A few weeks after John McWhorter and I participated in a "diavlog" on Bloggingheads, the site is hosting another language-y conversation between Joshua Knobe of Yale and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford. Whereas the previous diavlog touched briefly on neo-Whorfian arguments about the culturally determined relations of language to thought (responding to a New York Times […]
A month ago, I linked to Lera Boroditsky's WSJ piece "Lost in Translation", and promised to discuss the contents in more detail at some point in the future ("Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame", 7/26/2010). At the time, I noted that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and […]
It's bizarre. Suddenly every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to "universal grammar". The most recent example involves Ewa Dabrowka's interesting work on the linguistic correlates of large educational differences — Quentin Cooper did a segment on BBC 4, a couple of days ago, about how this challenges the whole idea of […]
Yesterday, those listening to NPR's Morning Edition heard a report by Robert Krulwich ("Shakespeare had roses all wrong") discussing the effects of grammatical gender on word-association norms, as investigated by Lera Boroditsky.
"Are you a different person when you speak a different language?" That's the headline of the press release, released from embargo on June 17, describing David Luna, Torsten Ringberg & Laura Peracchio, "One Individual, Two Identities", Journal of Consumer Research, August 2008. The press headlines (not many, so far) echo the same idea: "How Switching […]
Helen DeWitt at Paperpools describes an interesting classroom experiment in techniques for (adult) learning of grammatical gender ("Winnie der Pooh", 5/15/2008) 18 students were tested on an artificial-language task, where gender was marked by choice among different articles, as in German: [They] were given a list of 20 words, each of which had been assigned […]