| Linguistic talk - Ann Senghas talking about the awesomeness of Nicaraguan Sign Language |
[Mar. 27th, 2012|09:59 pm] |
Some background on Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL):
NSL is about 30 years old now. It began when a special school for the education of deaf children was established in Managua, allowing deaf children starting from age 4, who'd previously only had very ad hoc systems of home sign with their family, interact with 25-30 other deaf kids, each of whom brought their own idiosyncratic home sign system/language with them. When those kids interacted they created a completely new, richer sign language. And then since it's a school, every year another cohort of 25 or so new kids would come in, and those kids in turn expanded on the original system created by the first few cohorts, and so on until NSL reached its current status where it's basically a full-fledged language, created within the last 30 years from virtually nothing and without major contamination from other languages. Basically, it's a linguist's dream language, because we have detailed records of what the language looked like at each stage of growth (more on this in a moment) and so we can literally see the grammar unfolding over time rather than having to guess, like we do for pretty much every other language. And it turns out that we can also see what cognitive functions language is and isn't necessary for, which is pretty cool. More on this in a moment too.
The way this school works is that kids go from age 4 until age 14, at which stage they graduate and henceforth are allowed to hang out at the deaf club, but are (obviously) no longer at school. There are also often older kids just starting who couldn't come previously, and their language development is obviously not as good since they haven't had access to a decent source of language until that point. The early cohorts didn't really hang out with each other outside of the school context, but the later ones, having grown up in the age of cell phones, do. At school, the kids get several hours a day to hang out with each other - during food/play times, on the school bus (some of them live as much as 2 hours away, so that's a lot of time to socialise with the other kids), behind the teacher's back... The schooling is pretty much all done in Spanish and mostly with non-signing teachers. As you might expect, not a whole lot of regular school learning actually goes on, although more recently they've started hiring adults from the first generation of signers as teachers so they can actually communicate. Plus, texting via cell phones means the kids are way more incentivised to learn to read than the first generations were.
On sign languages in general: when signs are coined they are often iconic in some way or other. For example, the sign for a king may be the action of putting a crown on, or the sign for a cat might be drawing imaginary whiskers on your face. But there's nnothing principled about what iconic aspect of a thing or action will become encoded as a sign, and signs tend to get less iconic over time.
So, Ann Senghas. She's been going down to this school for the deaf every summer for many years now, documenting their language, getting them to complete various linguistics tasks, and so on. And now, onto the pithy details of the talk, listed in bullet point form as usual because I'm lazy and can't be bothered with trivialities like "good writing".
* The NSL signers can be split into roughly 3 generations, descriptively called first second and third. First generation started school in the 70's, second in the 80's, third in the 90's
* If you look at a video of each generation signing, there aren't any obvious differences at first, except in speed - first generation is slow compared to second is slow compared to third. But they're all clearly using language, not pantomiming or gesturing.
* However if you look more closely, there are bigger differences. Two ways that we saw today included the expression of number and expression of space. Others that were mentioned include expression of path/manner of movement, syntax, theory of mind stuff, and general 'with it'-ness
* On path/manner of movement: where the first and second generation would express a ball rolling down a hill by more or less pantomiming an object rolling down, the third generation would express a ball rolling down a hill by first indicating a rolling thing and then indicating a descent.
* On syntax: for the earlier generations, verbs could only take a single argument each, so "the boy fed the woman" would be expressed as "woman sit; boy feed"
* On expression of number: the first generation would express number the same way us non-signers generally would: 15 would be 5 on both hands followed by 5 on one hand. The second generation developed a more efficient (one-handed, faster) system that builds on that of the first generation: A girl counting to 10 counting the first 5 normally on one hand followed by counting from 1-5 again on the same hand but accompanied by a slight twist. Another girl asked to express the number 15 did so by first indicating a 1 and then moving her hand slightly to one and then indicating a 5 (so basically a 1 in the 10's column and a 5 in the units). Kids in the third generation came up with a new system altogether that loses a lot of the transparency but is even faster and more compact: 15 is expressed by holding the middle finger towards the palm with the thumb (imagine you're trying to form a ring with your thumb and middle finger - this represents 10) and then flicking it outwards to show 5 fingers. Apparently the older generations understand these kinds of signs but are disdainful of them - "they don't even look like numbers, it's just a flick!". This kind of pattern exemplifies the different generations: first generation functional but not particularly efficient, second generation has some kind of systematic improvement that allows them to express themselves more efficiently, and third generation as often as not will come up with something way more abstract that bears very little iconic resemblance to its meaning.
* On expression of space: there's a task linguists sometimes get people to do that goes as follows: person A has to describe a simple picture to person B, who then picks the matching picture on their side of the test area. In this case the pictures were of a tree and a man, where the man would be standing either to the left or right of the tree and could be facing towards or away from the tree, or out to the audience or away from it. Ann Senghas gave this task to her signers to find out how they expressed spatial concepts. Instead what she found was that the first generation failed the task - they couldn't encode spatial relations and performed at chance. In the later generations everyone could do it just fine. We were shown a video of the task being done by a first generation speaker and her third generation nephew, where during a break in the task she asked him to explain how to get it right. The kid does a pretty good job of explaining something that must have seemed ridiculously obvious to him - if the person is on this side of the tree then you put them like so, otherwise you put them on the other like so. This isn't something you can practise, you just look and then do it. Easy! (very rough paraphrase from memory). She did not get it.
* On theory of mind and 'with it'-ness: the first generation fails at second-order theory of mind, aka situations where you have to express what you know that I know. They're also a lot less 'with it' in general - like when Senghas is trying to coordinate with them for meetings and such, they're just a lot less good at it. They're also way less good at metalinguistic stuff - being aware of how you express things.
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| A request for guinea pigs |
[Mar. 15th, 2012|03:22 pm] |
I'm currently running a mini experiment on how native speakers of various dialects of English pronounce 'a' in some nonsense words. It only takes a few minutes and would help me out greatly. Results can be either left as a comment below this post or emailed to evil dot jen at gmail dot com. Thanks!
PS: If anyone's interested in the results or context for this, I'd be happy to post them up in a day or three when I've got all the results aggregated.
( Instructions and words )</div> |
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| a talk that DW failed to import to my LJ |
[Feb. 25th, 2012|08:39 am] |
There's been some interesting talks lately, but today was the first one in a while that made me think "I should blog about that". But since I also would like records of the other talks, I'm going to start trying to summarise the ones I found interesting.
Julie Van Dyke - on language processing using cue retrieval
* Language processing is really heavily dependent on working memory.
* But we don't actually know much about working memory (eg. how much of it we have), so to be safe let's assume that a hypothetical person can only remember the last item they heard/read. This isn't as insane as it sounds - computer models have indicated that processing can do pretty well even with such an impoverished working memory. Everything that isn't in active working memory is absorbed passively and can be called upon (albeit not as easily)
* So let's consider a few hypothetical sentences: 1) the book ripped 2) the book recommended by the editor ripped 3) the book from Michigan by Anne Rice that was recommended by the editor ripped. How does a listener tell if 'ripped' forms a grammatical sentence with 'the book'? There are a few ways: they could search forwards or backwards through the sentence, in which case you would expect processing times to reflect the amount of material between "the book" and "ripped". Or you could do cue-based retrieval, where you filter the sentence for words that have the features you're looking for, in which case you wouldn't expect there to be significant time difference in retrieval. As the name of the talk might suggest, people use cue-based retrieval.
* So now we have a model where we store words as bundles of semantic/phonological/etc features and then retrieve them by using those features. But what if the sentence has several possible words that have the features you're looking for? In that case, retrieval might get blocked due to interference from the other items. This, according to Julie Van Dyke, is why people forget. (I don't know whether she meant in general or when processing sentences. Hopefully the latter)
* And the main difference between people who are good at processing (eg. fast readers) vs those who aren't, is almost entirely based on how detailed your representations are. Because if your word representations are super detailed with lots of features, it's easier to zero in on them. And, good news, the main factor in how good your representations are (after controlling for IQ and a bunch of other bothersome details) is practice. So if you suck at reading, all you need to do to fix it is read more. |
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| Recent invited speakers |
[Feb. 20th, 2012|07:29 pm] |
There's been some interesting talks lately, but today was the first one in a while that made me think "I should blog about that". But since I also would like records of the other talks, I'm going to start trying to summarise the ones I found interesting.
Julie Van Dyke - on language processing using cue retrieval
* Language processing is really heavily dependent on working memory.
* But we don't actually know much about working memory (eg. how much of it we have), so to be safe let's assume that a hypothetical person can only remember the last item they heard/read. This isn't as insane as it sounds - computer models have indicated that processing can do pretty well even with such an impoverished working memory. Everything that isn't in active working memory is absorbed passively and can be called upon (albeit not as easily)
* So let's consider a few hypothetical sentences: 1) the book ripped 2) the book recommended by the editor ripped 3) the book from Michigan by Anne Rice that was recommended by the editor ripped. How does a listener tell if 'ripped' forms a grammatical sentence with 'the book'? There are a few ways: they could search forwards or backwards through the sentence, in which case you would expect processing times to reflect the amount of material between "the book" and "ripped". Or you could do cue-based retrieval, where you filter the sentence for words that have the features you're looking for, in which case you wouldn't expect there to be significant time difference in retrieval. As the name of the talk might suggest, people use cue-based retrieval.
* So now we have a model where we store words as bundles of semantic/phonological/etc features and then retrieve them by using those features. But what if the sentence has several possible words that have the features you're looking for? In that case, retrieval might get blocked due to interference from the other items. This, according to Julie Van Dyke, is why people forget. (I don't know whether she meant in general or when processing sentences. Hopefully the latter)
* And the main difference between people who are good at processing (eg. fast readers) vs those who aren't, is almost entirely based on how detailed your representations are. Because if your word representations are super detailed with lots of features, it's easier to zero in on them. And, good news, the main factor in how good your representations are (after controlling for IQ and a bunch of other bothersome details) is practice. So if you suck at reading, all you need to do to fix it is read more. |
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| Humour, part 5: Emotion as the prime mover |
[Feb. 11th, 2012|03:09 pm] |
(preamble: anyone who's a regular reader of LW can safely skip this post, it's nothing that hasn't been covered there a few hundred times)
There's a folk psychology idea that emotions and wisdom are opposed traits. There are lots of people who make really short-sighted impulsive decisions based on their emotions who would obviously benefit from stopping once in a while to think through the consequences of their actions. And on the other end of the spectrum is the Spock stereotype that most nerds are haunted by at some point or another**. Well, good news everyone! Turns out there's no dichotomy between the two! In fact, you need both!
Let's pick on Spock for a moment, and take the kind of scenario he might be faced with in a typical episode of Star Trek: there's a couple of crew members down on a planet who've been captured by the local bad guys. Those crew members will die if they're not rescued. Only problem is that they're being held in the middle of the bad guys' Fortress of Doom, and according to Spock's calculations a typical rescue attempt only has a 5% chance of succeeding and has a 50% chance of resulting in the deaths of the entire rescue team. What's the rational thing to do here? *
What if one of the crew members being held is Scotty, who they need to keep the ship running? What if it's Captain Kirk, who they need to seduce alien queens**? Is it more rational to mount a rescue then? Why? It's not like any of the numbers of the original estimate have changed. Dig into Spock's 'rationality' and it pretty clearly comes down to number of lives saved. A rescue attempt with a 5% chance of success and a 50% chance of more deaths is a lousy gamble. The perceived odds shift (even though the bare numbers haven't changed) when taking into account more important crew members because those people are essential to preventing more deaths further down the line. But why is it rational to save lives?
The real answer here is that Spock isn't actually ignoring his emotions at all. The only reason anyone would be interested in saving lives is if they value life over death. To unpack that further, we like it when people are alive and we don't like it when people die. Or maybe you do like it when people die but don't like it when everyone shuns you because you're a creepy death-loving weirdo, so you pretend to dislike death. The point here is that ultimately you act according to your values, and your values consist of emotional valencies towards certain concepts, eg. +10 life, -10 death, -20 being alone forever, +5 having a prestigious career, and so on. Without values, you have no mechanism to decide that thing A is a better decision than things B-Z. Some of these values are more common and deep-rooted than others, mostly because we only really have a small number of things we like and dislike, and so a value like "having a prestigious career" (which can change when you re-evaluate your life) is just a fancier version of "being liked by others" (which is much harder to shift and can be satisfied in lots of different ways).
Transient emotions can also affect our values. Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, talked about some experiments on how arousal affects decision making. A bunch of young men were asked questions like "would you have sex without using protection?" and "would you enjoy being spanked?" while in a normal baseline state. Unsurprisingly, they all said they would always use protection, wouldn't engage in taboo or kink, would always get consent, and so forth. Then they were given a stack of porn and given similar questions while they were aroused, and lo and behold, suddenly things like consent and protection were less important. Not because they were originally lying***, but because arousal causes a temporary rearrangement of your values to encourage you to procreate.
This is getting longish, and I have a roleplaying game to go to, so I'll stop here. Next post will be about curiosity, humour, and the evolutionary importance of having good mental models.
* I should probably mention that I've watched very little of the original series, and it's been a long time since I wached any of The Next Generation, so really I'm just making stuff up here.
** ok fine, and also to get into punch-ups. And I suppose to command the ship occasionally
*** even if their original answers were just signalling, I would argue that that's still a strong indication of their values: namely that their actual values around sex were getting outranked by their values around appearing virtuous, and then arousal changes that ranking****
**** One of my current classes is all about analysing phonology using a ranking system called OT. I feel a bit like I have rankings on the brain as a result |
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| If only my results were this pretty |
[Feb. 8th, 2012|10:44 pm] |
This is a midpoint-rooted phoneme tree produced using a Bayesian approach, from a paper whose sole purpose is to debunk a recent-ish high profile paper that claimed a language's phoneme inventory is correlated with how far away it is from Africa, thus providing support for the out-of-Africa story of human origins.
What this picture shows: something to do with phonemic relatedness and geographic clustering and how they don't correlate particularly well. I'm not really sure, to be honest, I've never used that technique or read a paper that used it before, so my being a linguist isn't particularly helpful here. Although I will assume that the different colours correspond to different language families, since that's pretty standard.
Source: Language Log, which also goes into lots more detail about the paper and has lots of other colourful graphs, although none as cool as this one.
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| Linguistic identification with your future self leads to better savings habits |
[Jan. 27th, 2012|10:46 pm] |
Last week we had a presentation by Keith Chen, who you may remember as the economist/management guy who caused a bit of a furor by claiming that the way any given language marks the future tense is a good predictor of future-oriented behaviours like saving money, taking care of health, and that sort of thing.
Some background: If you know about hyperbolic discounting it's probably a no-brainer to hear that if you give people a 401k/superannuation form with a picture of themselves now they'll put down lower payments than if you present them with a photo of themselves photoshopped to look old. The reason for this is that as a species we like to enjoy the good times now and make our future selves pay for it, but if you make people identify more with their future selves then they don't feel quite so great about putting stuff off that way.
With that out of the way, Chen's presentation can be summarised more or less as follows: Languages vary in the way they mark the future, with some languages like Hebrew forcing you to express the future explicitly whenever you're talking about future events and other languages like Chinese letting you talk about the future without using overt tense markers. For languages like German or English which have both overt (I will eat breakfast tomorrow) and covert (I am going to eat breakfast tomorrow) ways of talking about the future that can be used more or less interchangeably, the linguists who did these surveys looked at frequency of each type and and categorised the language as weak future-marking or whatever based on the most frequent forms.
The modern version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that language structure has weak priming effects on speakers. For example, in languages where the grammatical gender of "bridge" is feminine, people are more likely to describe them as "graceful" or "soaring" whereas speakers of languages that have masculine bridges are more likely to describe them as "strong" or "durable". (See Lena Boroditsky's publications page for lots more experiments of this type).
Chen used a bunch of census type data that included the language spoken at home to find that even after you control for a fairly impressive array of confounding factors, there was a strong correlation between savings behaviour and type of future marking in a language. In fact, he claimed, language type is a better predictor of savings behaviour than a bunch of other factors that economists usually consider to be pretty important, including trifling considerations like the country's economy.
Overall story: Every time you use an overt future marker you are priming yourself to think of future-you as a different person to present-you, so you're more likely to do what makes present-you happy. Or alternatively, there is a common cause for the savings behaviour and speakers' choice of how they talk about the future. |
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| A theory of humour: part 4 |
[Jan. 10th, 2012|09:48 am] |
Benign violation (BV) theory
There isn't actually that much to say here that doesn't properly fit into either IR theory or status/superiority theory, but here goes. The central premise of benign violation theory is that humour exists in the violation of social norms as long as there's no real harm in it. The main point in favour of it is that it describes accurately why things like slapstick and verbal sparring can be funny but attempted murder and arguments aren't, even though they mostly involve the same actions. It also captures why so much humour revolves around sex, excrement, and death, all of which are things you don't talk about in polite company. Minsky (1981) proposed a sort of Freudian account of humour. Namely that your brain has a bunch of cognitive censors designed to taboo certain kinds of words/thoughts such as sex or excrement related, a la Freud, but also censors for faulty reasoning. And then cheating these censors is 'naughty' and this is what you find funny, successfully carrying out taboo acts or thoughts. This sort of provides an explanation for wordplay humour, since the joke usually lies in an ambiguity between a normal serious reading and the incorrect nonsensical one. Another point in favour of BV theory is the evolutionary psychology explanation of laughter. Some types of primates have a 'false alarm' signal to go along with the 'snake', 'jaguar' and other assorted predator signals. And on top of that, apparently when chimps play they make a special 'play face' and engage in a kind of panting, which both help to signal that they're playing and the situation isn't serious. Hurley, Dennett, and Adams' explanation of laughter is as a sort of combination of these things: a way to signal that there's no real danger and I'm just playing with you. And so since humour is accompanied by the 'not serious' signal, the logic is that humour can pretty much be characterised as potentially-harmful things done in a non-harmful manner and that's why we all laugh at it. A final point in favour of BV theory is that it accurately captures the intuition that it's difficult to be in a negative emotional state and find something funny at the same time. But if that negative state isn't due to the potential humour, BV theory says nothing about why I should find something less funny then than when I start off in a neutral or positive emotional state. What BV theory can't capture 1. Humour isn't always harmless. See: pejorative and bullying humour, mean humour, satire, humour based on inferiority of others (eg. Irish jokes) 2. All the subtleties of humourcraft: if humour is just being non-serious or cheating an internal censor, it should be much easier to craft hilarious jokes than it is. All I would need to do is go out to a public space and say 'poo' a lot, or do something obviously nonsensical to trip the 'faulty reasoning' censor. Or for that matter just lie in bed and think of nonsensical or scatological scenarios. Jokes shouldn't really get more or less funny depending on whether you've been exposed to them before, since a norm violation isn't going to be less of one over time. Overall, benign-violation theory makes a decent attempt to provide an explanation of humour but misses the mark on many many levels. |
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| A theory of humour: part 3 |
[Jan. 9th, 2012|11:17 am] |
Incongruity resolution (IR) theory The central idea of incongruity resolution theory is that when we have an expectation that is suddenly resolved, we find it funny. IR theory comes in many different flavours: Kant claimed humour is when we have 'strained expectations that come to nothing", other modern researchers have claimed that it's when we develop two competing frames/expectations from a setup, which is then resolved in favour of one by the punchline, or that we have one frame for the setup and another for the punchline and the humour comes from resolving the two, or that it's when our perceptions and our abstract representations clash, or any number of other variations that involve unexpectedness. And not just any old unexpectedness - pretty much everything that happens to us isn't anything we actively expect. The kind of unexpectedness IR theory calls for are things that we expected *not* to happen as opposed to things that we merely weren't expecting. I didn't expect to see the particular guy at the library who checked my books out for me today, but if he'd been dressed up as Death I probably would have found it amusing. What incongruity resolution theory gets right: It accounts for why watching people fall down is widely considered hilarious. It explains most wordplay (where the incongruity comes from ambiguity in meaning). It somewhat explains parodies and obscure humour, where the requirement of being able to draw on your previous knowledge is likely to bring a set of expectations with it to be shattered. It explains unhelpful humour, since we have expectations of people saying things to us that are relevant and truthful (see Grice's maxims for more detail), and to a certain extent mean humour (by the same maxims I expect people not to be unnecessarily mean). What incongruity resolution theory gets wrong: There are lots of examples of incongruousness that aren't funny. Some examples: a patient with baffling symptoms, lies, mysteries and puzzles, snow out of season, an instrument out of tune at a concert. There are plenty of jokes that remain funny even when you already know the punchline, including ingroup humour and really good comedy movies and shows like Monty Python or the earlier seasons of the Simpsons. In these cases, there aren't any expectations being proven false or resolved in an unexpected way, since I already know what's going to happen IR theory also does a bad job of explaining the social aspects of humour - why other people's laughter makes things funnier, although we could stretch the theory to cover it by guessing that other people laughing makes you more likely to reach the same interpretation as them and therefore also find it funny. Finally, there's still a lot of vagueness in the theory: what is incongruity exactly? Most of the proposed definitions contradict each other. IR theory is more of a description than an explanation. |
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| A theory of humour: addendum to part 2 |
[Jan. 8th, 2012|02:33 pm] |
It occurs to me that I may have misrepresented part of the status/signalling/superiority theory of humour, in that I focussed on why you would tell jokes but only very briefly mentioned why it is that we might find things funny even when they have no obvious author. So just to make things clear: another way to state the status/superiority theory of humour is that people find it funny when they recognise their superiority over someone else, and this can include your past self. But all the other points still hold: not all humour can be explained in terms of status (eg. nonsequitur, some forms of wordplay), and it doesn't do a good job of explaining why we find the things funny that we do |
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