Interesting Research @ UConn

I'm catching up on some old issues of the UConn Advance, the newspaper of news and events at the University of Connecticut, and I noticed some interesting cognitive-related research going on -- in different departments, as you might expect.

Closest to me as the library adviser to the department of communication sciences, is the Sept. 29 article on assistant professor Melissa Tafoya, highlighting her research in "the dark side of human behavior," or as she elaborates: "the real-life stuff - infidelity, jealousy, aggression, and conflict." The Advance article describes her work in several areas, including assessment of the long-term relationships between step-siblings, and the physiological effects of communication. The Advance says:

In one study, she examined how people’s stress levels were reduced by expressing affection through writing a letter.

The participants’ cortisol levels, heart rates, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels were measured. “We found that participants’ stress levels were significantly reduced when they wrote a letter of affection to somebody they cared about,” she says.

I was also interested to read the October 6 article on the creation of a database to compare international sign languages. Linguists Harry van der Hulst and Rachel Channon are developing a database called SignTyp -- which will eventually be available on the Web for all to peruse -- that contains information on nearly 12,000 signs from six different sign languages. Van der Hulst is a phonologist who says “When I started studying sign languages, it changed my perspective on what human languages are. Sign languages are extra interesting in the domain of phonology, because the medium is not sound but visual display.” He adds that since linguistics has traditionally focused on sound, the field has to redefine what it means by phonology to allow for the fact that sign language doesn't have consonants and vowels.

Check out the Advance article for images of Van der Hulst demonstrating the sign for "recognize" in ASL; presumably a taste of what's to come in the SignTyp database.

For More Information

• Citations to Professor Tafoya's publications are available on her CV.
  
• UConn Linguistics Department SignTyp site.
  

Soda or Pop?

what is this carbonated beverage? 

Do you call it "pop"?  "soda"?  a brand name soda pop? I ran across a linguistics map showing who calls it what:

Read about it at the Strange Maps blog, The Pop Vs Soda Map.  They cite an article by Luanne von Schneidemesser, PhD in German linguistics and philology (University of Wisconsin-Madison) showing who calls "carbonated beverages" what.  They note that von Schneidemesser is a senior editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English.  

For More Information

• Schneidemesser, Luanne von. "Soda or Pop?" (first page in pdf)  Journal of English Linguistics, 1996 Dec; 24 (4): 270-87.  [article that is basis for blog post]
  
• Strange Maps.  The Pop Vs Soda Map. August 18, 2008.

Updates

In which we revisit some earlier posts and see what's new. This is partly because now that classes are over, I have time to catch up on old issues of the New Yorker and New Scientist, leading to some blog bits.

Crows
Last July, I wrote about the intelligence of crows and scrub-jays. In March, "hacker and writer" Joshua Klein spoke at TedTalks about crows and how he taught them to use a specially-created crow vending machine.


As Klein leads up to the vending machine (truly amazing), he shows some fascinating videos which nicely illustrate how crows learn, specifically a shot of a crow bending a wire to pick up food in a lab, and another shot of a crow using cars to crack her nuts -- then waiting for the light to change so she can collect the nut bits in safety. I won't spoil the vending machine story for you, as it's really fascinating.

Politics, Emotion, and ... Genes?
I've written occasionally about politics and the brain, and I read an article in an early February issue of New Scientist about some studies that suggest "political positions are substantially determined by biology." Jim Giles summarizes recent studies in various journals, and the findings are startling: twin studies suggest that political orientation is genetic (American Political Science Review, 2005); there may be a connection between fear of death, art preference, and one's political leaning (American Psychologist, 2003), and "there is probably a set of genes that influences openness, which in turn may influence political orientation" (Journal of Research in Personality, YEAR). Giles cautions, however, that "there is no shortage of critics who question the whole idea of linking politics with biology." For more, check out the article, or read some of the articles that Giles summarizes.

The Pirahã
I summarized a New Yorker article about the Pirahã about a year ago; in January, New Scientist interviewed the linguist Daniel Everett, who, along with his family, are the only non-Pirahã who speak that language. If you're interested in the story of the language of the Pirahã, and what it says for language acquisition (including a conflict with Noam Chomsky), the interview is a good read.

For More Information

• Klein, Joshua. The Amazing Intelligence of Crows. TedTalks, March 2008.
  
• Giles, Jim. "Born That Way." New Scientist, Feb. 2, 2008. Not available for free online, but full-text may be available @your library, in Academic Search Premier and other databases.
  
• Alford, John, Carolyn Funk, and John R. Hibbing. Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? (pdf) American Political Science Review. Vol. 99(2), May 2005, 153-167.
  
• Jost, John T. The End of the End of Ideology (abstract). American Psychologist. Vol 61(7), Oct 2006, 651-670. Full-text may be available @ your library in PsycARTICLES.
• "Heritabilities of Common and Measure-Specific Components of the Big Five Personality Factors" Journal of Research in Personality, vol 32 (4), April 1998, p. 431. Not available for free online, but full-text may be available @your library, in ScienceDirect.
• Else, Liz and Lucy Middleton. "Interview: Daniel Everett." New Scientist Jan 19, 2008, p42-45. Subtitle: "Out on a limb over language: linguist Daniel Everett went to Brazil as a young Christian missionary to work with the Piraha indigenous people. Instead of converting them, he told Liz Else and Lucy Middleton, he lost his faith and his family, and provoked a major intellectual row." Not available for free online, but full-text may be available @ your library, in Academic OneFile.

From Unregistered Words to OED3

Just heard a great lecture / podcast by Simon Winchester on the Oxford English Dictionary. Winchester spoke at TVOntario’s Big Ideas show in May and told fascinating stories about the genesis of monolingual dictionaries, which came later than the multilingual kind, and also spoke about the creation of the first edition of the OED.

Some interesting tidbits from his lecture include
* Samuel Johnson’s weaker definitions, including
** network: “Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”
** oats: “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people”
* the derivation of the word referring to a 4-legged animal that barks & has a tail. These creatures used to be known exclusively as hounds, until the Dutch came by and offered to sell the British a “dogge.”

At the end, Winchester briefly comments on the future OED, known as OED3:
* Work on the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary began in mid-1990s
* It’s expected to have 40 volumes and 980,000 words
It was originally scheduled for release 2010, but is now scheduled for release somewhere around 2037.

In researching this for an upcoming lecture on dictionaries & encyclopedias, I found an article in theTransactions of the Philological Society by John Simpson and colleagues about the OED today. Simpson is Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary, and the article is a series of interlinked pieces“ presented at the Philological Society in June 2003 to marked the 75th anniversary of the first edition of the OED. The article includes some new entries (work on OED3 began with M) and a comparison of the “modal auxiliary must” in the first OED and in OED3 as part of the effort to address not only definitions but also historical syntax. Joy for linguists!

For More Information
* Johnson, Samuel. “Some of Johnson’s Dictionary Definitions.” c1775.
* Simpson, John, Edmund Weiner, Philip Durkin. “The Oxford English Dictionary Today.” 102:3 335-381, December 2004 [full-text available via Academic Search Premier]
* Simpson, John. ‘Preface to the Third Edition,’ 2000.
* Winchester, Simon. “Big Ideas [lecture].” TV Ontario, May 27, 2007. [mp3 no longer available].
* ---. home page (sadly outdated).
* ---. The Meaning of Everything : The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press. 2003.
* ---. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, HarperCollins, 1998.

Blogged with Flock

Relationships between Language & Culture?!

Apparently it's still linguistics week here at the CogSciLibrarian corral. In catching up on my New Yorker reading, I came across a recent New Yorker article about the Brazilian hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). John Colapinto accompanied linguist Dan Everett on a recent visit to learn more about the Pirahã's language, including its lack of words for color and numbers, as well as its lack of "recursion." (Recursion is the human ability to say not only "the librarian is reading a book," but also "the librarian who is wearing a tiara is reading a book")

According to Colapinto, Everett has been writing about the Pirahã for over 25 years, "[b]ut his work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled 'Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,' which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology." In the article, Everett notes that the Pirahã don't have words for quantification (all, each, most, few), and don't do recursion. The controversy stems from Noam Chomsky's recent revision to his theory of universal grammar, which posits that "recursion is the cornerstone of all languages."

Yipes! Right into the linguistics fray.

The article is a good introduction both into the language issues in play with the Pirahã, (which Brent Berlin, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Georgia, believes "... may provide a snapshot of language at an earlier stage of syntactic development. ... 'The plausible scenarios ... suggest that early language looks something like the kind of thing that Pirahã looks like now.' ") -- and also a diversion into Peter Gordon's 2004 Science article "Numerical Cognition Without Words," in which he describes the Pirahã's understanding of numbers (very short version: one, two, many).

Colapinto neatly summarizes some of the arguments going on in linguistics right now about Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, including that Chomsky has not studied language development among many different peoples, and that Chomsky is not much interested in the evolution of human language. Everett's article and research may provide a window into the development of our language; at a minimum, it calls into question Chomsky's theory that recursion is essential in human language.

If you're interested in either language development or the politics of linguistics, this is a good read.

To Learn More
Colapinto, John, The Interpreter; Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? The New Yorker. 4/16/07, 120+. Full-text also available from LexisNexis, Academic Search Premier, and Academic OneFile @ your library.

Everett, Dan. "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã // Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language." (abstract; pdf) Current Anthropology, 46:4 (2005), pp 621+.

Gordon, Peter. Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science, 06:5695 (2004) pp. 496 - 499. Full-text may be available @ your library.

My Favorite Diphthong, or, The Maple Leafs

This turned out to be Linguistics Week in the CogSciLibrarian's commute.

First up, Seth Lerer on WHYY's Radio Times (May 11, 2007; listen via RealAudio or find on iTunes). Lerer talked about his new book Inventing English: A Portable History of The Language.

Lerer read part of the first poem written in English somewhere in the 6th century. He talked about the evolution of language from that poem through Old English, Middle English, the Great Vowel Shift, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Twain, and up to & including email & rap. I felt like I was sitting in Mark Feinstein's History of Language class again!

Things I liked from his talk:
* Shakespeare invented ~6,000 words & phrases, including assassination (which comes from "hashish"!) and "be all and end all." (list from wikipedia)
* Lerer's favorite diphthong is "i," "might," "thine," which to my untrained ear, sounds like oeil in French, which he suggests is the origin of "pirate English." Ahoy Matey!
* Johnson's definition of "oats:" a food given to horses in England and humans in Scotland.
* Mark Twain first fictionalized the term "dude" and "hello" (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), and the term became popular in the 1880s.
* He's a great speaker who's incredibly enthusiastic about his topic.

More about Professor Lerer. Read his new book, OR borrow his "Teaching Company" lectures on the History of the English Language from the library.


And then I listened to a March 2006 lecture by Steven Pinker on CBC's Big Ideas lecture series (mp3 available at amigofish). He talked about regular & irregular verbs and nouns, and hypothesized about how and where such grammatical rules are stored in the brain.

I most liked hearing about the irregular forms of verbs and nouns. For instance, the 10 most popular verbs (number of occurrences in a million words of speech) in English are all irregular, such as be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get. There is a 788-way tie for those words that are used only once in a million words -- and Pinker shows that the first 10 alphabetically are regular & can be "pasted" by adding -ed at the end of the verb. These include abhor, abrogate, acclimatize, and adulturate.

I also liked hearing about making compound nouns plural, including that the hockey team is called the Maple Leafs rather than the Maple Leaves and a group of more than one lowlife is called lowlifes. "It happens whenever ... the meaning of the noun ... is not simply the meaning of the little noun inside it" -- compare "workman" with "still life" to see the difference here.

Read a review of Pinker's book Loading "Words and Rules : the Ingredients of Language" in the article Washington Sleeped Herefrom the November 29, 1999 New York Times.


I'm not a linguist, and I know some of this is controversial, but I enjoy thinking about words and how they work. If you do, check out the podcasts or some of the books cited here.

Preserving Languages

Fun podcast recently from Science Friday about"a plan to preserve dying languages before they disappear entirely. The National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Smithsonian institution are planning approximately $2 million in funding to fight the 'imminent death of an estimated half of the 6000-7000 currently used human languages.' "

Joe Palca interviewed D. Terence Langendoen, who has the fabulous title of "Director, Cyberinfrastructure / Co-Director, Linguistics Program / Division of Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences at the National Science Foundation." Read about some NSF linguistics & cog sci grants!

The show starts out with a guy speaking Dena'ina, and you can read about that language and hear the Dena'inan word of the day (a recent word was "hnalqin", which means "warm/hot"). You can browse over 200 sound recordings (sadly, you can't hear them); you can read a bit about the Dena'ina language; and you can see a map charting the Athabascan family of languages.

"k'idiki"!

Road Trip for Linguists

A New York Times linguistics road trip through the “Inland North Region” (upstate New York & Pittsburgh, in the story) with William Labov’s Atlas of North American English as a guide. In a useful twist for linguists, and an interesting application of technology, the Times has provided links to audio clips of some of the regional phrases being discussed.

March 17, 2006
Travel / Escapes: It's Not the Sights, It's the Sounds
NYT
By TIM SULTAN

Hot Topic: Origin of Language

The CSA database provides summary info. about the origin of language, entitled Language Origins:
Did Language Evolve Like the Vertebrate Eye, or Was It More Like Bird Feathers?. Includes a several page summary, citations, web sites, and a glossary.

In related news, Hampshire just subscribed to LLBA (Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts), which offers citations to linguistics articles from 1973 to present. CSA provides detailed info. about LLBA as well.

Language Log Blog

The linguists among you might enjoy this Language Log blog. Covers such interesting and lexically significant topics as the semantics of "tightie whities", possible cognitive benefits of television, and brain structure in Williams Syndrome. Created by Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thanks to Emily for the link.

Linguistics & Reference Questions

Interesting article in the May 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology on linguistics & answering reference questions. Hampshire doesn't have access to the full-text online, but you can read the citation & abstract at the Wiley / JASIST home page. I was able to download the pdf without paying, so maybe it's free!

A linguistic analysis of question taxonomies.
Jeffrey Pomerantz Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Volume 56, Issue 7, Pages 715 - 728.

New Web Sites in Linguistcs

Added a few new sites to the "Doing Research in Linguistics" page:
- History of the English Language Annotated links are arranged chronologically and range from Pre History to American & Present Day English. Page hasn't been updated since August 2002.
- Interactive IPA Chart Includes the full inventory of IPA symbols and pronounciations in initial, intervocalic (between two vowels), and final position. Free Flashplayer required.
- Old English Aerobics Anthology of Old English texts and a collection of on-line exercises, all keyed to Peter S. Baker's 2003 Introduction to Old English . Includes a "workout room" (online exercises), a glossary, and an annotated anthology of old English texts.

Linguistics on PBS!

There's a PBS show tonight (Wed., Jan 5) called Do You Speak American? which is a 3-hour program about linguistic differences across the US, by Robert MacNeil.

The PBS web site is chock full of good stuff, including transcripts of all three hours, at http://www.pbs.org/speak/transcripts/. There's also an educator's site about the program, which might be interesting to some of you: http://www.pbs.org/speak/education/. I will buy the companion book for Hampshire's collection.