Emily Hopkins, Deena Weisberg, and Jordan Taylor, "The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information", Cognition 2016: Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information — even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the […]
No matter where I go these days, I hear young people shouting to their friends, "I'm playing Pokémon Go", which they pronounce "pokey-mon go". It would be an understatement to say that, for the past few weeks, Pokémon Go has been a veritable craze. Yet most people who play the game probably do not realize […]
Arriving at the London Underground subway station deep below King's Cross railway station, the main London terminal for trains to Edinburgh using the East Coast main line. I'm lugging a heavy wheeled bag, and there are flights of ordinary stairs as well as escalators, so I take the passenger elevator upward. Several of us crowd […]
A frequent topic of our Language Log posts has been about how best to learn Chinese, e.g.: "How to learn to read Chinese " (5/25/08) "How to learn Chinese and Japanese " (2/17/14) "The future of Chinese language learning is now " (4/5/14) Two things I have stressed: 1. take advantage of properly parsed Pinyin […]
I would like to call the attention of Language Log readers to an extraordinary article by Nikhil Sonnad: "The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font " (Quartz, 12/18/15) I knew that Nikhil was writing this article, because I helped him with the part about the historical development of the script […]
The news recently has been full of the debate between George F. Will and Bill O'Reilly. This started because of O'Reilly's book Killing Reagan, whose central premise is that the unsuccessful 1981 assassination attempt was, in a deeper sense, successful. Will explains why this premise is important ("Bill O’Reilly makes a mess of history", Washington Post 10/10/2015): The […]
Note from Gábor Ugray: I just came across a hugely exciting conversation on Twitter, about English words mixed in with Chinese / adopted into Chinese speech – as seen in the subject line. There’s no easy way to extract conversations from Twitter, but it’s all in Liz Carter's feed today: https://twitter.com/withoutdoing
In English-language conversations, older people tend to use UH more often and UM less often. And at every age, men tend to use UH more than women, and women tend to use UM more than men. These effects are large and robust – they've been documented in at least five independent datasets, from both North American […]
This post follows up on Mark Dingemanse's guest post, "Some constructive-critical notes on the informal overlap study", which in turn comments on Kieran Snyder's guest post, "Men interrupt more than women". As part of a project on the application of speech and language technology to meetings, almost 15 years ago, researchers at the International Computer […]
A few years ago, I wrote about a presentation by Bridget Jankowski on the trend towards increasing use of 's as opposed to of, in phrases like "the government's responsibility" vs. "the responsibility of the government". My post was "The genitive of lifeless things", 10/11/2009, and the slides from her talk are here. I was reminded of this […]
It is time for Language Log to set things straight about the Right Honourable Andrew John Bower Mitchell MP. The story of what everyone thought had happened in London on 19 September 2012 was reported here (by yours truly) in this post and this follow-up. It involved (we all thought) a snooty and arrogant Conservative […]
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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 […]