Language Log

Below is a guest post by Mark Seidenberg on Malcolm Gladwell's recent book, David and Goliath, which promotes the idea that apparent disadvantages are often actually advantages, and in particular suggests that dyslexia might be Good For You.

This piece is commentary on a chapter about dyslexia in Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book. I don’t follow his work closely, and the book is being reviewed and critiqued everywhere, but I thought the chapter merited a response from somebody, like me, who studies dyslexia and works with local advocacy groups for dyslexics and their families. The chapter deserves s a line-by-line analysis; what I’ve written only mentions the main issues. The document incorporates several key points that were handed to me by Maryellen MacDonald, for which I thank her, a lot.

__________________________Mark Seidenberg
__________________________Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
__________________________University of Wisconsin-Madison

Today's Frazz:

In Tainan, Taiwan, there's an amateur sports team that calls itself the Yěqiú rén bàngqiú duì 野球人棒球隊, the English version of which is "Yakyuman Baseball Team"

Here's their Facebook page.

A Korean restaurateur, trying to make his menu more accessible for foreign customers, came up with bewildering English translations of some dishes.

Yasmine Seale discusses the (legendary and real) history of the Turkish alphabet: "Q v. K", LRB Blog, 10/16/2013. I was interested to learn that this version of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's signature, actually designed by the Armenian calligrapher Hagop Çerçiyan, is "one of the most popular tattoos in Turkey":

There are some famous American signatures, but I've never seen any of them used as a tattoo.

Crazy English: crazier than you imagined!

An anonymous tipster sent me this photograph taken in a washroom at the Kunming Airport:

Sent in by Molshri Ezekiel via David Donnell:

In Meg Wilson's post on marmoset vs. human conversational turn-taking,  I learned about Tanya Stivers et al., "Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation", PNAS 2009, which compared response offsets to polar ("yes-no") questions in 10 languages. Here's their plot of the data for English:

Based on examination of a Dutch corpus, they argue that "the use of question–answer sequences is a reasonable proxy for turn-taking more generally"; and in their cross-language data, they found that "the response timings for each language, although slightly skewed to the right, have a unimodal distribution with a mode offset for each language between 0 and +200 ms, and an overall mode of 0 ms. The medians are also quite uniform, ranging from 0 ms (English, Japanese, Tzeltal, and Yélî-Dnye) to +300 ms (Danish, ‡Ākhoe Hai‖om, Lao) (overall cross-linguistic median +100 ms)."

Kat Chow, "Asian-American Band Fights To Trademark Name 'The Slants'", NPR codeswitch 10/20/2013:

The Slants, a six-member band from Portland, Ore., calls their sound "Chinatown Dance Rock" — a little bit New Order, a little bit Depeche Mode. They describe themselves as one of the first Asian-American rock bands. Their music caters to an Asian-American crowd, they've spoken at various Asian-American events, and they're proud of all of it.

But the Slants have been duking it out with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) over the past four years because of their name. The PTO refused the band's two trademark applications, saying that "slants" is a disparaging term for people of Asian descent. Now the band plans to take their case to a federal circuit court.

This is a guest post by Margaret Wilson.

Turn-taking is fundamental to human conversation, so the question of whether it occurs in other social animals is extremely interesting. A new paper on turn-taking in marmoset monkeys (Takahashi et al., "Coupled Oscillator Dynamics of Vocal Turn-Taking in Monkeys", Current Biology, 2013) is to be applauded for tackling this issue.

Unfortunately, though, it is not clear that their data demonstrate turn-taking in any sophisticated sense: specifically (and this is the sense embraced by the authors), entrainment of timing mechanisms between two individuals to regulate the passing of the turn. They begin by asking, "Is this a simple call-and-response (‘‘antiphonal’’) behavior seen in numerous species, or is it a sustained temporal coordination of vocal exchanges as in human conversation?" They conclude that they have shown the latter, but, on my reading, all their data is compatible with simple call-and-response. What seems to be going on is that the authors have failed to appreciate just how weird human turn-taking is.

From Reuben Fischer-Baum, "Six Decades of the Most Popular Names for Girls, State-by-State", Jezebel 10/19/2013:

From Tim Leonard:

I read here that Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his diary, "… are virtually identical with us." I was surprised that he would use "identical with" rather than "identical to," since I find it ungrammatical. So I checked Google Ngram Viewer, and was delighted to discover that the preposition that goes with "identical" appears to be a previously fixed choice that's in the process of changing:

There's an article in the current issue of The Economist that you should read carefully: "Trouble at the lab", 10/19/2013.  If you're a regular reader of Language Log, you'll be familiar with the issues that it raises — lack of replication, inappropriate use of "statistical significance" testing, data dredging, the "file drawer effect", inadequate documentation of experimental methods and data-analysis procedures, failure to publish raw data, the role of ambition and ideology, and so on.

But all the same, I'm going to push back. The problems in science, though serious, are nothing new. And the alternative approaches to understanding and changing the world, including journalism, are much worse. In fact, some of the worst problems in science are the direct result, in my opinion, of the poor quality of science journalism. One of the key reasons that leading scientific journals publish bad papers is that both the authors and the editors are looking for media buzz, and can usually count on the media to oblige.