Magic Singlish

A number of non-native English speakers get "Singaporean" as the top guess for their native language. You can actually see that by playing around in our dialect navigator. Here's screenshot of a particularly illuminating view:

As you can see, "Singaporean" is connected to a big bundle of non-native dialects. Most of the other native dialects are off in a chain in the bottom right. Here is another view with a slightly weaker filter on connectedness:

Again, you can see that most of the non-native dialects cluster together. Most of the native dialects do not connect directly to that cluster but rather connect to Singaporean. Again, you can see Standard American and AAVE off in their own cluster.

Of course, this view just tells you what is connected to what. It's possible that Swedish is actually more similar to Irish than to Singaporean, even though the chain of connections is farther for Swedish and Irish. If you click on one of the dialects, the panel on the left will show you how closely related that dialect is to all others:

We're working on a browser that will let you see *why* different dialects are more or less related -- that is, what answers in the quiz are typical of which dialects. I'm hoping it will be ready soon. In the meantime, enjoy the dialect browser.

Which English: The Science, Part 1

I've gotten a number of questions about the science behind our WhichEnglish quiz. Actually, I had intended to post a more detailed discussion days ago, but I got distracted by other matters.

In this project, we are looking at three interrelated issues:

1. How does the age at which you start learning a language affect how well you learn that language?
2. How is learning a foreign language affected by the language you already know?
3. How are the grammars of different English dialects related?

And of course, we train an algorithm to predict participants' native language and dialect of English based on their answers. I return to that at the end.

Age of Acquisition

Although WhichEnglish has a few scientific targets, age-of-acquisition effects were the original inspiration. Everybody knows that the older you are when you start learning a foreign language, the harder it is to learn. One possibility is that there is a critical period: Up to some age, you can learn a language like a native. After that age, you will never learn it perfectly. The other possibility is that there is no specific period for language learning; rather, language-learning simply gets a little harder every day.

The evidence is unclear. Ideally, you would compare people who started learning some language (say, English) from birth with people who started as 1 year-olds and people who started as 2 year-olds, etc. Or maybe you would want something even finer-grained. The problem is that you need a decent number of people at each age (50 would be a good number), and it quickly becomes infeasible.

One study that came close to this ideal used census data. The authors -- led by Kenji Hakuta -- realized that the US census asks foreign-born residents to rate their own English ability. The authors compared this measure of English ability with the year of immigration (an approximation for the age at which the person started learning English). Their results showed a steady decline, rather than a critical period.

We are trying to build on this work in a few ways. For one, it would be nice to confirm (or disconfirm) the previous results with a more sensitive measure of English ability. So rather than just ask people how good their English is, we have them take a test. Also, we are getting more precise information about when the participant started learning English and in what contexts.

Also, there is good reason to suspect that age-of-acquisition affects different aspects of language differently. Studies have shown that even people who began learning a language as toddlers have detectable -- if very subtle -- accents. However, people who start learning foreign languages as adults usually report that learning vocabulary isn't so hard. Grammar seems to be somewhere in between. The Hakuta study didn't distinguish these different aspects of language.

WhichEnglish focuses on grammar. We also have a vocabulary quiz to look at vocabulary. A pronunciation test is in the works.

First language effects

When we started thinking about studying age-of-acquisition effects, we quickly realized a problem. We needed questions that would be difficult for someone who learned English as a second language. But which aspects of grammar are difficult seems to depend on your first language. I personally have difficulty with aspect in Russian because the English aspect system is much less complex. However, dealing with tense in Russian is relatively straightforward, since the Russian tense system is much less complex that English's.

Since we didn't know for sure what the language backgrounds of our participants would be, we wanted a range of questions that covered the different kinds of problems people with different backgrounds might have.

As we combed the literature, we realized that it was pretty fragmented. One study might say that grammar rule x is difficult for Japanese-speakers and grammar rule y is difficult for German-speakers, but there would be no information on how Japanese-speakers fare with grammar rule y and how German-speakers manage with grammar rule x. This actually makes sense: Most studies look at speakers of one or at most a handful of language backgrounds. This is partly a matter of research interest (the researchers are usually interested in some particular language) and partly a matter of feasibility (in a lab setting, you can only test so many participants). We realized that our study, by virtue of being on the Internet and recruiting people from a wide array of backgrounds, would provide an opportunity to get more systematic data across a large number of languages.

This is pretty exploratory. We don't have strong hypotheses. But as data comes in, we will be analyzing to see what we get, and we will report it here.

The Grammars of English

In designing our age-of-acquisition study, we realized a second problem. Correct English grammar varies across different dialects. In Newfoundland, you can say "Throw me down the stairs the hammer," but most places, you can't. (I have heard that this is said in parts of Rhode Island, too, but only anecdotally.) We don't want to count a late-learner of English who says "Throw me down the stairs the hammer" as not knowing English if in fact she lives in Newfoundland!

So what we really wanted were questions for which the correct answer is the same in all English dialects. But we didn't know what those were. Again, the literature was only partly helpful here. For obvious reasons, researchers tend to be interested in understanding peculiar constructions specific to certain dialects, rather than recording what is the same everywhere (boring).

We picked out a lot of grammar rules that we at least had no reason to believe varied across dialect. But we also realized that there was an opportunity here to study differences across dialects. So we included a subset of items that we thought probably would be different across dialects so that we can explore relationships across dialects.

The algorithm

When you take the quiz, at the end we give you our best guess as to what your native language is and what dialect of English you speak. How is that related to the three issues I just discussed?

It's deeply related. The best way of proving that you understand how people's understanding of grammar is affected by the age at which they started learning, their first language (if any), and the dialect of English they speak, is to show that you can actually distinguish people based on their grammar. In fact, training an algorithm to make just that distinction is a common way of analyzing and exploring data.

There are also obvious practical applications for an algorithm that can guess someone's language background based on their grammar (for education, localization of websites, and so on).

But an important reason we included the algorithm's predictions in the quiz itself was to present the results of the study to participants in the study as the study goes on. Certainly, you can read this and other blog posts I've written about the project as well. But it probably took you as long to read this post as to do the quiz. The algorithm and its predictions boil down the essence of the study in a compelling way. Based on the (numerous) emails I have gotten, it has inspired a lot of people to think more about language. Which is great. The best Web-based studies are a two-way street, where the participants get something out of the experience, too.

We chose the particular algorithm we use because it runs quickly and could be trained on very little data. You can read more about it by clicking on "how it works" in our data visualization. We are testing out more sophisticated algorithms as well, which are likely to do much better. Algorithms for detecting underlying patterns is actually a specialty of my laboratory, and this will be a fantastic dataset to work with. These algorithms mostly run too slowly to use as part of the quiz (nobody wants to wait 10 minutes for their results), but the plan is to describe those results in future posts and/or in future data visualizations.

In conclusion

If you have any questions about this work, please ask in the comments below or shoot me an email at gameswithwords@gmail.com.

A Critical Period for Learning Language?

If you bring adults and children into the lab and try teaching them a new language, adults will learn much more of the language much more rapidly than the children. This is odd, because probably one of the most famous facts about learning languages -- something known by just about everyone whether you are a scientist who studies language or not -- is that adults have a lot less success at learning language than children. So whatever it is that children do better, it's something that operates on a timescale too slow to see in the lab. 

This makes studying the differences between adult and child language learners tricky, and a lot less is known that we'd like. Even the shape of the change in language learning ability is not well-known: is the drop-off in language learning ability gradual, or is there a sudden plummet at a particular age? Many researchers favor the latter possibility, but it has been hard to demonstrate simply because of the problem of collecting data. The perhaps most comprehensive study comes from Kenji Hakuta, Ellen Bialystok and Edward Wiley, who used U.S.A. Census data from 2,016,317 Spanish-speaking immigrants and 324,444 Chinese-speaking* immigrants, to study English proficiency as a function of when the person began learning the language. 

Their graph shows a very gradual decline in English proficiency as a function of when the person moved to the U.S.

Unfortunately, the measure of English proficiency wasn't very sophisticated. The Census simply asks people to say how well they speak English: "not at all", "not well", "well", "very well", and "speak only English". This is better than nothing, and the authors show that it correlates with a more sophisticated test of English proficiency, but it's possible that the reason the lines in the graphs look so smooth is that this five-point scale is simply too coarse to show anything more. The measure also collapses over vocabulary, grammar, accent, etc., and we know that these behave differently (your ability to learn a native-like accent goes first).

A New Test

This was something we had in mind when devising The Vocab Quiz. If we get enough non-native Speakers of English, we could track English proficiency as a function of age ... at least as measured by vocabulary (we also have a grammar test in the works, but that's more difficult to put together and so may take us a while yet). I don't think we'll get two million participants, but even just a few thousand would be enough. If English is your second (or third or fourth, etc.) language, please participate. In addition to helping us with our research and helping advance the science of language in general, you will also be able to see how your vocabulary compares with the typical native English speaker who participates in the experiment.

--------
Hakuta, K., Bialystok, E., & Wiley, E. (2003). Critical Evidence: A Test of the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition Psychological Science, 14 (1), 31-38 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.01415



*Yes, I know: Chinese is a family of languages, not a single language. But the paper does not report a by-language breakdown for this group.

Do You Speak Korean?

Learning new languages is hard for many reasons. One of those reasons is that the meaning of an individual word can have a lot of nuances, and the degree to which those nuances match up with the nuances of similar words in your first language can make learning the new language easier; the degree to which the nuances diverge can make learning the
new language harder.

In a new experiment, we are looking at English-speakers learning Korean and Korean-speakers learning English. In particular, we are studying a specific set of words that previous research has suggested give foreign language learners a great deal of difficulty.

We are hoping that we will be able to track how knowledge of these words develops as you move from being a novice to a fluent speaker. For this, we will need to find a lots of people who are learning Korean, as well as Korean-speakers who are learning English. If you are one, please participate.

The experiment is called "Trials of the Heart". You can find it here.

We do also need monolingual English speakers (people whose first and essentially only language is English) for comparison, so if you that's you, you are welcome to participate, too!

Image credit

Update on DuoLingo

I have been using Duolingo for a few months to brush up my Spanish. I have generally found it to be pretty useful and a significant improvement over my strategy was to listen to the news in Spanish. So I was interested to see a report on the effectiveness of Duolingo.

Even though most people enrolled in the study did not actually spent much time using DuoLingo (only a handful managed more than 30 hours in two months), there was a statistically significant improvement. How much improvement? The report estimates that a person with no prior knowledge of Spanish would be able to place into 2nd-semester Spanish after 34 hours with Duolingo.

Reasons for sketicism

While this is certainly good to see, Duolingo goes a bit far in concluding that this means Duolingo is more effective than a university. It might be true, but these aren't the kind of data you would want to show it. What we would want to know is how much the participants in this study would have learned if they had taken one semester of college Spanish. I doubt the answer is "exactly enough to place into 2nd-Semester Spanish on the study's placement test."One reason is that placement tests are designed to tell you whether someone has enough background to take a class, not whether they know exactly as much as the typical student starting that class. A second reason is that the study population is very different from your typical undergrad. In fact, nearly 3/4 of them had graduated from college already, and over 1/4 had a graduate degree. These are people who are highly experienced at education and who have been very successful, and either reason might make you expect them to learn faster than your typical college freshman. Then there's the fact that the study doesn't seem to control for whether they are using any other methods to learn Spanish at the same time (like taking a class).

I suppose my main reason for being skeptical is that while I find Duolingo incredibly useful for learning nouns and adjectives and for practicing what I already know, I've found it less useful in terms of learning grammar or learning verbs. Grammar is not explicitly taught at all (you're suppose to work out the rules of grammar from seeing example sentences). There are a lot of Spanish verbs with irregular endings, and Duolingo gives you no information about those (except what you might glean from seeing an example sentence with such a verb).

Perhaps this is closer to how children learn (though not really -- Duolingo is all about translation, and generally children don't learn their first language by learning how to translate it into another language!), but I suspect there's a reason that language classes the world over explicitly teach you grammar rules. Babies might not need it, but adults seem to.

What Duolingo is good for

This doesn't mean I've got it in for Duolingo. As I said, I've been using it and intend to keep on using it. Much of Duolingo consists of trying to create new sentences in Spanish and then getting feedback on whether you did it right or not. This is fantastic practice, maybe even better than what you'd get in an immersion environment (in which you create sentences but don't always get feedback), and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to revive moribund language skills or as an addition to an ongoing course of study. I just don't see it standing all by itself.

The other useful tidbit from this study: Most people who started using Duolingo quit, and quit quickly. Which is a reminder that the limiting factor in language learning is not what textbook or website you use, but your own dedication.

Advice for how to learn foreign languages

I am often asked for advice on how to learn second languages. I have written a few popular-press articles on the topic before, but these articles are mostly high-level advice, whereas the questions I usually get asked are specific (what books should I read, where should I study, etc.), so I thought it was time to write up the resources that I have found useful.

First, a disclaimer: What I write below is based only on my own experience learning languages. While I am a language researcher, I know no more about the research into second-language learning than the run-of-the-mill psycholinguist (that is, what you would learn by overhearing water-cooler conversations and attending talks at conferences). Second, I make no claim to be Ken Hale's second coming; that is, I'm not an especially gifted language-learner, just a persistent one.  I leave to the reader to decide whether that gives me more or less insight into the problem.

Textbooks

I cannot say enough good things about Japanese For Busy People. The title comes from the fact that the chapters are bite-sized. You can work through one in half an hour or less. The series is designed to get you speaking as quickly as possible, and so focuses on words and phrases you might actually need. (This might seem like an obvious strategy, but it did not occur to the writers of my introductory Russian textbook, which filled opening pages with words for, for instance, 18th century Russian course-drawn carriages.)

Difusion publishes a series of fantastic, conversation-based textbooks, such as Gente and Aula, at least some of which were (I'm told) developed in collaboration with my favorite language school (see below). Like Japanese For Busy People, these books use short lessons focused on high-frequency words and phrases, and provide many useful exercises (the more you practice, the more you learn).


I have used a few Mandarin textbooks. My favorite is the Integrated Chinese series, which comes in both traditional and simplified character versions. It's not as impressive an achievement as the Japanese and Spanish books I mentioned above, but a solid resource.

I haven't had as much luck with Russian textbooks, though I do have a soft spot in my heart for Making Progress in Russian (the classic 1973 text by Davis and Oprendek, not the more recent revival -- I warn you, it isn't easy to find), which is meant for intermediate students. This is not a great text for learning to speak, and especially not for learning to speak modern spoken Russian (it was because of what I learned from this textbook that one my professors in Russia told me, "You speak such beautiful Russian. Like Leo Tostoy!" which wasn't really the effect I was going for). But I appreciate its thoroughness and precision.

Schools

I have studied at several specialized language schools. I can't imagine a better one than La Escuela de Idiomas Nerja. Many of the teachers that I had in 2005 (and wrote about here) are now gone , but Paco Dueñas, who seemed to me to be the heart and soul of the institution, is still there, so I expect it is still as good. If you want to learn Spanish, I cannot imagine any faster way to do it than attend this school.

The Mandarin Training Center in Taipei, Taiwan, and the Russian Language & Culture Institute at Smolnyi in St. Petersburg, Russia, were less mind-blowing than La Escuela de Idiomas, but  and solid emersion options that served me well.


Podcasts and Online courses


These days, I find that I have little time for textbooks and certainly no time to go spend a couple months in Nerja. But I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts, especially in the gym (be kind to your ears and use a safe volume; there is no point in learning a language if you are just going to go deaf in 15 years. The real trick here is to find a gym that is quiet enough that you can keep the volume down). Here is what I listen to:

ChinesePod & SpanishPod -- the only resources on this list that require subscriptions -- are high quality mini lessons, which involve various exercises on their website, an optional phone app, and a downloadable podcast. I haven't found the phone app all that useful, and I can't say I ever actually had time to use the website, but I love the podcasts, which teach some new vocabulary based around a conversation and provide a lot of useful cultural context. Plus they are just fun to listen to.

On the topic of Internet sites, I should point out DuoLingo, brainchild of the incomparable Luis von Ahn, in which you can learn a new language (currently, you can choose between Spanish, French, German or English), while helping translate pages on the Internet (seriously). I haven't used it a great deal (again -- little time or patience for working through problem sets on the Internet), but I have poked around the Spanish site a bit, and it seems very good.

There are a couple other podcasts meant for language-learners that deserve mention. Notes in Spanish, while not as polished as SpanishPod, is free. The aptly-named "Slow Chinese" podcast provides short audio essays on various topics, using advanced vocabulary but at a slow pace (helpful for the learner).

Otherwise, I listen to a lot of news in foreign languages:  In Russian, I get my daily business news from the Vedemosti podcast (Vedemosti is the Russian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal). I also really like NHK, a Russian-language international news broadcast from Tokyo. I occasionally listen to BBSeva (from the BBC), but I find the half-hour format too constraining to listen to it regularly. In Spanish, my favorite show is from RFI (based in France), which covers mostly European and Latin-American news, though I sometimes also listen to Cinco Continentes, which is produced in Spain and similarly covers international news.

I am continually looking for short-form podcasts on non-news topics (as interesting as it is to hear the international news from several different perspectives, it does get repetitive), but I haven't had much luck, and many of the podcasts that I enjoyed have closed up shop. Right now, I occasionally listen to a science podcast called "A hombros de gigantes", which covers a range of scientific topics, both historical essays and current events, but takes around an hour to do so, and I don't always have an hour available.

Books

The other primary way I keep up my foreign languages is reading books in those languages. One particularly good option is to re-read a favorite book , translated into the language you want to work on. (Right now, I'm reading His Dark Materials in Russian.)

But the best is...

Many of the methods listed above are focused on receptive language. That's fine, but you learn more by actually trying to produce language. So nothing is better than having a friend who is fluent in the language and is willing to talk to you in it (and who has the discipline not to break back into English). Pen-pals are also good, even if the pen-pal is yourself. (When I keep a travel journal, mainly because I often travel to the same places repeatedly, and it's helpful to remember where that restaurant you really liked was. A little while ago, I started keeping it in Spanish so that I'd get at least some minimum amount of writing in Spanish in every so often.)

And personally I'm much more motivated to learn a language when I actually have someone to speak it with!

Why is learning a language so darn hard (golden oldie)

I work in an toddler language lab, where we study small children who are breezing through the process of language acquisition. They don't go to class, use note cards or anything, yet they pick up English seemingly in their sleep (see my previous post on this).

Just a few years ago, I taught high school and college students (read some of my stories about it here) and the scene was completely different. They struggled to learn English. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows what I mean.

Although this is well-known, it's a bit of mystery why. It's not the case that my Chinese students didn't have the right mouth shape for English (I've heard people -- not scientists -- seriously propose this explanation before). It's also not just that you can learn only one language. There are plenty of bilinguals out there. Jesse Snedeker (my PhD adviser as of Monday) and her students recently completed a study of cross-linguistic late-adoptees -- that is, children who were adopted between the ages of 2 and 7 into a family that spoke a different language from that of the child's original home or orphanage. In this case, all the children were from China. They followed the same pattern of linguistic development -- both in terms of vocabulary and grammar -- as native English speakers and in fact learned English faster than is typical (they steady caught up with same-age English-speaking peers).

So why do we lose that ability? One model, posited by Michael Ullman at Georgetown University (full disclosure: I was once Dr. Ullman's research assistant), has to do with the underlying neural architecture of language. Dr. Ullman argues that basic language processes are divided into vocabulary and grammar (no big shock there) and that vocabulary and grammar are handled by different parts of the brain. Simplifying somewhat, vocabulary is tied to temporal lobe structures involved in declarative memory (memory for facts), while grammar is tied to procedural memory (memory for how to do things like ride a bicycle) structures including the prefrontal cortex, the basal ganglia and other areas.

As you get older, as we all know, it becomes harder to learn new skills (you can't teach an old dog new tricks). That is, procedural memory slowly loses the ability to learn new things. Declarative memory stays with us well into old age, declining much more slowly (unless you get Alzheimer's or other types of dementia). Based on Dr. Ullman's model, then, you retain the ability to learn new words but have more difficulty learning new grammar. And grammar does appear to be the typical stumbling block in learning new languages.

Of course, I haven't really answered my question. I just shifted it from mind to brain. The question is now: why do the procedural memory structures lose their plasticity? There are people studying the biological mechanisms of this loss, but that still doesn't answer the question we'd really like to ask, which is "why are our brains constructed this way?" After all, wouldn't it be ideal to be able to learn languages indefinitely?

I once put this question to Helen Neville, a professor at the University of Oregon and expert in the neuroscience of language. I'm working off of a 4-year-old memory (and memory isn't always reliable), but her answer was something like this:

Plasticity means that you can easily learn new things. The price is that you forget easily as well. For facts and words, this is a worthwhile trade-off. You need to be able to learn new facts for as long as you live. For skills, it's maybe not a worthwhile trade-off. Most of the things you need to be able to do you learn to do when you are relatively young. You don't want to forget how to ride a bicycle, how to walk, or how to put a verb into the past tense.

That's the best answer I've heard. But I'd still like to be able to learn languages without having to study them.

originally posted 9/12/07

Why is learning a foreign language so darn hard?

I work in an toddler language lab, where we study small children who are breezing through the process of language acquisition. They don't go to class, use note cards or anything, yet they pick up English seemingly in their sleep (see my previous post on this).

Just a few years ago, I taught high school and college students (read some of my stories about it here) and the scene was completely different. They struggled to learn English. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows what I mean.

Although this is well-known, it's a bit of mystery why. It's not the case that my Chinese students didn't have the right mouth shape for English (I've heard people -- not scientists -- seriously propose this explanation before). It's also not just that you can learn only one language. There are plenty of bilinguals out there. Jesse Snedeker (my PhD adviser as of Monday) and her students recently completed a study of cross-linguistic late-adoptees -- that is, children who were adopted between the ages of 2 and 7 into a family that spoke a different language from that of the child's original home or orphanage. In this case, all the children were from China. They followed the same pattern of linguistic development -- both in terms of vocabulary and grammar -- as native English speakers and in fact learned English faster than is typical (they steady caught up with same-age English-speaking peers).

So why do we lose that ability? One model, posited by Michael Ullman at Georgetown University (full disclosure: I was once Dr. Ullman's research assistant), has to do with the underlying neural architecture of language. Dr. Ullman argues that basic language processes are divided into vocabulary and grammar (no big shock there) and that vocabulary and grammar are handled by different parts of the brain. Simplifying somewhat, vocabulary is tied to temporal lobe structures involved in declarative memory (memory for facts), while grammar is tied to procedural memory (memory for how to do things like ride a bicycle) structures including the prefrontal cortex, the basal ganglia and other areas.

As you get older, as we all know, it becomes harder to learn new skills (you can't teach an old dog new tricks). That is, procedural memory slowly loses the ability to learn new things. Declarative memory stays with us well into old age, declining much more slowly (unless you get Alzheimer's or other types of dementia). Based on Dr. Ullman's model, then, you retain the ability to learn new words but have more difficulty learning new grammar. And grammar does appear to be the typical stumbling block in learning new languages.

Of course, I haven't really answered my question. I just shifted it from mind to brain. The question is now: why do the procedural memory structures lose their plasticity? There are people studying the biological mechanisms of this loss, but that still doesn't answer the question we'd really like to ask, which is "why are our brains constructed this way?" After all, wouldn't it be ideal to be able to learn languages indefinitely?

I once put this question to Helen Neville, a professor at the University of Oregon and expert in the neuroscience of language. I'm working off of a 4-year-old memory (and memory isn't always reliable), but her answer was something like this:

Plasticity means that you can easily learn new things. The price is that you forget easily as well. For facts and words, this is a worthwhile trade-off. You need to be able to learn new facts for as long as you live. For skills, it's maybe not a worthwhile trade-off. Most of the things you need to be able to do you learn to do when you are relatively young. You don't want to forget how to ride a bicycle, how to walk, or how to put a verb into the past tense.

That's the best answer I've heard. But I'd still like to be able to learn languages without having to study them.