17 posts · 9,225 views

I am a linguist who has worked in academia, government consulting, NLP, and the branding and marketing industry. I used to be a graduate student in linguistics specializing in the syntax-semantics interface and verb classes.

The Lousy Linguist
17 posts

Sort by Latest Post, Most Popular

View by Condensed, Full

June 29, 2011
04:18 PM
814 views

Through the Language Glass (Part 2) [reposted]

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

This is part 2 of my review of Guy Deutscher's new book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. This covers The Language Lens (129-249). Part 1 is here. This review will cover the scientific evidence that Deutscher reviews suggesting that language affects thought, and will end with a shocking proposal.To sum up my review of part one: meh. Okay, we've established that culture can influence language. This is a lot less controversial than Deutscher makes it seem and he spent a large amount of text defending that position. Okay, whatever, time to move on. In part 2 he again begins with historical review explaining why he thinks Whorf was a con man, but also why he thinks the core insights of early linguist relativity deserve closer, honest investigation. He complains that based his Hopi claims on just one lonely informant (p142). We'll see later that Deutscher himself falls for the same trap. He replaces Whorf with the Boas-Jakobson principle that languages differ in what they must convey, not what they may convey” (151). I respect Deutscher for making this a central theme in his book because I think he's right. To parrot his own recitation of Humbolt: any thought can be expressed in any language. It is what our native language forces us to foreground that makes linguistic relativity an interesting topic.Deutscher spends most of the second part of the book reviewing three areas of language that have provided evidence that language affects thought: spatial coordinates, grammatical gender, and color terms (familiar from part 1). The general point I want to make about his evidence is that it is far weaker than he maintains. But is is interesting. A brief set of reactions:Spatial Coordinates -- everything is embodiedMost of his argumentation about the affect of spacial coordinate terms on thought stems from Levinson's evidence from speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr which is famous for giving us the word “kangaroo.” Speakers of GY do not generally use ego-centric terms like "right" and "left" but rather use cardinal direction terms like "east" and "west." As a result, Deutscher claims, they remember information about situations differently than speakers of English. They have, so the argument goes, a perfect pitch for direction and they are always attuned to where north is. Deutscher's claim is that only the linguistic repetition of such terms can possibly account for this. Hence, their language affects what they pay attention to and what they remember, hence language affects thought.I've never found this line of research all that convincing regarding linguistic relativity and Deutscher does not really add much to the debate. Like Deutscher's complaint above regarding Whorf's one lonely Hopi speaker, it turns out there are not many native speakers of Guugu Yimithirr left and haven't been for a while. These experiments on directional language involve very few speakers, and most of them have both cardinal direction and ego-centric direction in their dialect. If we're going to complain about Whorf's restricted subject pool, we must complain about Levinson's too.But more to the point, I believe all direction terms are ultimately ego-centric insofar as they are embodied. The terms "north" and "south" are not magically universal. They are based on a human being's body and orientation (i.e., ego-centric). Don't believe me, ask yourself, what does "north" mean in space? What does "north" mean to an amoeba? Mostly what Deutscher does in his discussions of direction terms is reiterate the point he belabored in Part 1: culture affects language. Yeah, we got that already.The rise of similarity judgmentsThat is until he discusses the table experiments. These experiments show subjects tables with objects on them and ask them to arrange them in accordance with a target. Basically, they ask for similarity judgement. How can you make this table arrangement similar to the previous table. This methodological paradigm has become prominent in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, especially studies testing linguistic relativity. In fact, all of the studies Deutscher discusses are similarity judgment studies of one sort or another. The point is that I show you one target thing, then two test things and ask, which test is MORE SIMILAR to the target than the other? Ultimately Deutscher himself problematizes spatial coordinate terms so much, they fall flat and remain unconvincing as a base of evidence for linguistic relativity.Grammatical GenderMost languages have terms for classifying things. Some languages have more elaborate classifier systems than others. In German, the term for the fork is die Gabel, marked by feminine die. Ultimately, most languages with elaborate classifiers have systems that can be described as incoherent in so far as most things given one classification have no inherent properties that signify that classification (there is nothing inherently feminine about a fork). However, Deutscher provides evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical gender will evoke properties of things in keeping with their gender classifier, suggesting that the classifier is causing them to imagine a fork would speak with a female voice, for example. But these experiments mainly test vague associations of imagination, not linguistic causality, as Deutscher admits.Color TermsIt is not until chapter 9 Russian Blues that Deutscher really delivers the goods. It is this chapter which provides the most interesting evidence for the effect of language on thought. Pity it is only about 15 pages of the book. The whole book should have been more like this. The facts he discusses involve the basic point that the brain sees what it wants to see. It turns out our perception of color has little to do with any objective feature of the thing we're looking at (he explains this fact brilliantly in the Appendix which I highly recommend, and frankly, should have been the first chapter, not relegated to the attic of an appendix). The point is that our brains change the input. As our eyes take in objective photons, our brain photoshops the input (a great analogy from Deutscher which really brings the point home).The experimental results Deutscher discusses involve more similarity judgements, albeit with a twist. Instead of relying solely on the similarity judgments, researchers studied the more objective reaction time. They showed people different color patches and asked them to judge the sameness. Despite the various and clever variations on this theme, they all relied on subjective judgements of similarity. And this is where they fail to extricate themselves from the problem of strategizing.Unfortunately they all share the critical flaw that making a similarity judgment is a logical reason act and may be mitigated by strategizing. Deutscher discusses this fact, but doesn't realize that none of the fixes work. A similarity judgment is always a logical process susceptible to the effects of strategizing. This will be a major issue in my Shocking Proposal at the end. You see, regardless of how clever the test, as long as you are basically asking a subject to make a similarity judgment, you are asking them to reason about the task. So your results will be tinged by the strategizing of human subjects as they logically try to game the system. This is well known in psycholinguistics and difficult to avoid. So how do you objectively test what colors a person considers blue?A Shocking ProposalThe paradigm already exists. How can you objectively prove that English speakers really do consider aspirated /kh/ and unaspirated /k/ both the same phoneme? You condition them to fear aspirated /kh/ by shocking them every time they hear it (measuring their galvanic skin response). Once they are conditioned, you then play them unaspirated /k/ (with no shock) and check to see if you get the same GSR spike (in anticipation).Okay, now apply this to color terms. Condition subjects to fear center of the category blue, then show them gradations. What causes the GSR spike? That's what they consider blue. now do that with speakers of 40 different languages.If the hippies on the human subjects review board let you do it, there's your dissertation.... Read more »

Guy deutscher. (2010) Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Metropolitan Books. info:/

July 7, 2011
07:33 AM
638 views

more on auto metaphor recognition methods

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

A quick follow-up to my previous post on automatic metaphor recognition. The paper Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns by Tang et al. challenges the dominant selectional preferences method by substituing their own Semantic Relations Patterns. They point out the problems with Selection Preferences (unfortunately I don't think they solved the problems with their own method, more on that in a bit).Again I'll give the Ling 101, computational linguistics for dummies version (as I understand it ...): Selection Preferences assumes that words frequently co-occur with other words that are literally associated with the same semantic domain. For example,That ship has sailed the mighty ocean.That boat has sailed across lake Erie.That captain has sailed many seas.In these three sentences, the verb sailed occurs with three different subjects (ship, boat, captain) and three different objects (ocean, lake, seas), but all of them evoke the SAILING domain. So a computer could use this info to create a model of the verb sail that would match up the semantics of its expected subjects and objects, then compare them to a new sentence. If the computer encountered the new sentence 4. That student sailed through final exams.It could automatically use the model created from sentences 1-3 above to recognize that the verb sailed occurs with a subject and object not from the SAILING domain, but rather from the STUDENT domain. Then it could use a metaphor mapping component to recognize that HUMANS as MACHINES is an acceptable mapping and thus recognize that #4 might be coherent under a metaphorical interpretation.Tang et al. rightly point out that matching frequency-based selectional preferences is not the same thing as literal meaning. First, they note that some times, a metaphorical pairing is actually MORE FREQUENT than a litertal pairing. They use some Chinese examples, but I think the English translation makes the point. Take the following two uses of close:The plane is close to the tower.Opinion are close.In their corpus, Chinese uses like 'opinions are close' were more frequent, even though this is a non-literal use of close. Frequency would lead the Selectional Preference method to believe that the opinions-type use is literal simply because it is more frequent. This outcome is predicted by Lakoff & Johnson, btw, because one of the core tenants of their seminal work on metaphors was that metaphors are NOT special uses of language, but rather quite common and normal.Tang et al.'s solution is a new method they call Semantic Relation Patterns. Their explanation is brief and highly technical, making it a slog to get through, but it hinges on incorporating an existing semantic relations knowledge base, HowNet, and adding a probabalistic model. Note, I had trouble getting the HowNet website to load, but here is a PDF explanation.How Net is an on-line common-sense knowledge base unveiling inter-conceptual relations and inter-attribute relations of concepts as connoting in Chinese and English bilingual lexicons. In my quick read the two methods differed only minimally in the crucial ways (namely, they are both lexalist and local). Semantic Relation patterns are still based on lexical semantics and still derived entirely locally. I don't see how SRP would handle this metaphor from my earlier post any better than SP:Imagine a situation in a biology class where two students, Alger and Miriam, were originally going to be partners for a lab assignment. Then they got into an argument. A third student, Annette, asks Miriam:Annette: Are you still going to be lab partners with Alger?Miriam: No. That ship has sailed.In this scenario, the sentence "That ship has sailed" is entirely coherent from a selectional preferences perspective (i.e., ships really do sail). Yet it is clearly being used metaphorically (there is literally no ship). Here, the metaphor is only detectable if we link two sentences together via co-reference. The phrase "the ship" does not co-refer to a real ship in the discourse. Rather, it refers to the possible event of be-lab-partners-with-Alger. Unless we can link phrases between sentences and between types (i.e., allowing an NP to co-refer to an event), then we are not going to get a computer to recognize these types of metaphors (which I suspect are quite common).I appreciate Tang et al.'s critique of the SP method and their attempt to get beyond it, but I think their methodology fails to make the critical improvements to automatic metaphor recognition that will be crucial to creating a full scale tool that handles real world metaphor.Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu (2010). Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns International Conference on Asian Language Processing... Read more »

Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu. (2010) Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns. International Conference on Asian Language Processing. info:/

July 5, 2011
09:49 AM
618 views

the big picture: automatic metaphor identification

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

The recently popularized IARPA Metaphor Program piqued my curiosity, so I've been reviewing a variety of articles on contemporary approaches to automatic metaphor identification. I've read three articles so far and one thing is somewhat dissapointing: they all severely restrict the notion of metaphor to mean local metaphors within single sentences.They all pay considerable lip service to Lakoff & Johnson's seminal 1980 work Metaphors We Live By, taking as gospel the notion that metaphor is defined as a mapping from one conceptual domain to another. But their examples are all of a limited type. Here are three representative examples from the papers I've been reading:Achilles was a lion. (Babarczy et al.)The sky is sad. (Tang et al.)I attacked his arguments (Baumer)What struck me is the methods used to identify metaphor are remarkably lexalist. The dominant strategy is Selectional Preferences whereby a list of source and target conceptual domains is created. Then from each, a list of words typically associated with that domain is culled from corpora or intuition or dictionaries. Then, each word is given a set of selectional preferences which constrain what kinds of subjects or predicates it typically occurs with.Here is my Ling 101 version of this methodology: If I understand correctly (and I may not), for Tang et al.'s example "The sky is sad", we would have a concept like THE ENVIRONMENT IS HUMAN. We would have a list of words typically associated with the environment (e.g., "sky") and a list of words typically associated with being human (for example "sad"). A computer could then recognize the following:The subject (the sky) is associated with the environment.The predicate (sad) is associated with humans.This subject (the sky) is not typical for this predicate (sad).This sentence is incoherent on first analysis.The concept THE ENVIRONMENT IS HUMAN links these non-typical phrases coherently.This sentence is only coherent using conceptual mapping, therefore it is probably metaphorical.This is a gross oversimplification, but I think it gets the big picture about right.At first blush, I'm impressed with the simplicity and elegance of this solution. However, it seems to me that much metaphorical language is not local like this (local here = within a single sentence). For example, imagine a situation in a biology class where two students, Alger and Miriam, were originally going to be partners for a lab assignment. Then they got into an argument. A third student, Annette, asks Miriam:Annette: Are you still going to be lab partners with Alger?Miriam: No. That ship has sailed.In this scenario, the sentence "That ship has sailed" is entirely coherent from a selectional preferences perspective (i.e., ships really do sail). Yet it is clearly being used metaphorically (there is literally no ship). Here, the metaphor is only detectable if we link two sentences together via co-reference. The phrase "the ship" does not co-refer to a real ship in the discourse. Rather, it refers to the possible event of be-lab-partners-with-Alger. Unless we can link phrases between sentences and between types (i.e., allowing an NP to co-refer to an event), then we are not going to get a computer to recognize these types of metaphors (which I suspect are quite common).Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu (2010). Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns International Conference on Asian Language ProcessingOther citations:The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: ACorpus-Based Analysis. Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M.1, István Fekete1, Eszter Simon1Computational Metaphor Identification to Foster Critical Thinking and Creativity. ERIC BAUMER (dissertation). 2009.... Read more »

Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu. (2010) Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns. International Conference on Asian Language Processing. info:/

June 10, 2010
08:33 AM
603 views

Is Arabic The Least Positive Language? (hint, no) ... sigh

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

Sometimes bad science reporting is a function of bad science. Garbage in, garbage out.There's been some buzz about new research regarding the bias of negative and positive words in English as well as cross linguistically. I have refrained from commenting because it sounded like typical bad reporting and misunderstanding of academic research. Then Andrew Sullivan got involved. Sigh. Sullivan has his strengths and weaknesses as a blogger. His strength shone brightly last summer when he helped publicize the Iranian green movement. His weakness, however, peeps out anytime he blogs about anything remotely related to science or academics (see HERE and HERE). His most recent silliness has the title The English Language Is An Optimist. His megaphone is so big, I feel someone must clear up the foggy facts and murky interpretations currently being disseminated.To begin, the research under question is from Rozin et al., U Penn psychologists who appear to be focused on emotion research (full citation below). As far as I can tell, no linguists were involved (and boy oh boy, they should have been. Ya know, Penn has a linguistics department that is, let's just say, above average). The basic point of the research cited is this: Positive events are more common (more tokens), but negative events are more differentiated (more types). Sullivan simply posts a quote from another blog which regurgitates the research as if it were true with no ciritical analysis on anyone's part. I will offer the much needed critical analysis here.Here are the four facts about English that everyone seems to find so fascinating:Negative words are often composed of the positive root negated with a prefix (e.g., unhappy, insincere, unpleasant), while the reverse is exceptional (e.g., unselfish, uncontaminated).Negated positive adjectives tend to have a negative valence, whereas negated negative adjectives tend to be neutral in valenceUsually, only positive adjectives are used to refer to the whole positive negative dimensionIn conjunctions or disjunctions, positive adjectives are usually mentioned before the opposite negative adjectivesOne of the disappointing things about this buzz is that the facts gaining the buzz are decontextualized from the research reported in the paper (a common ingredient in these kinds of stories). As far as I can tell, all Rozin et al. did was this: take some random linguistic facts published in 1978, look up some arbitrary words in a frequency table, then administer a short one-on-one survey with a small group of informants. That's it! And that's not much. It's modest qualitative analysis masquerading as comprehensive quantitative data gathering. The whole premise of this paper is based on a bold claim that "most of the events experienced in life have positive implications." They cite research on this that I have not looked into, so I have no clue what they mean by this. What do they mean by "event"? I suspect their use of "event" and the use of this word by semanticists (especially formal semanticists) is quite different. Linguists, and semanticists in particular, really care about defining what an "event" is. If you want to have some fun, ask five formal semanticists to define "event". Sparks will fly. Then, ask them 'when does the beginning of an event end?'. Oh my, fisticuffs are certain.While linguists are obsessed with being quite disciplined with these kinds of things, psychologists don't seem to be. I confess that what little emotion research I've read is disappointing. The field seems plagued by vague terms and weak methodology. But that's not what my principle critique will center on. I'm more interested in what they actually did. Let's walk through their methodology, shall we?Take some random linguistic facts published in 1978Rozin et al. report that "positive words (tokens, not types) occur with much higher frequency than negative words in English" but they only cite three studies, all of which were published before 1984, one of them in the 1960s, but their four big facts come from one study, Matlin, M. W., & Stang, D. J. (1978). The Polyanna principle. Selectivity in language, memory, and thought. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company. 1978!...In other words, before the advent of large, easily searchable corpora. Rozin et al. give no operational definition of what a "positive word" or a "negative word" is. They appear to just assume that such things exist and they're easy to identify. In other words, they assume the linguistics part is easy, so why bother working hard at it. Bad psychologist, bad (imagine me slapping their noses with a newspaper while saying this). If we take a "negative word" to simply mean the negated form of another word, well, then, yeah, sure they're gonna be marked. If it's something else, we need to know what that something else is. If we don't have a good definition of what these things are, then how do we go about finding them? Well, Rozin et al. just decided arbitrary intuition was good enough:These ‘‘reference’’ adjectives were selected in advance by the authors, such that some were negative and some positive. They were common ajectives in English, but were selected by convenience, with the proviso that we knew in advance for all cases that the positive asymmetries we were exploring were present for these words in English. (emphasis added)Their eight adjectives were pleasant, sad, dirty, disgusting, bad, sincere, pure, and beautiful. Look up some arbitrary words in a single frequency tableOnce they came up with their list, they looked up each word in Leech's Word frequencies in written and spoken English.We confirmed this in a preliminary study, searching for positive and negative valenced adjective frequency in an extensive corpus of over 100 million words of both spoken and written British English (Leech, Rayson, & Wilson, 1971, also available on the Internet). We searched for frequency of English usage for the seven adjectives we examined across languages in the first part of the present study and their opposites (opposites listed after the solidus: pleasant/aversive, sad/ happy, dirty/clean, bad/good, sincere/no obvious opposite in English, ure/contaminated, beautiful/ ugly). We also searched for the negation of any of these words, when it formed a word in English, which was the case for 5 of 7 positive words (unpleasant, unhappy, unclean, insincere, impure) That right there was the sum total of corpus research they did. Mere frequency counts don't tell us much. This is the worst kind of corpus linguistics where simple word counts are imbued with magic and meaning. Nope. Nothing terribly meaningful in word counts all by themselves. It would have been easy to gather collocation data and give us some sense of what significant co-occurrence was going on. But no, they give us nothing.Administer a short one-on-one survey with a small group of informantsWe interviewed one native speaker of each of 20 languages, not including English. The languages were: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Ibo, Arabic, Turkish, Tamil, Hindi, German, Icelandic, Swedish, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Russian, and Polish. The languages were selected by convenience ... The informants were asked ten questions about eight adjectives, half positive...It was essential that all informants had an intuitive sense of the language they were being interviewed about, since the questions had little to do with ‘‘rules’’ of syntax, but rather relied on what ‘‘sounds right’’. (emphasis & jumps add... Read more »

Rozin, P., Berman, L., & Royzman, E. (2010) Biases in use of positive and negative words across twenty natural languages. Cognition , 24(3), 536-548. DOI: 10.1080/02699930902793462

February 17, 2010
10:10 PM
576 views

A Constraint Based Approach To Figure Skating

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

While perhaps not quite a pure crash blossom, this headline caught me off guard:Is Figure Skating Fixed? Honestly, my first reaction was to wonder if there was a new scoring system (yes, there is) and what was wrong with the old one (bias and collusion). In other words, what was broken and how was it improved? Of course, there's another meaning of fixed -- 'to cheat.' In other words, are figure skating outcomes rigged by cheating? Were this headline from any other publication than the increasingly dumbed down Slate, I'd assume the ambiguity was intentional, but with Slate these days, you just never know. Note that there are at least two other senses for the word fixed: to spay/neuter a pet and to have sufficient amount of something like money (British English as in 'You Kev mate, you fixed for goin' out later? HT Urban Dictionary). With at least 4 senses to choose from, no wonder I was a tad confused.But how did my super duper human language processing system resolve this?This headline reminded me of James Pustejovsky's somewhat older work on lexical ambiguity (aka polysemy) and the mechanism of lexical underspecification. For example, in The Semantics of Lexical Underspecification (1998) Pustejovsky contrasts the various senses of good:a good booka good meala good knifeThe adjective good does not mean the same thing in these three phrases because a book is good in a different sense than a knife is good. The qualities that make a book good are mental while the qualities that make a knife good are physical. There is, however, some core meaning of good that's consistent across its different senses. In Pustejovsky's words, the adjective good "can be analyzed as an event modifier which subselects for a relational interpretation available in the head noun." In lay terms, he's proposing that each noun (book, meal, knife) carries with it as part of its meaning some notion of the kinds of things people normally do with them. So, people normally read books, eat meals, and cut with knives. If the meaning of the nouns (book, meal, knife) includes these events, then the adjective good could be modifying the events (the verbs read, eat, cut), not the noun. Note that this cuts against the grade school definition of adjectives as words that modify nouns. To work, this hypothesis requires a very complex lexical definition stored in the mental lexicon (the brain dictionary). Here's what the definition for book would have to look like:For our purposes, we simply need to see that the lexical entry for good contains a TELIC feature read. When the noun book is modified by the adjective good, so says this hypothesis, the adjective is modifying the act of reading, not the book itself. Since each noun (book, meal, knife) has a different set of TELIC event features unique to them (read, eat, cut), the polysemy of good can be explained rather elegantly. The adjective good isn't necessarily polysemic at all; rather, the word good picks out something different depending on the noun it's modifying. It's the nouns that differ, not the adjective.Back when I was a grad student, I really liked Pustejovsky's work, as well as HPSG, which bears a lot of similarity (Stanford has a nice page describing the Leading Ideas of HPSG, first amongst them is "Strict Lexicalism"). But I always had a sneaking suspicion that it was more engineering than science. In other words, there was a tremendous amount of literature explaining how a lexicalist system could account for a large variety of language phenomena, and precious little literature on whether or not there was any psychological reality to any of it. This suspicion was part of my own evolution into a very psycholinguistics oriented linguist (i.e., I mostly want to know how the brain does language). I'll note that this is a bit unfair for two reasons:There actually is some psycholinguistics research on HPSG and lexicalist approaches, just not as much as I'd like. Maybe my expectations are unfair but I spent a few minutes searching through Stanford's lengthy HPSG Bibliography and found only two citations that looked like experimental tests of HPSG hypotheses (see here, and here). I didn't search thoroughly though.It's really really hard to design psycholinguistic experiments to test these hypotheses.Until the tools and field of neuroscience progress further, there's not much syntacticians can do about this. Neither of these reasons are unique to HPSG either. Grammatical theory is hard to test in general because we just don't have the tools and understanding of the brain necessary to thoroughly investigate all the complex hypotheses. Nonetheless, as a student I tired of reading yet-another-HPSG-analysis-of construction X in language Y papers.In any case, the grammar game was fixed by Chomsky's thugs for decades when they took even the most tame non-dominant grammarians to the CFG/Transformational/P&P/Minimalist vet to be fixed so I'm happy to see any and all lively debate supported. I'll leave it to Ivan and Tom to fix HPSG as needed to account for new psycholinguistic data. Besides, I'm fixed with blogging topics for now, I don't need any more.James Pustejovsky (1998). The Semantics of Lexical Underspecification Folia Linguistica... Read more »

James Pustejovsky. (1998) The Semantics of Lexical Underspecification. Folia Linguistica. info:/

July 8, 2011
07:33 AM
572 views

"the definition of “metaphoricity” is problematic in itself"

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

One of the metaphor recognition papers I read this week had an interesting finding wrt inter-annotator agreement and metaphor: The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-based Analysis (Babarczy et a., LREC 2010 Workshop). The purpose of the paper was to run a sort-of bake-off between three methods of creating source/target word lists (to be used by selection preference metaphor recognition system): Three different methods of compiling the word lists were tested: a) word association experiment, b) dictionary of synonyms, and c) reference corpus.Ultimately they found that their corpus based method was most successful as measured by recall/precision, but there was a more striking result rather buried in the paper that I feel deserves more analysis. They created a gold standard by hand-tagging a 30,000 word "baseline" corpus. Here's what they found:At the first attempt, inter-annotator agreement was only 17%. After refining the annotation instructions, we made a second attempt, which resulted in an agreement level of 48%, which is still a strikingly low value. These results indicate that the definition of “metaphoricity” is problematic in itself [emphasis added]. They reported three general sources of inter-annotator DISagreement:Direct vs. Indirect Reference: For example, in the case of the conceptual metaphors ANGER IS HEAT or CONFLICT IS FIRE, the source domain should be an expression referring to a sort of “heated thing”. However, in some cases, one or the other annotator included words indirectly suggesting the presence of heat, such as kiolt ('extinguish'), kihől ( 'get cold') etc.Lexical Ambiguity: For example, the expression eljutottam a mai napig ('I've gotten to this day') may or may not represent a CHANGE IS MOTION metaphor depending on whether the Hungarian verb jut (literally: get somewhere, reach a place by moving the entire body) is taken only to denote physical movement or to be ambiguous.Discrepancies in Classification: ...it is difficult to make an informed decision on whether the following example contains a CHANGE IS MOTION or a PROGRESS IS MOTION FORWARD metaphor, neither of which appear to be an intuitively correct choice: a járvány végigsöpört szülıvárosukon ('the epidemic swept through their hometown').Of the four or five articles I've reviewed on automatic metaphor identification, this is the only one which reported on the results of human-tagging a corpus for metaphor. This strikes me as the sort of thing that should be a first step for anyone seriously interested in this program (certainly anyone interested in the IARPA Metaphor Program).I don't doubt that others have done this, but it seems to be under-reported, suggesting it is not be treated as a core part of the problem.I've complained in my previous posts that there is an overly restricted definition of metaphor underlying contemporary approaches to auto identification, but even within a highly restricted definition like those used by Babarczy et al. and others, there appears to be problems at the heart of identification for humans. So what exactly is being identified?Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M., István Fekete, & Eszter Simon (2010). The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-Based Analysis LREC 2010 Workshop. Proceedings... Read more »

Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M., István Fekete, & Eszter Simon. (2010) The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-Based Analysis. LREC 2010 Workshop. Proceedings. info:/

September 4, 2010
08:33 AM
564 views

the original Whorf

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

Guy Deutcher's NYT's article on how language affects thought continues to get buzz, as surely his book Through The Language Glass will when people read it (it was just released 3 days ago and is currently #234 on Amazon's book rank). One common reaction amongst bloggers is that Deutscher gives Whorf himself unfairly harsh treatment, and ultimately mis-represents Whorf's own opinions.For example, Kathryn Woolard, SLA President, says "Whorf’s own statements of his theory look little like the caricature that opens the NYT article and much more like the position that Deutscher himself offers as reasonable and compelling. Far from holding that “the inventory of ready-made words” in a language “forbids” speakers to think specific thoughts, Whorf argued that patterns of grammatical structures, often the most covert ones at that, give rise not to a language prison but to a “provisional analysis of reality” and habits of mind, very much as Deutscher concludes."Mark Liberman says "And in fairness to Whorf, he mostly ... suggested that linguistic differences would have exactly the sorts of minor biasing effects on perception and memory that Boroditsky and others have found."Greg Downey says "The one thing that turns me off to Duetscher’s writings is his pretty harsh bashing of Benjamin Whorf, who, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting anthropological linguists."However, we don't need to rely on these secondary sources to stand up for Whorf, we can read one of Whorf's original papers that started this kerfluffel (60 years ago): Science and Linguistics (pdf). Happily for the lay reader, that paper is neither very science-ee nor linguistic-ee, nor is it very long. It's actually quite readable. It's basically a series of thought experiments and casual language facts. If you can read Deutescher's article, you can read Whorf's.So let's take a look at what Whorf said in his own words.Whorf begins the article by describing what he calls "natural logic": Every normal person in the world, past infancy in years, can and does talk. By virtue of that fact, every person — civilized or uncivilized — carries through life certain naive but deeply rooted ideas about talking and its relation to thinking. Because of their firm connection with speech habits that have become unconscious and automatic, these notions tend to be rather intolerant of opposition. They are by no means entirely personal and haphazard; their basis is definitely systematic, so that we are justified in calling them a system of natural logic (emphasis added).He then goes on to describe what natural logic says about the difference between language and thought. Namely that "Natural logic says that talking is merely an incidental process concerned strictly with communication, not with formulation of ideas. Talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to “express” what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically. Formulation is an independent process, called thought or thinking, and is supposed to be largely indifferent to the nature of particular languages.[...] Natural logic holds that different languages are essentially parallel methods for expressing this one-and-the-same rationale of thought and, hence, differ really in but minor ways..."So Whorf claims that the average person is walking around (in 1940, mind you) believing that language and thought are independent processes and that thought is the same across all people, it's only languages that differ, and only slightly. Personally I find this a simplistic straw man argument. I'm not convinced all that many people held this view. Nonetheless, Whorf spends the rest of the article attacking his own straw man. A little too easy. But let's see what he actually says.Whorf then says that because people hold this view of natural logic, we are unable to see its flaws, that it is a part of our background assumptions and hence invisible to our thinking. This becomes a crucial part of his argument. We are unable to to imagine possibilities outside of natural logic: What it might well suggest to us today is that, if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious. Never having experienced anything in contrast to it, we cannot isolate it and formulate it as a rule until we so enlarge our experience and expand our base of reference that we encounter an interruption of its regularity (emphasis added). This rung quite hollow with me. He uses a couple of examples that undermine his very point. He asks us to imagine a person who could only see blue. That person would be unable to discover that they could only see blue because they wouldn't know what it was not see something else. Then he writes about gravity: The phenomenon of gravitation forms a rule without exceptions; needless to say, the untutored person is utterly unaware of any law of gravitation, for it would never enter his head to conceive of a universe in which bodies behaved otherwise than they do at the earth’s surface (emphasis added).Huh? Neither the blue-only example nor the gravity-ignorant example are convincing precisely because we stand (as they did in 1940) as examples of the opposite. Humans only perceive a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum (not as limited as blue only, but limited nonetheless). Yet we managed to discover our limitations! Same with gravity. Note the qualifier Whorf added "untutored person." How did the tutored person get that way? At some point, she was tutored by someone else, but there was someone who first grasped that gravity must be a force. More to the point, Whorf assumes a model of the average person wherein imagination does not exist. I agree that people can be biased by their beliefs about the world, but we are not as trapped by them as Whorf seems to believe.Next, Whorf lists two fallacies of natural logic:It does not see that the phenomena of a language are to its own speakers largely of a background character and so are outside the critical consciousness and control of the speaker.It confuses agreement about subject matter, attained through use of language, with knowledge of the linguistic process by which agreement is attained.The first one I've already addressed, but the second one is interesting. Basically, it says that we mistake what it means when we agree through language. If we agree on directions to the movies, then we assume there is some objective fact we've discovered about the world, otherwise we would not have come to agree. I think there is something to this. And this is why it's difficult to break past our biases (essentially, agreement masquerades as objectivity). But again, Whorf takes it too far and writes, in all caps to be sure we all understand that this is an important point: THIS AGREEMENT IS REACHED BY LINGUISTIC PROCESSES, OR ELSE IT IS NOT REACHED.But surely there are examples of non-linguistic agreement in the world? Imagine two strangers are passing each other in a tight hallway, and they both move a bit to make way. Have they not agreed to not collide? Yes there are cultural attitudes bound to this situation, but they need not be linguistic. I think evolutionary biologists could list cooperative strategies that non-humans engage in to survive and because they are non-humans, they cannot be linguistic strategies, right? Do we need to claim that agreement and cooperation are different to save Whorf's point?Whorf continues by claiming it was the expansion of comparative linguistics that really led to the ability to think outside the box and that led to recognition that our perception of the world is not the same thing as the world itself. This really is the crucial paragraph in the paper:When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken. It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from sligh... Read more »

Benjamin Lee Whorf. (1940) Science and Linguistics. MIT Technology Review, 42(6). info:other/

May 24, 2010
08:03 AM
544 views

The Politics of Publishing

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

(image from http://alysha.gather.com/)Let's talk about class warfare in academics, shall we? I just read a nice little article on speech production from Cognition and while I enjoyed it, I couldn't help but wonder how it got published because it was rather light weight. To be fair, Cognition published it as a "Brief article" so it was meant to be short*; nonetheless, it had the feel of a grad student poster, not a publication. You might argue that this is the point of a "Brief article", but I will argue that similar content would likely not have been published had it not been recognizably associated with a well known scholar. Despite the precautions of blind reviews, it is not uncommon for a linguistics reviewer to have a pretty good idea of who authored or co-authored a paper, simply because linguistics is a small field, and the sub-fields even smaller. Most scholars have easy-to-recognize methodologies, content areas, or style that acts almost as a scholarly fingerprint. I don't mean to be mean-spirited, I hope this doesn't come across that way, but minus the second author's fingerprint, I don't see this paper getting accepted.But first, let's look at the paper itself: A purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Inconsistent phonology affects determiner selection in English (full citation below).From the abstract: "during the production of a determiner–noun phrase, nouns automatically activate the phonological forms of their determiners, which can compete with the phonological forms that are generated by an assimilation rule." As I understand it, this means that nouns activate default articles when we're about to say them. Show me a picture of an orange giraffe, and I think a orange giraffe before I say an orange giraffe. because I haven't yet applied the phonological process that says the indefinite article a becomes an when followed by a vowel. This leads to competition between a and an to see which one will actually be said out loud. What the researchers found was that the phrase an orange giraffe was produced more slowly than a purple giraffe and they argue that this slowness (aka, naming latency) is the result of the extra time it takes to apply the phonological process to the indefinite article (aka determiner competition). By putting the adjective orange in between the article and the noun, they were able to show that it was the noun driving this effect, not the adjective (because the indefinite article agreed with the noun originally, thus the slowness).Like I said, a nice little article. Cute little paradigm, good results, nice work. But here's the thing: more than a dozen previously published articles say the same thing. There's nothing new here. What this research does is drill down to test a detail of a well known phenomenon (determiner competition), namely that phonology alone can invoke this competition. In the authors' own words: "the lexical-syntactic level may not be necessarily involved." Let me repeat: X may not be necessarily involved in Y. Wow, that's hardly a bold statement worthy of a journal publication. There was really only one experiment reported (a second experiment was included, but imho, it was so similar to the first, it hardly counts as a second). I have no problem with this as an experiment and it would be a good poster at a psycholinguistics conference or the LSA. but I can't image being able to publish something like this myself, nor anyone I went to grad school with because we simply didn't have the institutional ooomph to guide something as light as this through the review process.Yes yes, again I know the process is "blind", but this article does have Kathryn Bock's fingerprint. She's well known for publishing on sentence production in general as well as number agreement in sentence production, a similar if not exact match to determiner agreement. And she's a well respected psycholinguist by any measure. I'd have to re-read a bunch of her papers to see how closely the methods and presentation match her work, but I'd guess that a "blind" reviewer, who would by necessity be familiar with sentence production literature, would not have a hard time guessing that this work was done in conjunction with Bock. The blind process actually allows such unintentional and intentional biases to fester because it's hidden and hard to prove. If the process were transparent, I suspect this sort of thing wouldn't happen as much. I'm all for open reviewing. I'd prefer all open, transparent reviewing. Why hide?Spalek, K., Bock, K., & Schriefers, H. (2010). A purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Inconsistent phonology affects determiner selection in English Cognition, 114 (1), 123-128 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.09.011*The only guideline regarding the content of a "Brief article" I could find on Cognition's site is this: "Brief articles must be no more than three thousand words long."... Read more »

Spalek, K., Bock, K., & Schriefers, H. (2010) A purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Inconsistent phonology affects determiner selection in English. Cognition, 114(1), 123-128. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.09.011

September 13, 2010
07:33 AM
538 views

Through the Language Glass (Part 1)

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

The publisher Henry Holt and Company was kind enough to send me a review copy of Guy Deutscher's new book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages which bills itself as "demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial" but which also goes beyond that and purports to demonstrate that language affects thought, if only via habits of mind.This is part one of a two part review. I expect to post Part 2 next Monday, Sept. 20th. My division into two reviews follows the book's own division:Part 1: The Language Mirror (pages 1-126)Part 2: The Language Lens (129-249)Part 1: The Language MirrorThe general goal of the first part of the book is to establish that language does in fact reflect culture; that it is a mirror in some non-trivial ways of the culture of the speakers. However, Deutscher begins the book by clearly debunking many tired canards about specific languages reflecting crude stereotypes about its speakers. Is French really the most logical language, as my PhD advisor was fond of jokingly claiming? No, it is not (sorry JP, haha).Overall, Deutscher is a clear and enjoyable writer to read. He does a good job of reviewing basic, but important facts about language and linguists. Facts that need to be understood by the reader if the rest of the book is to be appreciated. These includes arbitrariness of the sign, cultural transmission, abstraction, and categorization.So how dose languages mirror their speakers?Deutscher spends 95 pages (38% of the whole book and 75% of Part 1) arguing that the inventory of color terms in a language reflects the state of the culture's need to distinguish one color from another as well as its exposure to a wide range of hues (particularly, artificial). The basic facts, which have been established by about 150 years of empirical findings, are these:All languages have a set of color terms (words that name colors).Languages do not share the same color terms (e.g., some have no word for blue and what gets labeled as blue in one language may differ from what what gets labeled as blue in another).Color terms are not arbitrary (each term refers to a coherent subset of the visible spectrum)Acquisition of color terms is predictable (i.e., language acquire names for color terms in a predictable order.The predictable order of acquisition is this:black & white > red > yellow/green > blueWhat this says is that all languages have terms for black and white. If a language has a third color term, it refers to red. If that language has a fourth color term, it refers to either yellow or green. And so on. See WALS for more.Deutscher goes to great lengths to establish these facts. Maybe too great. I felt he beat this horse a bit too long and hard. The average reader may disagree. Ultimately, we get no satisfying answer as to why this pattern exists (that's science's fault, just haven't figured it out yet, but Deutscher build this up pretty high to give us such a weak landing).And this brings me to my first critique of Part 1: This is just too light weight for me. I was expecting a more rigorous scientific work, and what I got was Gladwell-lite. The first three of the five chapters of Part 1 read more like pop biography than serious cognitive science. They each begin by introducing us to an historical 19th Century figure who was crucial in the emerging field of color term research. Deutscher describes each man's lost contribution with the affection of a smitten history student trying to re-fight battles that ended before his grandfather was born. It's a particular genre of history that is not uncommon (think Ken Burns' The Civil War), but I found it beside the point. Can we please get down to the business of how language affects thought, I kept thinking. Worse, despite his lengthy explications, he never quite convinced me that color terms was the crucial topic he needs it to be in order to justify such lengthy discussion. His own obsession with color term research leads him to over-emphasize the topic, to the detriment of many other crucial topics (which he does in fact get to, but a little too late and a dollar short).He's also a little too fond of his own Writing 101 skills. Several times he concocts little explanatory vignettes, but then rather takes it too far, going on not for a paragraph or two, but a full page. He also tends to give us these tantalizing teasers about future chapters (like "X would have to wait until Y before..."). I found these a bit tiresome. A bit too much like Behind The Music documentaries which tease you before each commercial break.Deutscher has been criticized for treating Benjamin Lee Whorf too harshly (see my review of his NYTs article here for specifics). At one point in this book he call Whorf the most notorious of the [linguistic relativity] con men. This is odd, to me, because in Part 1 Deutscher repeatedly channels Whorfs own claims and even language. If you were to read Whorf's original 1940 essay Science and Linguistics (pdf), one of his early drafts of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, you'd have to conclude that he and Deutscher are best pals, simpatico. They both make the same distinction between folk theories and science; they both emphasize the need to question one's own pre-conceived notions, and both concoct straw men to argue against.Both Deutscher and Whorf sketch for us the basic assumptions of the common man (Deutscher actually uses the phrase Joe the Plumber, Peirs the Ploughman, or Tom Piper's son to represent this straw man at one point). But I couldn't help but shake my head at some of the things Deutscher thinks you and his readers are running around thinking, like "primitive people speak primitive languages" (page 99; this is an echoing of Whorf as well). I have no doubt that SOME people think this, but is this the average person? Deutscher needs this straw man to create the space of need that he fills. Joe the Plumber NEEDS Deutscher to save him from his ignorance.In a similar vein, Deutscher also uses some questionable assumptions. On page 101 he seems to assume that our contemporary notions of aboriginal languages comes from Tintin and Westerns...huh? Frikkin Tintin? I had to Google that. And Westerns? Does Deutscher think it's 1955?The portion of Part 1 I liked most was the last 20 pages or so where he really starts to get into the meat of how language and culture intermix. If only this were the FIRST 20 pages, but alas.He finally starts to get into really interesting issues of culture and language when he discusses complexity and language. I found it a little confusing that he would claim, and strongly so, that "No one has ever measured the overall complexity of even one single language, not to mention all of them. No one even has an idea how to measure the overall complexity of a language" (page 105). Then he claims that it is inherently impossible to compare the complexity of two languages (page 109).My position is that this is simply false and it is odd for Deutscher to have published those sentences. What Deutscher is doing, I think, is defining his own version of what it means to "measure the overall complexity of a language" in such a way that the many attempts to do so, dating back to the 1940s, don't count. He's playing a rhetorical game like politicians do when they pledge to cut taxes in such a way that when they fail to do it later on, they can wiggle out beneath their words to make it look like they lived up to them nonetheless. Linguists and logicians have long been interested in measuring linguistic complexity. Deutscher makes it look like this is not so. He may not like these attempts. He may wish to debate their merits, but they do exist. All you have to do is Google "measuring linguistic complexity" and you get a whole host of results, like these:Gruber, J. & Gibson, E. (2004). Measuring linguistic complexity independent of plausibility. Language, 80, 583-590.Juola, Patrick, Assessing Linguistic Complexity, Duquesne University.McWhorter, John (2001). The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars. Linguistic Typology 5, pp. 125–66Bane, Max. ... Read more »

Guy Deutscher. (2010) Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Metropolitan Books. info:/

September 27, 2010
07:33 AM
515 views

can language affect blood flow?

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

Do languages affect blood flow in the brain differently? Apparently, yes! In a recent fMRI study, researchers showed that Cantonese verbs and nouns are processed in (slightly) different parts of the brain than English nouns and verbs in bilinguals. The researchers used a lexical decision task to contrast the processing of English and Cantonese verbs and nouns in the brains of bilingual speakers.Chinese nouns and verbs showed a largely overlapping pattern of cortical activity. In contrast, English verbs activated more brain regions compared to English nouns. Specifically, the processing of English verbs evoked stronger activities of left putamen, left fusiform gyrus, cerebellum, right cuneus, right middle occipital areas, and supplementary motor area. The cognition of English nouns did not evoke stronger activities in any cortical regions.This is truly language affecting thought, no? The point of general interest to linguist is that bilingual speakers seem to process words in their two languages differently. Cantonese words are processed using diffuse brain regions and English words are processed using localized regions (this is a simplified explanation of course).Now, I have to admit that this is not my specialty so I am not familiar with the background literature. However, as interesting as this is, I must say I have some serious questions about their methodology and underlying assumptions. IFirst, they use orthography as their base for determining the "similarity" and "complexity" of languages. That is, if two languages use an alphabet, they are considered similar. While they give some passing references to other linguist measures, ultimately it is orthography that they use to compare "complexity" of stimuli (their word, not mine). So, they compared the mean number of strokes in a Chinese character with the number of letters in an English word to determine which was "more complex" than the other. I found this weird.Then they made an assumption that Cantonese words are more ambiguous with respect to parts of speech. I do not klnow if this is true, but it certainly is true that English has plenty of POS ambiguity (just ask Eric Brill), so it's not obvious to me that this is a fair assumption. Furthermore, they provider no evidence for this. Unfortunately, they do not publish their actual sets of stimuli, so it's not possible (this morning while googling around) to look at which words they actually use, but I suspect there's plenty of ambiguity to be found in the English words.Based on earlier work, they conjecture that morphological simplicity leads the brain to distribute where words are processed in the brain:...a recent fMRI study examining monolingual Chinese adults in our own laboratory indicated that Chinese nouns and verbs activate a wide range of overlapping brain areas (without a significantly different network) than those reported in the English studies cited above (Li et al., 2004). Relatively fewer distinctive grammatical features of nouns and verbs at the lexical level are likely to be responsible for this finding, but the question may be addressed more directly by employing bilingual individuals.And the corollary should be true: the fact that English has tense and number markings means English verbs and nouns are processed ion more isolated parts of the brain. This is my wording of their conjecture. I may be oversimplifying just a bit, but I'm trying to wrap my head around the underlying claim. It's not clear to me why this would be true.Next (and this may be a bit nit-picky), they judged the level of bilingual proficiency using a self-assessment questionnaire. Call me a cynic, but I just don't trust people's perceptions of their own language skills. Then, the researches used frequency data from really dated sources including Francis and Kuceras 1982. I love F&K as much as the next guy, but in the age of the BNC, Davies's freely available 400 million word COCA, and the redonkulous Web 1T corpus of 1 trillion words (yes, 1 Trillion!), I see no reason to use resources so old.Their basic conclusions are a tad confusing too. They never clearly explained the connection between bilingualism and morphological complexity, imho. The interplay is complicated and requires thorough discussion, which they simply did not provide. When I used to teach writing to college freshmen, I always told them that their job when writing a paper was to make my job as a reader easy. Explain things clearly so I don't have to work too hard to figure out what you mean. These authors failed to make my job easy. I had to figure things out too much for myself.Ultimately, they found something interesting, I'm just not sure what it means and without more thorough linguistic vetting of their underlying assumptions, their results remain a head scratcher.Chan, A., Luke, K.K., Li, G., Li, P., Weekes, B., Yip, V., & Tan, L.H. (2008). Neural correlates of nouns and verbs in early bilinguals. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1145, 30–40. (pdf)Chan, A., Luke, K., Li, P., Yip, V., Li, G., Weekes, B., & Tan, L. (2008). Neural Correlates of Nouns and Verbs in Early Bilinguals Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1145 (1), 30-40 DOI: 10.1196/annals.1416.000... Read more »

Chan, A., Luke, K., Li, P., Yip, V., Li, G., Weekes, B., & Tan, L. (2008) Neural Correlates of Nouns and Verbs in Early Bilinguals. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1145(1), 30-40. DOI: 10.1196/annals.1416.000

October 1, 2010
07:33 AM
506 views

do boys need more language help than girls?

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

No.But that's the conclusion of the anonymous journalist/stenographer from the Science Daily who wrote the recent story Building Language Skills More Critical for Boys Than Girls, Research Suggests. The author states Developing language skills appears to be more important for boys than girls in helping them to develop self-control and, ultimately, succeed in school.Unfortunately I cannot find the original article (citation below) freely available, so all I have to go on is the brief description from the Science Daily piece:The researchers examined data on children as they aged from 1 to 3 and their mothers who participated in the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation study. As with previous research, Vallotton and Ayoub found that language skills -- specifically the building of vocabulary -- help children regulate their emotions and behavior and that boys lag behind girls in both language skills and self-regulation.What was surprising, Vallotton said, was that language skills seemed so much more important to the regulation of boys' behavior. While girls overall seemed to have a more natural ability to control themselves and focus, boys with a strong vocabulary showed a dramatic increase in this ability to self-regulate -- even doing as well in this regard as girls with a strong vocabulary (emphasis added).I cannot speak directly to the methodology without access to the original article. My guess is that there was some attempt to qualitatively correlate scores on vocabulary tests to either records of bad behavior or observed behavior. I could be wrong. But I'm skeptical about the claims in Science Daily because it strikes me as the sort of thing that would take years of studying and dozens of researchers to come to any definite conclusions about. Yet we have just this one study. It also draws a causal connection between a language skill (vocabulary) and a non-language behavior (emotion and "self-regulation"). It is extremely difficult, under even the best circumstances, to do that. And even when this is done, there are typically teams of neuroscientists using fMRIs and such involved. I mean no disrespect to the authors of the study. They are both accomplished professors of psychology, a very important and challenging field. But they are not, as far as I can tell, either neuroscientists or psycholinguists. The second author, Catherine Ayoub, appears to have a specialty in "Legal mental health issues with children" (see PDF here).This seems to be a case of over-interpretation with the intent of building actionable policy directives. I understand and sympathize with the impulse to translate scientific research into something directly useful that a teacher can implement today. Look, all you have to do is help boys build their vocabulary and they will behave themselves better! Unfortunately, it is rarely wise to make that leap so quickly. I suspect there is no there there.Vallotton, C., & Ayoub, C. (2010). Use your words: The role of language in the development of toddlers’ self-regulation Early Childhood Research Quarterly DOI: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2010.09.002... Read more »

Vallotton, C., & Ayoub, C. (2010) Use your words: The role of language in the development of toddlers’ self-regulation. Early Childhood Research Quarterly. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2010.09.002

July 22, 2010
08:33 AM
493 views

the psychological reality of truthiness?

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

New research out of U. Chicago looked at the effect of foreign accents on trust. The brief Flash Report Why don't we believe non-native speakers? (PDF; full citation below) found that "People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker." There's a cline of truthiness because the researchers did the following: "Participants listened to each statement and indicated its veracity on a 14 cm line, with one pole labeled de!nitely false and the other definitely true. We measured the distance from the false pole in centimeters, so a higher number indicates a more truthful statement."I found this to be a interesting design idea. Don't force people to make a clear decision about truth value. Frege and Russell be damned, haha! Have these researchers discovered the psychological reality of truthiness?On a more serious note, they begin the article with a review of all the ways that processing fluency affects linguistic stimuli judgement. from the paper (reformatted for easy of reading):Stimuli that are easier to process are perceived asmore familiarmore pleasantvisually clearerlonger and more recentlouder, less riskymore truthfulFor example, people judge “Woes unite foes” as a more accurate description of the impact of troubles on adversaries than“Woes unite enemies,” because the rhyming of woes and foes increases processing fluency. Similarly, people judge the statement “Osorno is in Chile” as more true when the color of the font makes it easier to read.Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025... Read more »

Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010) Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025

January 27, 2011
07:33 AM
485 views

the linguistics of heaven and hell

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

The value of pop culture data for legitimate research is being put to the test. Exactly what, if anything, can the reality show Big Brother tell us about language change over time?Voice Onset Time is a measure of how long you wait to begin vibrating your vocal folds after you release a stop consonant. Voiced stop consonants like /b/ and /d/ require two things: 1) stop all airflow from escaping the airway by closing the glottis and 2) after the air is released, begin vibrating the glottis (by using the rushing air). For non-linguists, think of a garden hose. Imagine you use your thumb to stop the water for a second and you let the pressure build, then you let go and water rushes out, but then you use you thumb to clamp down just a bit on the water to spray it. This is kinda like the speech production of voiced stop consonants in human language.(image from Kval.com)Though I’m no phoneticist, I really like VOT as a target of linguistic study for one crucial reason: it’s a clear example of a linguistic feature that varies according to your human language system but which you do NOT have conscious control over. What that means is that you cannot consciously change the length of your own personal VOT. Go ahead, try it. Make your VOT 20 milliseconds longer. Go ahead, I’ll wait…Of course you can’t. Well, not consciously, but what researchers have found is that your brain, quite independent of conscious will or knowledge, can! Lab studies have found that people will unknowingly alter their VOTs according to certain situations, and the results are predictable. For example, they found that when listening to a set of long VOT stimuli, subjects will begin to lengthen their own VOTS, in essence accommodating the longer VOTs. Over the longer term it has also been shown that people will lengthen their VOT over their lifetime to accommodate cultural shifts. It has been shown that The Queen Mother herself now has a longer VOT than during her younger days (few other people have been recorded consistently over a long period to provide such valuable data, so thanks mum).Here’s what Bane et al. did: They took recordings of confessional sequences from the UK reality TV show Big Brother (where groups of strangers are made to live with each other and occasionally speak to a camera alone like a video diary) and tested what happened to 4 crucial individuals (the ones that stayed on the show long enough to provide several months worth of data points). What they found was that their VOTs did in fact change, though no linear pattern was discovered (i.e., they did not simply get longer in a steady line). This paper is labeled as a progress report because they don't have a firm hypothesis about what actually is happening. Nice trick there boys, ;)They did find one interesting thing: During part of the show, the house mates were physically divided into basically a caste system where half the people were low caste and half were high (a heaven and a hell. And this seemed to have an effect on VOT as well (sociolinguists are slap happy about this, I'm sure).I haven’t looked at the actual number very closely, but in section 6, they say “Housemate trajectories seem to diverge when the divide is present…” However, just taking a glance at the Figure 3, it looks like the diverge at the beginning, then converge at the end, episode 65 (and remain somewhat similar until several episodes of non-DIVIDE have gone by). If my cursory glance is correct, I would assume it takes awhile for the convergence to manifest, and then it persists for awhile after DIVIDE is gone. But this is just me looking at the picture, not the actual data.Finally, and this is just a readability point, but I would order the names in Figure 3 in the same order as the end point of each trajectory, making it easier to follow who is doing what.Max Ban, Peter Graf, & Morgan Sonderegge (2011). Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system Linguistic Society of America 2011 Annual Meeting.... Read more »

Max Ban, Peter Graf, & Morgan Sonderegge. (2011) Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system. Linguistic Society of America. info:/

September 22, 2010
07:33 AM
475 views

Through the Language Glass (Part 2)

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

This is part 2 of my review of Guy Deutscher's new book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. This covers The Language Lens (129-249). Part 1 is here. This review will cover the scientific evidence that Deutscher reviews suggesting that language affects thought, and will end with a shocking proposal.To sum up my review of part one: meh. Okay, we've established that culture can influence language. This is a lot less controversial than Deutscher makes it seem and he spent a large amount of text defending that position. Okay, whatever, time to move on. In part 2 he again begins with historical review explaining why he thinks Whorf was a con man, but also why he thinks the core insights of early linguist relativity deserve closer, honest investigation. He complains that based his Hopi claims on just one lonely informant (p142). We'll see later that Deutscher himself falls for the same trap. He replaces Whorf with the Boas-Jakobson principle that languages differ in what they must convey, not what they may convey” (151). I respect Deutscher for making this a central theme in his book because I think he's right. To parrot his own recitation of Humbolt: any thought can be expressed in any language. It is what our native language forces us to foreground that makes linguistic relativity an interesting topic.Deutscher spends most of the second part of the book reviewing three areas of language that have provided evidence that language affects thought: spatial coordinates, grammatical gender, and color terms (familiar from part 1). The general point I want to make about his evidence is that it is far weaker than he maintains. But is is interesting. A brief set of reactions:Spatial Coordinates -- everything is embodiedMost of his argumentation about the affect of spacial coordinate terms on thought stems from Levinson's evidence from speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr which is famous for giving us the word “kangaroo.” Speakers of GY do not generally use ego-centric terms like "right" and "left" but rather use cardinal direction terms like "east" and "west." As a result, Deutscher claims, they remember information about situations differently than speakers of English. They have, so the argument goes, a perfect pitch for direction and they are always attuned to where north is. Deutscher's claim is that only the linguistic repetition of such terms can possibly account for this. Hence, their language affects what they pay attention to and what they remember, hence language affects thought.I've never found this line of research all that convincing regarding linguistic relativity and Deutscher does not really add much to the debate. Like Deutscher's complaint above regarding Whorf's one lonely Hopi speaker, it turns out there are not many native speakers of Guugu Yimithirr left and haven't been for a while. These experiments on directional language involve very few speakers, and most of them have both cardinal direction and ego-centric direction in their dialect. If we're going to complain about Whorf's restricted subject pool, we must complain about Levinson's too.But more to the point, I believe all direction terms are ultimately ego-centric insofar as they are embodied. The terms "north" and "south" are not magically universal. They are based on a human being's body and orientation (i.e., ego-centric). Don't believe me, ask yourself, what does "north" mean in space? What does "north" mean to an amoeba? Mostly what Deutscher does in his discussions of direction terms is reiterate the point he belabored in Part 1: culture affects language. Yeah, we got that already.The rise of similarity judgmentsThat is until he discusses the table experiments. These experiments show subjects tables with objects on them and ask them to arrange them in accordance with a target. Basically, they ask for similarity judgement. How can you make this table arrangement similar to the previous table. This methodological paradigm has become prominent in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, especially studies testing linguistic relativity. In fact, all of the studies Deutscher discusses are similarity judgment studies of one sort or another. The point is that I show you one target thing, then two test things and ask, which test is MORE SIMILAR to the target than the other? Ultimately Deutscher himself problematizes spatial coordinate terms so much, they fall flat and remain unconvincing as a base of evidence for linguistic relativity.Grammatical GenderMost languages have terms for classifying things. Some languages have more elaborate classifier systems than others. In German, the term for the fork is die Gabel, marked by feminine die. Ultimately, most languages with elaborate classifiers have systems that can be described as incoherent in so far as most things given one classification have no inherent properties that signify that classification (there is nothing inherently feminine about a fork). However, Deutscher provides evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical gender will evoke properties of things in keeping with their gender classifier, suggesting that the classifier is causing them to imagine a fork would speak with a female voice, for example. But these experiments mainly test vague associations of imagination, not linguistic causality, as Deutscher admits.Color TermsIt is not until chapter 9 Russian Blues that Deutscher really delivers the goods. It is this chapter which provides the most interesting evidence for the effect of language on thought. Pity it is only about 15 pages of the book. The whole book should have been more like this. The facts he discusses involve the basic point that the brain sees what it wants to see. It turns out our perception of color has little to do with any objective feature of the thing we're looking at (he explains this fact brilliantly in the Appendix which I highly recommend, and frankly, should have been the first chapter, not relegated to the attic of an appendix). The point is that our brains change the input. As our eyes take in objective photons, our brain photoshops the input (a great analogy from Deutscher which really brings the point home).The experimental results Deutscher discusses involve more similarity judgements, albeit with a twist. Instead of relying solely on the similarity judgments, researchers studied the more objective reaction time. They showed people different color patches and asked them to judge the sameness. Despite the various and clever variations on this theme, they all relied on subjective judgements of similarity. And this is where they fail to extricate themselves from the problem of strategizing.Unfortunately they all share the critical flaw that making a similarity judgment is a logical reason act and may be mitigated by strategizing. Deutscher discusses this fact, but doesn't realize that none of the fixes work. A similarity judgment is always a logical process susceptible to the effects of strategizing. This will be a major issue in my Shocking Proposal at the end. You see, regardless of how clever the test, as long as you are basically asking a subject to make a similarity judgment, you are asking them to reason about the task. So your results will be tinged by the strategizing of human subjects as they logically try to game the system. This is well known in psycholinguistics and difficult to avoid. So how do you objectively test what colors a person considers blue?A Shocking ProposalThe paradigm already exists. How can you objectively prove that English speakers really do consider aspirated /kh/ and unaspirated /k/ both the same phoneme? You condition them to fear aspirated /kh/ by shocking them every time they hear it (measuring their galvanic skin response). Once they are conditioned, you then play them unaspirated /k/ (with no shock) and check to see if you get the same GSR spike (in anticipation).Okay, now apply this to color terms. Condition subjects to fear center of the category blue, then show them gradations. What causes the GSR spike? That's what they consider blue. now do that with speakers of 40 different languages.If the hippies on the human subjects review board let you do it, there's your dissertation.... Read more »

Guy deutscher. (2010) Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Metropolitan Books. info:/

September 1, 2010
07:33 AM
450 views

the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters)

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

Let me take the ball Mark Liberman threw on Monday and run with it a bit. Liberman posted a thorough discussion of Fausey and Broditsky's neo-Whorfian English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently. Specifically, he invited readers to carefully examine the methodology of the experiments themselves, and not just focus on the conclusions. It turns out that a few years ago another set of neo-Whorfians, Jürgen Bohnemeyer and company, published a paper that addressed similar methodological concerns:Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events. (With S. Eisenbeiss and B. Narasimhan) Colchester: University of Essex, Department of Language and Linguistics (Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 50: 1-19). 2006.This paper addressed experiments involving motion events like rolling and falling whereas Fausey and Broditsky's work addressed agentivity like breaking and popping, but there's enough overlap to warrant some comparison, particularly since the Bohnemeyer et al. paper specifically addresses methodology wrt Whorfian experiments.But before I get into the details, let me state clearly why I think this is important. In other posts, I have dismissed popular lingo-topics like language evolution as outside the mainstream of linguistics because they don't bear directly on what I consider to be the center of the linguistics universe: How the brain does language. But linguistic relativity (aka, The Whorfian hypothesis) is one of the great questions of linguistics and cognitive science precisely because it bears directly on the question of how the brain does language. And we're only just now developing the proper tools and methodologies to study the question with scientific rigor. It may turn out that language does not affect other cognitive processes or the effect is minor. I don't care. I just want to know one way or the other. And it's work like Bohnemeyer's and Broditsky's that will lead us to knowing, eventually.Now the fun stuff.Bohnemeyer et al. start with an assumption about language types based on Talmy's cognitive semantics typology that classes languages as either satellite-framing or verb-framing, From Talmy:...languages fall into two main types on the basis of where the Path is represented in a sentence expressing a Motion event [...]. In this two-category typology, if the Path is characteristically represented in the main verb or verb root of a sentence, the language is "verb framed", but if it is characteristically represented in the satellite and/or preposition, the language is "satellite framed".In this typology, English is a satellite-frame language and Spanish is a verb-frame language. Bohnemeyer et al. conclude that “verb-framed” (V) languages lexicalize path information in the verb root. Consequently, they require a separate expression for the “manner” of the motion event [...] The additional syntactic position renders manner in V–languages less “codable”. Consequently, manner is encoded more routinely in S–language discourse. Thus, the question arises whether S–language native speakers also pay more attention to manner when committing a motion event to memory and/or comparing it to other events." (emphasis added).So satellite-frame languages like English push path info into separate phrases and verb-frame languages like Spanish push manner into separate phrases. Take the following English sentences:The ball rolled down the hill.The ball bounced down the hill.In English, the manner of motion (rolling vs. bouncing) is encoded on the verb (i.e., different verbs), but the path is encoded as a separate phrase ("down the hill") as opposed to something like this:The ball moved down the hill rollingly.Here the verb move is fairly simple and encodes no manner info by itself. As a note, Talmy's typology is based on colloquial and high frequency language use. Many languages allow both kinds of constructions, it's just that one is highly frequent in "everyday" speech.And there's the crux of Bohnemeyer et al.'s experiments. But, they also noticed conflicting results in several other neo-Whorfian studies that they believed were a result of methodology so they set out to investigate methodology. Those other papers used a similarity-judgement task, so Bohememeyer et al. used that task as well. Particularly, they gave particpants a series of three short animated videos to watch. For example, one video was a tomato rolling down a hill. Their methodology is difficult to understand if you just read through, so I'm going to try to help with some bold-facing and re-structuring of paragraphs and a few re-wordings. What follows is a near-quote:...we conducted a similarity-judgment task analogous in design to those reviewed above with native speakers of 17 genetically and typologically diverse languages – to our knowledge, the largest sample of languages ever used in a Whorfian study. To control for the effects of individual manner or path contrasts, we cross-classified six path types with four manner types, realizing all possible combinations in our stimulus set and counterbalancing for frequency of occurrence.[... FYI, the 17 languages were Basque, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Jalonke, Japanese, Lao, Polish, Spanish, Tamil, Tidore, Tiriyó, Turkish, and Yukatek]The materials consisted of 72 triads (i.e., 72 sets of three videos). The targets (i.e., main videos) were 24 motion-event video-animations which systematically varied:four manners of motion (SPIN, ROLL, BOUNCE, SLIDE),three scenarios with different “ground” objects (inclined ramp; field with tree and rock; field with hut and cave), andtwo directed paths (motion UP/RIGHT, DOWN/LEFT)For each of these targets (e.g. tomato-ROLLs-UP-RAMP, see Figure1), we created a same-manner (different-path) variant (e.g. tomato-ROLLs-DOWN-RAMP), and three types of same-path (different-manner) variants (here, OUNCE/SLIDE/SPIN-UP-RAMP).This resulted in 72 triads with a target clip, a same-manner variant and one of the three same-path variants. The variants were presented side by side, 1 second after the target-clip presentation ended (see Figure 1).(figure from page 7)Their methodology was as follows (emphasis added to help readability):The 72 triads were distributed across 6 randomized presentation lists in a Latin-square design.Each list was given to two participants per language (in reverse presentation order).Each list contained 12 triads, with the target clips combining the four manners of motions with the three scenarios so that each participant saw all 12 combinations in the target clip.The number of UP/RIGHT and DOWN/LEFT motions in the target- and variant-clips as well as the manners of motions in the different-manner variants was counterbalanced across the lists, as was the position in which the variants were presented on the screen.The position of the ground objects remained the same in all clips.Minimal variations in the triad clips allow us to take into account the effects of different manners, paths and scenarios, but make our test triads quite similar.Added 38 f... Read more »

Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Sonja Eisenbeiss, & Bhuvana Narasimhan. (2006) Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events. ESSEX RESEARCH REPORTS IN LINGUISTICS, 1-19. info:other/

August 11, 2010
07:33 AM
418 views

ant synonyms and linguistics envy

by Chris in The Lousy Linguist

A cute analogy: Similar molecules which differ slightly in chain length cause similar behavioral reactions in ants. Therefore, similar chemicals are like lexical synonyms in human language. This is a rough paraphrase of the brief post Chemical Ant Language Has Synonyms.But is the analogy valid?The blog was referring to a study that investigated what appeared to be a pretty straight forward stimulus-response reaction. Ants were exposed to a variety of chemicals which differed minimally and their reactions were recorded. Upon first pass, it appears as though no sort of cognitive processing occurred in the ants (I cannot speak with any authority on the state of cognitive processing in ants, but I'm guessing it's limited at best). The blog post author took the sysnonym analogy straight from the original study Deciphering the Chemical Basis of Nestmate Recognition (full citation below). From the abstract:This study contributes to our understanding of the chemical basis of nestmate recognition by showing that, similar to spoken language, the chemical language of social insects contains “synonyms,” chemicals that differ in structure, but not meaning (emphasis added).Linguists have been justly accused of having both physics envy and biology envy for our tendency to borrow concepts from those fields to help understand linguistic processes. This, however, may be a case of linguistics envy. The use of language as a metaphor for anything remotely communicative is all too familiar to many of us and typically wrong. And the public's love of animal language stories fuels the fire.Clearly the findings are interesting to the extent that they show a certain categorical response. Apparently ants respond to a set of chemicals in a similar way and this set of chemicals might be loosely compared to a set of synonyms like run, jog, trot, scurry, scamper, sprint, etc. But the most interesting thing about lexical synonyms is that they DO differ in meaning and distributional properties. Even if the differences are nuanced, they are real. Their semantics are related, but it's the differences that are the object of linguistic inquiry. So, if the ant response is to be a viable analogy to lexical synonyms, we're going to have to see that each chemical variant produces a similar but interestingly different response in ants.Now, what might be a closer linguistic analogy is that of phonemes. Here we have a well undersood phenomenon whereby a set of similar but interestingly different sounds are perceived as belonging to a single class. There is also the interesting categorical perception phenomenon where slight differences in sounds can be perceived as whole category differences, not unlike molecules of different chain length causing a similar reaction in ants (I think).Wilgenburg, E., Sulc, R., Shea, K., & Tsutsui, N. (2010). Deciphering the Chemical Basis of Nestmate Recognition Journal of Chemical Ecology, 36 (7), 751-758 DOI: 10.1007/s10886-010-9812-4... Read more »

Wilgenburg, E., Sulc, R., Shea, K., & Tsutsui, N. (2010) Deciphering the Chemical Basis of Nestmate Recognition. Journal of Chemical Ecology, 36(7), 751-758. DOI: 10.1007/s10886-010-9812-4

login

Chris

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

search

topics

dates

View

Language

Languages to Display

join us!

News