Magic babies

There's an interesting article today over at Slate (Why Babies Crave Magic) that features work from one of my favorite local labs.

Making Super-babies

Parenting advice is no doubt as old as time itself. There is good advice, and then there are myths.

The Walt Disney Company is, in a roundabout fashion, owning up to one myth, which is that their Baby Einstein videos make babies smarter. This has been a well-known myth in scientific circles -- the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no videos of any type for children under 2. Controlled experiments are tough, since it's hard to assign children to either watch or not watch TV (this tends to correlate with parental factors), but a quick search found a conference paper showing that toddlers have difficulty learning words presented on television, which fits with what I hear from other language development people that young children do not learn vocabulary from television (this isn't a literature I know well -- the youngest kids I study are 4 years old).

This brings up a myth about bilingualism. Many parents believe that raising a child bilingual makes them smarter. Some do this by having their children watch Spanish-language programming like Diego. This is likely a waste of time for two reasons: first, children typically do not learn a language if it makes up less than 20% of what they hear during a day. So a television program or two isn't going to do much good (again, citing other language researchers; I didn't see an obvious paper relating to this).

Second, though, the evidence that bilingualism makes a baby smarter is weak. The problem, again, is that controlled experiments are impossible. There is no way of randomly assigning toddlers to be bilingual or not. And bilingualism correlates with family (e.g., cultural and genetic) factors. As anyone who has spent time with a bilingual family knows, raising a child bilingual is a lot of work, and many parents don't bother. The parents who do are, by definition, not randomly distributed.

That said, there is a good reason to raise your children bilingual, even if it doesn't make them smarter: your children will be able to speak two languages! And that's pretty useful.

But if you want to make smarter babies, the best option I know of is to play with them more.

Vaccination and the Assault on Health

I had always though that refusal to get a flu vaccination was relatively harmless masochism. Refusal to vaccinate one's own children, on the other hand, should probably be prosecuted as child abuse, but at the least the negative consequences stay close to home.

Yesterday, however, I read two articles on vaccination. One in Slate looks at the risks the unvaccinated pose to people with immunity problems (she's unable to get childcare for her child, who is undergoing cancer treatment, because the risk of being around unvaccinated children is too high). If that seems like a parochial problem ("my kid doesn't have cancer; why should I worry about vaccination rates?"), the other article, appearing in Wired, is feature-length, and focuses on the anti-vaccine movement and the dangers it poses to the health of everyone.

Both note the rise in non-vaccination and the concomitant rise in outbreaks of the scourges of yesteryear. And they were scourges:

Just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in mor ehtan 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage...

But refusing to vaccinate is more than just a convenient way of decreasing the probability you'll have to pay for college (and that your neighbor's kid with leukemia will survive). This is because the un-vaccinated put the vaccinated at risk.

The Risk to Us All

As told in the Wired article, an unvaccinated 17-year-old Indiana girl picked up measles on a 2005 trip to Bucharest. When she returned, she went to a church gathering of 500 people. Of the 50 attendees who had not been vaccinated, 32 developed measles. Any adults who got measles had at least made the choice to take on that risk, but the children had not.

Even worse are the two people who had been vaccinated but nonetheless got sick. They had been responsible and protected themselves, but this reckless 17-year-old and her parents endangered their lives. First, though, three cheers for vaccines. Of the unvaccinated, 64% got sick. Of the vaccinated and those with natural immunity, only 0.8% got sick.

But still, vaccines don't always work. Sometimes they don't take. Sometimes your immune response may have weakened (for instance, through aging). Or you might just have bad luck. A 2002 study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases determined that you were safer as an unvaccinated person in a well-vaccinated country than as a vaccinated person in a largely un-vaccinated country.

People who refuse vaccines aren't just risking themselves, and parents who refuse vaccines for their children aren't just risking their children, they are risking you and me.

Baby-Killers

What makes this even worse is that every baby is initially unvaccinated. Children have to reach a certain age in order to get vaccines. What protects babies is that everyone older is healthy (i.e., vaccinated). So adult vaccine-refuseniks made it through infancy partly thanks to everyone else getting vaccinated. But they aren't willing to give other babies the same chance.

Do people have the right to choose for themselves whether they want vaccines? Sure -- as long as they live on top of a mountain or on a deserted island away from contact with anyone else. Mandatory vaccination**, and now!

(**With medical exceptions, of course)

Why do so many homophones have two pronunciations?

An interest in puns has led me to start reading the literature on homophones. Interestingly, in appears that in the scientific literature "homophone" and "homograph" mean the same thing, which explains why there are so many papers about mispronouncing homophones. Here's a representative quote:

"...reports a failure to use context in reading, by people with autism, such that homophones are mispronounced (eg: 'there was a tear in her eye' might be misread so as to sound like 'there was a tear in her dress").'

Sticklers will note that "tear in her eye" actually does involve a homophone (tier), but I don't think that's what the authors meant.

Readers of this blog know that I'm not a prescriptivist -- that is, I believe words mean whatever most speakers of a language think the words mean. So I'm not going to claim that these authors are misusing the word, since there seem to be so many of them. That said, it would be convenient to have a term for two words that have the same pronunciation which is distinct from the term for two words with distinct pronunciations but are written in the same way.

Recruiting Laboratory Participants

I am in the process of revamping the Internet laboratory, as I'm trying to increase the number of participants. Some very successful websites recruit ~500/day. I have been averaging about 30/day -- still respectable, but it limits what I can do.

In this context, I read recent reports from the folks behind Phrase Detectives with interest. Phrase Detectives, it appears, gets a slightly greater amount of traffic than I do. What I focused on was their method of advertising and how well it works. They noted that their traffic comes in the following forms:

direct: 46%

website link: 29%

search: 12%

Facebook advertisement: 13%

Then they looked at the bounce rate (the number of visitors who arrive at the home page then scoot away) for each of these sources:

direct: 33%

link: 29%

search: 44%

Facebook advertisement: 90%

It appears that paid advertisements -- the only one of these sources that actually costs money -- isn't worth much. In the end, only 4% of visitors who didn't bounce came through the paid advertisement.

Renovations at the Cognition and Language Lab

I am in the processing of doing a complete overhaul of the Web-based laboratory. The site has been due for some editing for a while; the page about me still lists me as an "incoming graduate student," though I just started my third year.

More importantly, though, I want to make the website more interesting. Though I've collected some very good data, leading to two publications already with several more on their way, the experiments I'm currently interested in running require more participants. Right now I get about 30-40 participants a day. For the new experiments to work, I need closer to 100 per day.

Here is where you, the reader, comes in. What do you think would make the site more interesting and the experiments more compelling? I am doing a few things already. First, you may have noticed there are lately more pictures on the website. The new experiments are all going to be game-like. Participants will get back scores and, in some cases, know how they did compared to others. This has worked very well for folks like Games with a Purpose or TestMyBrain.org. I also admit that some of the experiments I've posted over the last few years have been pretty dry.

One last thing I'm considering doing is changing the name of the site to reflect the new brand. I had planned on LanguageGames.org, but someone just snagged that domain. I could still go with LanguageGames.com, but there is always the risk of confusion. What else might be a catchy name?

If you have any ideas about the domain name or any other aspect of the website, please leave a comment here or email me at coglanglab@coglanglab.org.

Measuring the Quality of a Scientific Paper

"Good" is a notoriously difficult word to define. A pretty common and reasonably uncontroversial definition of a good paper, though, is one that has significantly advanced human knowledge. The question is how do we measure that?

If the paper is in your field, you probably have a sense of the impact. But if it's outside of your field, it becomes trickier. A pretty good proxy is how many times the paper has been cited. Pretty much all the work in the study of language over the last 50 years has bounced off of Chomsky's ideas, and you can see this in the fact that his 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax has been cited 11,196 times...and that's only one of several very influential books.

It takes a few years for a paper or book to start getting citations, though, because it takes time for people to read it, not to mention the fact that a paper that is printed today was probably written anywhere from 1-3 years ago. So for a new paper, you can estimate how big an impact it will have by looking at the quality of the typical paper published in the journal in which the paper in question was published. This is usually measured by -- you guessed it -- how often papers in that journal are cited.

As a recent article in the Times points out, this gets tricky when you want to compare across fields. In some fields, authors meticulously cite everything that could possibly be relevant (linguistics is a good example). Other fields don't have as strong a citation tradition. Conversely, researchers in some fields traditionally work for years at a time on a project and sum up all their findings every few years in a single, high-impact publication (again, linguistics comes to mind). Other fields are more concerned with quickly disseminating every incremental advance. Then there is simply the size of the field: the more people in your field, the more people can cite you (developmental psychology journals tend to have low impact factors simply because developmental psychology is a very small world).

So by looking at citation rates, you might conclude that molecular biology is the most important field of modern thought, and mathematics and computer science are among the least. I'm a fan of molecular biology, but it's hard not to admit that molecular biology would be impossible without recent advances in mathematics and computer science; the reverse is not true.

Starting Assumptions

The idealized scientist might start by questioning everything and assuming nothing. However, one usually has to make starting assumptions to get things going. For instance, David Hume proved that the notion that science works at all is founded on the un-provable assumption that the future will conform to the past (i.e., if e=mc2 yesterday, it will do so again tomorrow).

Starting assumptions can get a bit less metaphysical though. Here is a very telling line in linguist David Pesetsky's influential Zero Syntax from 1995:

It follows from the hunch just described that hypotheses about language should put as small a burden as possible on the child's linguistic experience and as great a burden as possible on the biologically given system, which we call Universal Grammar (UG). Of course, the role of experience is not zero, or else every detail of language would be fixed along genetic lines. Nonetheless, given that linguistics tries to explain, the null hypothesis should place the role of experience as close to zero as possible.

In contrast, there has been a strong trend in psychology -- and folk science, for that matter -- to assume everything is learned and prove otherwise.

Ultimately, if science proceeds as it should, we'll all converge on the same theory somewhere in the middle. In the meantime, wildly divergent starting assumptions often unfortunately lead to folks simply talking in different languages.

A good example is a recent exchange in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Waxman and Gelman had recently wrote an article about how children's assumptions about the world (they called these assumptions "theories") guide learning even in infancy. Sloutsky wrote a letter to complain that Waxman and Gelman had failed to explain how those assumptions were learned. Gelman and Waxman responded, in essence: "Who says they're learned?"

All three are intelligent, thoughtful researchers, so at the risk of simplifying the issue, Sloutsky's problem with the "innate theories" theory is that nobody has given a good characterization of how those theories are instantiated in the brain, much less how evolution could have endowed us with those innate theories. Sloutsky assumes learning unless proven otherwise.

However, Waxman and Gelman's problem with Sloutsky is that nobody has a good explanation -- even in theory -- of how you could learn anything without starting with some basic assumptions. At the very least, you need Hume's assumption (the future will conform to the past) to even get learning off the ground.

Both perspectives have their strengths, but both are also fatally flawed (which is not a criticism -- there aren't any perfect theories in cognitive science yet, and likely not in any science). Which flaws bother you the most depends on your starting assumptions.

Are college professors underworked?

According to Dick Morris, I've joined a cushy profession. Professors don't teach very much, which makes college expensive. He argues that by requiring faculty to work harder "approximating the work week the rest of us find normal" and holding down some administrative costs, the tuition can be cut in half!

Comments on The Choice sum up the reaction -- mainly, that strong opinions are easy to have if you have no clue what you are talking about. Most have focused on the ridiculous claim that faculty don't work very hard, presumably due to Morris's odd belief that the only time professors spend working is time spent in the classroom. Morris would presumably cringe at the claim that the only time he spends working is the time he is physically typing out an article.

Well, maybe not Morris. There's no evidence in this article, at least, that he spend any time doing research. But most faculty spend a lot of time doing research, preparing for class, grading, sitting on committees, meeting with students, etc. When I find one who works less than 50 hours a week, I'll ask her secret.

There are also some funny numbers. Morris argues faculty typically teach 5 courses per year, spending 18-20 hours in the classroom per week. If they were to teach 8 courses, they'd spend 24 hours in class per week. Increasing the number of courses by 60% seems to only increase hours by 20%-33%. Sounds like profitability through magical thinking.

There is one point that Morris could have made, though: some universities could be made cheaper by having faculty do no research and less preparation for class. This wouldn't necessarily be an ideal situation, but it would be cheaper. The question is whether it's worth the cost.

And now, on the radio

The radio show I discussed a couple weeks ago finally aired. I would have posted earlier, but I wasn't aware it had happened. My appearance is brief, but it was fun to do. The journalist (Michelle Elliot) does a very nice job of discussing birth order effects, so it is definitely worth listening to.

Coglanglab on Scientific American

I have an article on the Scientific American website (part of the Mind Matters blog) this week. It's on the relationship between language and thought. Check it out.

Speaking Chinese

People often talk about speaking 'Chinese,' as if there were a single language called 'Chinese.' There are a number of related Chinese languages, much as there are a number of related Romance languages.

It turns out the situation is worse than we thought, though. Linguists have been discovering new Chinese languages.

My First Radio Interview

In my brief career as a freelance travel & culture writer, I conducted a number of interviews. I had never been interviewed for anything real prior to just finishing a phone interview with a journalist who is considering writing about my birth order research.

Harvard being Harvard, many of my friends have been interviewed by multiple TV and radio shows, and there are periodically camera crews on my floor. But my lab's research is less media-friendly (no dancing parrots), it's not something we normally deal with.

I admit the experience is somewhat disconcerting. I expect my birth order research to be controversial. And while there is really no point in publishing something that is then ignored, the one advantage of being ignored is nobody's likely to send angry emails, feel I misrepresented their findings, or criticize the methods or conclusions. So while I do seek out publicity for these findings (hence the blog, and also an upcoming article I'm writing for a mainstream science magazine), success in achieving that publicity is at least as worrisome as failure. So we'll see how this goes...

New in Developmental Research

Every year, the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies (of which I am a part) sends out a newsletter to all the parents of the kids have participated in our research studies. For every project conducted in the last year, the lead experimenter (usually a grad student or post-doc) writes up the results in layperson-friendly terms. This year's newsletter was just published. Check it out here.

Ambiguity

I'm preparing a speech for later today on unrecognized ambiguity. Many sentences are ambiguous. Often we don't notice that these sentences are ambiguous, because we know what we intend to say. This probably explains many of the (reportedly) real newspaper headlines I'm using in the talk, most of which are worth reading again even if you already know them:

Ten Commandments: Supreme Court says some OK, some not

Federal agents raid gun shop, find weapons

One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers

Autos killing 110 a day; let's resolve to do better

Dr. Ruth to talk about sex with newspaper editors

Enraged cow injures farmer with ax

Eye drops off shelf

Iraqi head seeks arms

Juvenile court tries shooting defendant

Killer sentenced to die for second time in 10 years

Kicking baby considered to be healthy

Two soviet ships collide -- one dies

William Kelly was Fed Secretary

Kids make nutritious snacks

Milk drinkers are turning to powder