopher of biology John S. Wilkins recently referenced a couple of Language Log posts ("Queensland grammar brouhaha", 6/13/2008; "How the Romans invented grammar", 6/14/2008), and added his own ruminations ("Grammar wars in Queensland", 10/14/2008):

Now grammar wars and grammar nazis go back a long time, and the fight seems to this outsider to be between those who follow Chomskyian transformational grammars and those who follow traditional grammars.

To this insider, John's comment seems to be yet another indictment of my profession, which has evidently failed to provide, to one of the more intellectually accomplished members of the general public, even the faintest hint of a clue. Closer to home, in this case, even reading two Language Log posts didn't make a dent. So let me try again.

A sample of today's biospam:

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"Purity" at xkcd:

Addendum by Simon Holloway at Davar Akher: "Of course, you can’t see Linguistics because it’s waaaay over to the right."

This post follows up on my promise ("Sax Q & A", 5/17/2008) to respond to Dr. Leonard Sax's answer to my 2006 critique of the sensory physiology and psychophysics in his 2005 book Why Gender Matters. The first installment, yesterday, was about hearing ("Liberman on Sax on Liberman on Sax on hearing", 5/19/2008). This one is about vision. I'll try to make it shorter, and I'll try to keep it entertaining — but I'll warn you again, this is probably more than you want to know about the subject, unless you're deeply interested in the anatomy and physiology of vision, or in the rhetoric of Dr. Sax's movement.

Geoff Pullum posted a little while back on the way the language of the imprisoned children in Amstetten, Austria was characterized in the Daily Telegraph, under the outrageous headline Dungeon children speak in animal language. Last year I spent some time trying to track down the facts in another imprisoned-Austrian-children story (this time in Linz). In the first coverage I saw, from The Times on 12 February 2007, the children (three girls) were said to have developed their own language, an "almost unintelligible" form of German, with an astonishing twist: the girls "reportedly finish all sentences with the word "but" [that is, German aber]".

The first report I have seen concerning the language skills of the imprisoned children involved in the horror story coming out of Amstetten, this Daily Telegraph story by Nick Allen [hat tip: Matt Austin], is headlined Dungeon children speak in animal language. I suppose we should have expected it: the usual headline-writers' nonsense. Animals do not have language, and these children do not communicate like animals. The story says:

Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his brother Felix, five, learned to talk by watching a television in the dungeon where they were held with their mother Elisabeth Fritzl, 42. But their form of communication is only partly intelligible to Austrian police officers.

Police chief Leopold Etz, 50, who has met the two boys, said: "It is only half true that they can speak. They communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing."

"If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."

Being able to say anything at all to other people, however exhausting the process, makes them already quite different from any non-human animal species on earth. And semi-private speech modes used by children with siblings (e.g., identical twins with mostly or only their twin for company) are well known to developmental psycholinguists.

I find the Amstetten story almost unbearably appalling. I am viscerally affected by the story each time I think about it, which is many times each day. A point about reporting on their language seems almost too trivial to make. But perhaps it is worthwhile to say just this much: let us all try to ensure that the terrible psychological damage done to these poor children and their mother by the monster who imprisoned them is not now amplified by the promulgation of sensationalist nonsense likening them to animals.

I got a message the other day from Laura Petelle, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Illinois Central College, with an optimistic view of the effects of modern technology on writing skills and research abilities, the diametrically opposed to the ill-substantiated pessimism about cellphones destroying language and thought that Naomi Baron somehow peddled to a writer for The Economist. Says Laura:

I've been tutoring writing since I was in high school, and I think texting and instant messaging has made the job quite a bit easier! I used to get students who'd stare at a blank page, for whom writing was a chore, and translating their normal communication mode from talking to writing was like pulling teeth. Today, I get students (both in my college classroom and in the high school tutoring I do on the side) for whom writing IS a normal mode of communication.

Maria Brumm, "Giving the Lie: Blogs and Scientific Criticism", Green Gabbro, 4/6/2008. My favorite paragraph:

This cultural conflict been making the rounds of the geoblogosphere thanks to a pair of editorials in Nature Geoscience on the pros and cons of blogging. See RealClimate and Highly Allochthonous for summaries, Kim (who talks about fact-checking before teaching undergraduates), Chris again (with diagrams!), and James Annan for further discussion. (Incidentally: I am sure the various editors of the Nature Publishing Group are too dignified and professional to dance around their offices going "Oh yeah, baby, who controls the discourse? We control the discourse! UNGH!"… but when was the last time a blog post sparked a rambling article in the pages of EOS or Geology?)

Also worth the price of admission: the pointer to Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth.