Games with Words

Now, now, don't go leaping to conclusions. Sur...

2012-05-08T00:35:00.644-04:00

Now, now, don't go leaping to conclusions. Surely it can all be explained by simple omniscience? ;-)

Oh, I think some snark is in order especially sinc...

2012-05-07T17:37:40.960-04:00

Oh, I think some snark is in order especially since you can guess why the reviewer knows of this important research that was never published or presented.

FYI - All Google Doodles are archived here:
2012-04-11T00:53:16.617-04:00
FYI - All Google Doodles are archived here:
www.google.com/doodles/

amazing one!!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o...

2012-04-09T07:42:16.950-04:00

amazing one!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oTPFjOobDM

Hi! I recently found this blog (nice site, btw!). ...

2012-04-04T05:44:56.571-04:00

Hi! I recently found this blog (nice site, btw!). I've been working on a video series about the International Phonetic Alphabet and the English language, and I was wondering if it was the sort of thing you or your readers might be interested in. (I hope comments are an OK way to contact you!)

The first one is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e66ByetpDY

If you like them, I'd love to spread them to a wider audience.

Best regards,
-Gabe Wyner
www.towerofbabelfish.com

I always use their web submission system for that ...

2012-03-22T09:01:21.954-04:00

I always use their web submission system for that sort of thing.

One possibility that occurs to me is the subject m...

2012-03-11T14:34:13.648-04:00

One possibility that occurs to me is the subject matter: the top 5 all discuss distinctly emotive things (death, birth, vomiting up a limb, etc). It would be good to see the top 10/20.

BTW in case anyone tried "Person or Thing of ...

2012-03-04T11:54:35.430-05:00

BTW in case anyone tried "Person or Thing of the Year", there was a similar issue with the available responses. I am fixing it now and should be done in ~15 minutes. "Simon Says Freeze" has actually been piloted partially already and so should work just fine.

@Gordon: Many thanks for trying the task. Many tha...

2012-03-04T11:53:02.697-05:00

@Gordon:
Many thanks for trying the task. Many thanks also for noticing the problem with "everything changed". That was left over from an earlier version (we've been through a few iterations) and has now been fixed and should make more sense.
As far as whether it would be easier to identify which object was affected rather than which one wasn't ... it's an empirical question. Let's just say that we tried it the other way previously and that turned out to be hard, too. My suspicion is that the new way is actually easier, but there's only one way to find out.
What part of the nouns and adjectives did you think was not a good idea?

Maybe it's just me, but I found it very diffic...

2012-03-04T11:01:52.657-05:00

Maybe it's just me, but I found it very difficult and tiring to determine what DIDN'T change. It's so much easier to say what DID.

It's compounded by the fact that the list is extremely long. I know you said it would take ~30 minutes, but time goes by a lot slower when it takes so much energy to answer a single question. Also, it was confusing that there was a choice for every question for "nothing changed" but not for "everything changed". If nothing changed, wouldn't we just check all the boxes anyway?

There was also at least one sentence that didn't seem grammatical to me, even discounting the fake words.

That being said, I do like how you presented the story in a way that would be accessible to non-linguists, although you did throw in a note about nouns and adjectives at the end that I thought might not have been a good idea.

So, full disclosure:
I am a linguist. I attempted the Ducks test. I didn't finish it.

HTH.

I would love to find a speach to text program that...

2012-02-17T14:34:40.482-05:00

I would love to find a speach to text program that doesn't require months of "training" to get how I say words...Keep trying!

sometimes you want to say one thing but really mea...

2012-02-08T14:38:32.123-05:00

sometimes you want to say one thing but really means another :)

No, it's because the peer review process quali...

2012-01-02T21:57:23.507-05:00

No, it's because the peer review process qualifies the peers before giving them something to review, whereas anyone can comment on a blog.

Unfortunately, in the 20th century there was a mov...

2011-09-10T16:58:07.022-04:00

Unfortunately, in the 20th century there was a movement to try to turn teaching into a science, rather than the art that it actually is. No two artists work the same way, and great teachers are all unique in the way they work. I feel that the modern scientific approach to education is unfortunate.

@Matt: Your comment got held up in my spam filter ...

2011-09-08T10:02:39.141-04:00

@Matt: Your comment got held up in my spam filter for some reason, and so I just saw it.

I wonder if perhaps we mean different things by "innate". Would you be comfortable with stating that each organism has a starting state, from which some end points can be reached and others cannot? That is, the starting state for the human and chimpanzee embryos are different, with the human embryo capable of developing into things that the chimpanzee embryo cannot develop into, and vice versa.

This is all I -- and most people, I think -- mean by saying something is innate: it's a prior constraint on where the system can go. Without that concept or something very similar to it, it seems that it is impossible to ask what is different between different species of animal. We know that it's not just the environment (cf the Noam Chimpsky experiments).

Well, it's fortuitous that you picked that par...

2011-09-01T23:15:07.603-04:00

Well, it's fortuitous that you picked that particular question, as it's one I think I have the ability to address. The idea is that we should do away entirely with "innate" as a word, because there's no particular reason to say, "This is innate, that is not." Genes are something that a human zygote (and later, infant) has - but their expression is modified, altered, controlled, and influenced by a literally endless list of environmental factors, from nutrient densities to social environment later in life. Basically, it says, nothing exists in isolation.

So in a developmental system, genes don't work according to the Central Dogma of Crick and Watson. There's nothing like: genes (genotype) -> transcription, translation -> amino acids -> proteins -> phenotype (the way the organism is). Instead, genes are just one of many things that contribute to the phenotype - along with social cues (why are you blushing? did your genes just change?), electrochemical cues, etc. etc.

While this is mostly a theory, there is strong, consistent evidence of the fact that epigenetic modification (non-genetic factors that change gene expression) are stable and heritable. So genes, while you're born with a certain set, produce one outcome in one environment and a different outcome in another (search for anything on methylation).

So, to extend this to language, while exaggerating as little as possible: we aren't born with "innate" anything, nor to we "learn" everything as we go along. There is a massively complex, interdependent system of factors ranging from genes to physical environment to linguistic and social environment that allow children to learn to make use of a complex method if information transfer, which is different from, say, pheromone-level communication only cosmetically. This, if you take it seriously, applies Occam's razor swollen to the size of a battering ram to the innate-learning-mechanism-versus-innate-hierarchical-phrase-structure issue. Both are irrelevant, because language is not a faculty, or a single contiguous ability, or even a single entity in any sense. Body language, smells, immediate circumstances, tone, vocal contour, and so on are not auxiliary to a phrase, they are part of it. But that's a different argument. Basically, language is construed not as a regularized series of rules and symbols and so on, but as a dynamic method of communication. Words and phrases are only part of the process. After all, you can never achieve fluency learning rules and exceptions, not with a human brain (which makes room for C-3PO, thank god).

Sorry I've been so verbose. Hopefully you skipped to the end and are not horribly bored.

@Matt: I haven't read this particular paper, t...

2011-08-28T10:18:18.337-04:00

@Matt: I haven't read this particular paper, though I've heard similar arguments. I'm not sure I completely understand them, and I suspect people may be talking past one another. For instance, take the claim that there is nothing innate, only genetic, environmental, and social factors (among others). What definition of "innate" is being used such that genetics isn't innate?

oy. Reed's paper is 1997, not 2007. Sorry. Was...

2011-08-23T10:39:33.456-04:00

oy. Reed's paper is 1997, not 2007. Sorry. Wasn't thinking.

What are your thoughts on people like Edward S. Re...

2011-08-23T10:36:36.617-04:00

What are your thoughts on people like Edward S. Reed who argue (see his 2007 paper, The Ecological Approach to Language Development: A Radical Solution to Chomsky's and Quine's Problems) who essentially argue that the Nativist/Empiricist debate is founded in the wrong presuppositions, and that we should instead adopt a ecological perspective?

Th idea basically appeals to the idea of a developmental system, wherein there is no "innate" anything, just the combination of factors (i.e. genetic, environmental (biochemical), social (social), etc.) that result in particular developmental patterns. By this view, language is not a unique, distinct faculty or capacity but rather non-separable part of a complex information sharing and processing system, that most humans end up developing in pretty similar ways because we all get raised in pretty similar ways.

I am an undergrad studying linguistics and neuroscience, and I would be delighted to hear your thoughts on the matter.

What is remarkable here is the poor grammar exhibi...

2011-08-14T03:21:23.830-04:00

What is remarkable here is the poor grammar exhibited by the original author. The word "data" is the Latin plural of the word "datum", which means "that which is given". In formal or scientific writing, "data" should always be used as a plural.

Thus, instead of "very much data", it should be "very many data", and "little data" should be "few data".

Also, different languages have different preferred word orders. I learned in my Bar-Mitzvah lessons that ancient Hebrew used verb-subject-preposition-object (although modern Hebrew uses a more English-like word order); and I have read that in heavily inflected languages, such as Latin, you can mix up the words and the sentence will still make sense.

I also have a problem with Bayesian analysis. I remember my frustration with the then-popular search engine Alta Vista. I would start a search, and Alta Vista would go off on a tangent and give me results that did not match my needs. I would then reframe the search, using more specific terms, but Alta Vista would be stuck in some kind of Bayesian hysteresis and give me results reflecting its previous misunderstanding of what I was trying to ask. Then Google came to the rescue, and Alta Vista is now part of Yahoo.

I wasn't suggesting "the world is not ran...

2011-08-11T00:59:43.361-04:00

I wasn't suggesting "the world is not random" as an explanation. I was suggesting it as a rephrasing of the question.

None of the above. There are patterns in the inp...

2011-08-05T19:56:09.699-04:00

None of the above.

There are patterns in the input. Perfors shows, under certain assumptions, those patterns can be learned. But why do those particular patterns exist, rather than some other patterns?

"The world is non-random" is not an explanation, any more than it is an explanation of why apples fall or light behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

ok, maybe you can help me understand this, because...

2011-08-05T12:41:41.004-04:00

ok, maybe you can help me understand this, because I've heard your question at the end, but I'm not sure I understand it.

You are not really asking, "why is the world not random?" right?

Are you asking, "why is language input not random?"

or maybe something more like, "why is language input optimalish?"

none of the above? =)

-ecl.

I only just now saw this, but it looks like Altman...

2011-06-29T08:39:32.385-04:00

I only just now saw this, but it looks like Altman will remain editor for another 3 years.

That is a good suggestion Tim because the problem ...

2011-06-28T17:13:56.186-04:00

That is a good suggestion Tim because the problem with puns is that if the vocabulary doesn't stand up it's instantly lame.