Chipanglish » Language Psychology

Invented Languages

Peter — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:40:49 +0000

With the popularity of the film, Avatar, linguists around the world have a new invented language to expose their geekiness: Na’vi.

Poised to join the ranks of other invented languages like Esperanto, Quenya (aka High-Elvish), and Klingon, Na’vi is sure to amass a following of nerds and linguists at future nerd conventions like Comic-con.

But philosophically, it calls into a greater question. What makes a language a language? Vocabulary? Native speakers? A grammar filled with syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphology, and semantics?

Having tried to create my own fictional language, I can tell you it is a lot more sophisticated than just making up words.

Anyway, score another one for the linguistic nerds out there!

Bird or Fish?

Peter — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:53:32 +0000

Two weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times about nomenclature. The author argues that there is something inherent about the way we name things, particularly animals, that lets us separate them into categories. Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of Georgia conducted a study asking students to listen to a pair of 50 names read aloud. Each pair contained the name of a fish and the name of a bird. To combat bias, he chose names from the Huambisa language, spoken by people of the same name in Peru.

Students were able to correctly identify the bird and the fish 58% of the time, suggesting that they subconsiously picked up on linguistic cues. Somehow, the names gave a sense of “bird-ness” or “fish-ness”.

Statistically speaking, random guessing would give a result hovering around 50%. A scaled-down version of the quiz can be found here. Interestingly, I took the quiz and was able to correctly identify the bird in 9 of the 10 questions, despite not having any exposure to the language. Maybe there is something to this idea.

This got me thinking, what about non-Latinate languages? I’ve written a mini quiz for Chinese with 10 pairs of names. Each pair contains a flower and a bird. (I couldn’t find a list of fish names with audio pronunciations. However, the study suggests that this pairing could also work, in that the two categories are distinguishable with distinct characteristics. Whereas, distinguishing the name of a tree and a bush is more difficult since the defining characteristics between the two aren’t as distinct.) Can you pick out the bird? To remove visual clues from radicals, I will only give the Pinyin and an audio pronunciation. Click on the links for audio.

1. a) wu1 dong1 1a, b) shui3 xian1 1b
2. a) chu2 ju2 2a, b) he4 2b
3. a) ge1 3a , b) mu4 jin4 3b
4. a) ying1 4a, b) shu3 kui2 4b
5. a) shao2 yao4 5a, b) fei3 5b
6. a) kong3 que4 6a, b) ying1 su4 6b
7. a) bai2 tou2 ying1 7a, b) yu3 jin4 xiang1 7b
8. a) ge1 zi3 8a, b) gong1 ren2 cao3 8b
9. a) xiang4 ri4 kui2 9a, b) guan4 9b
10. a) pu2 gong1 ying1 10a, b) jin1 si1 que4 10b

So? How’d you do? Which ones are the birds?

Answers: (highlight below to reveal answers)
The birds: 1. a; 2. b; 3. a; 4. a; 5. b; 6. a; 7. a; 8. a; 9. b; 10. b

Language / Dementia Correlation

Peter — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:40:33 +0000

A former linguistics classmate posted a link to this article from the BBC News website on her Facebook. Turns out “superior language skills” in your 20s may be an indicator against dementia.

The study looked at 38 Catholic nuns and analyzed their brains post-mortem. Analysis of sample essays written in their 20s for complex language skills and grammar was also done.

The women who had better memory in their later years scored higher in language skills.

Superior grammar skills, however, showed no correlation.

I’d be curious to see a more extensive study, given that this study was only done on a group of 38 nuns. I’m especially curious to see one that includes men, given the preconception that men are more linguistically challenged than women.

If anything you can have fun being a polyglot by asking the nursing home staff for water in eight different languages, provided you remember them.

Dreaming and Language

Elenita — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:37:05 +0000

It’s three o’clock in the morning–at least it is in my time zone–and I’m posting here at Chipanglish after a bad dream.

Actually, since we’re all about language here, that’s not very accurate. To be more precise, there was nothing bad about the dream per se. It’s more that I dreamt in German, and that is considerably disconcerting to me once I wake up.

(Because this is the Internet, let’s get something out of the way here. I am not saying that German is a bad language, that I dislike German, that people who dream in German are bad and/or disconcerting, or some combination thereof. I like German a lot, and wouldn’t have voluntarily studied it–after I’d already fulfilled my foreign language requirement–if I didn’t. Okay?)

As you might have guessed, I don’t dream in German particularly often. For that matter, I don’t use my German particularly often, either. Out of the four languages I claim some degree of competence in, it is the one I feel the least comfortable with. I’ll occasionally write an email in it, or listen to a podcast in it; every once in a while, I’ll read an untranslated article in Der Spiegel. But a completely German conversation, without some code switching into English? I can maybe recall five or six, in as many years since learning the language.

That’s not to say my German is bad, or that I couldn’t manage if I were mysteriously transported to Berlin one day. But it’s the language I personally find most stressful: unlike Spanish, I never got to the point where I could think in German when I’m using it. There’s a lot of mental translating going on, and it feels like I can’t keep up.

Thus, it’s always a little freaky to me when my subconscious does this. Possibly I know more of the language than I give myself credit for. But I don’t think I’ll ever get used to fluent, fully formulated German emerging from my brain.

Especially not at three in the morning.

Retroactive Interference in Action

Yvonne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:41:24 +0000

So I finally busted out some Spanish in the comments of my previous post.

I’ve been volunteering at the Children’s Museum of Houston where maybe half of the visitors speak Spanish. I’d like to get to the point where I’m confident enough in my Spanish to at least mix it in with English in teaching these kids, especially since some of them don’t speak English yet.

My brain is not cooperating. I can switch off easily between English and Chinese as I’ve been doing that my whole life. However, my brain has grouped Spanish and Japanese together in a category apparently named “Languages I Speak Brokenly.”

We were doing a slime demonstration at the museum last week. One of the kids started to eat the slime. I racked my brain for “Don’t eat!” in Spanish and this is what happened.

English-speaking brain: I need “Don’t eat!” in Spanish!
Broken languages brain: “No tabetes!”
English-speaking brain: That…makes no sense in any language!
Broken languages brain: @#$#%^$!!!
English-speaking brain: You’re taking too long! I give up! “DON’T EAT THAT!”

食べる (taberu) is Japanese for “to eat”. “No tabetes” is apparently wrongly-conjugated Japanish. Classic retroactive interference.

After the slime-eating danger had passed, my broken languages brain finally came up with “¡No come!” Which I’m pretty sure is right, but the actual Spanish speakers in the audience will have to weigh in on that.

Foreign Language in Kindergarten: Yay or Nay?

Yvonne — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:08:48 +0000

The Washington Post ran an article today on foreign language programs for young kids. It’s generally near the top of education reformers’ wish lists, but I tend to think it’s a misguided use of education dollars.

While it is true that young children pick up language almost effortlessly, it does not follow that introducing foreign language early into the curriculum gets you the most bang for your buck. For one, a sixteen-year-old learns much faster than a six-year-old. You’ll cover more ground in one semester of high school Spanish than several years of elementary school Spanish.

I also haven’t seen any data that demonstrates the efficacy of introducing foreign language into the curriculum at a young age. Both my parents and my husband grew up in non-English-speaking countries with many, many years of mandatory English instruction and the vast majority of people in those countries can only say a few isolated things.

Virtually all of the language research I’ve read converges on one thing: immersion is key. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to move to a different country, but you must speak, hear, read, and write a second language consistently to become fluent. Your average foreign language class is not going to suffice (though an immersion school would).

What if fluency isn’t the goal, as the above article says?

“The kids getting it for 30 minutes won’t become fluent, but that’s not the point of those programs,” said Julie Sugarman, research associate at the nonprofit Center for Applied Linguistics in the District. “It’s to give them exposure to the language. Just because kids aren’t able to do calculus in sixth grade doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach math in elementary school.”

The math analogy fails on a number of levels and I personally find mere “exposure” to be a shoddy reason to spend taxpayer money. If the goal isn’t fluency, fine. But then educators should set some other learning goal for students to meet, otherwise there’s no point.

I’m aware that my opinion is basically heresy in many education and polyglot circles. Let the debate ensue.

Six Sentences in Chinese

Yvonne — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:47:31 +0000

Many of the language blogs I’ve found in the last few weeks have discussed Tim Ferriss’s “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour”. He provides six illustrative sentences that will help you tease apart the basic structure of a language in a short period of time.

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.

In Chinese, the six sentences are (followed by the literal word-for-word English translation):

蘋果是紅的.
Ping2 guo3 shi4 hong2 de5.
Apple is red [possessive marker].
是 John 的蘋果.
Shi4 John de5 ping2 guo3.
Is John [possessive marker] apple.
我給 John 蘋果 (了).
Wo3 gei3 John ping2 guo3 (le5).
I give John apple (marker to indicate an action is completed).
我們給他蘋果 (了).
Wo3 men2 gei3 ta1 ping2 guo3 (le5).
I [plural marker] give him/her apple (marker to indicate an action is completed).
他給 John (了).
Ta1 gei3 John (le5).
He/She give John (marker to indicate an action is completed).
她給他 (了).
Ta1 gei3 ta1 (le5).
She give he/she (marker to indicate an action is completed).

From the above, it’s clear that Chinese deals with the following grammatical structures quite differently than English (and for the record, I’ve had zero formal instruction in Chinese grammar—I picked it up the way native speakers do so this may not be 100% accurate):

Articles. Chinese does not have a definite article like “the”. Chinese does have indefinite and partitive articles, but they are used a bit differently than in English—you can drop them if it’s clear what you mean from context.
Verb conjugation. Does not exist in Chinese. Tense is inferred through context.

This creates a certain amount of ambiguity in translation. The first sentence above could mean “The apple is red.” But it could also mean “Apples are red.” In the right context, it could even mean “This apple is red,” or “These apples are red.”

Possessives. In Chinese, possession is marked by the word 的 which has no real English translation. 的 is used when a person possesses an object, but also when an object possesses a particular property, like being red.
The existence of 了. There is no real English equivalent of this marker. And while it’s not strictly necessary to put it in, not doing it at all will give your Chinese a stilted, I-learned-it-from-school feel.
Pronouns. The same word 他 is used for he, she, him, and her. If there’s a need to specify female gender, you can use 她. There is a neuter pronoun 它, which can mean “it”, but it’s not used in quite the same way. We, 我們, is literally “I, plural”. And though it’s not illustrated in the sentences above, they, 他們, is literally “he/she plural”.

There is a notable similarity between English and Chinese though—both follow subject-verb-object patterns.

Knowing these kinds of things up front could definitely be useful in learning a language (or not, if you subscribe to the no grammar school of language learning).

It’s also worth knowing if you’re interested in language education/language psychology. When people make errors in a second language, it’s likely not a random error. Most errors are due to interference from the first language.

For example, my mom is pretty much the stereotypical Chinese Lady with Broken English. She is fluent, in the sense that she can live and work in the US just fine. But she rarely says or writes an English sentence that isn’t riddled with grammatical errors.

Almost all of her errors fall into one of these categories:

Pronoun errors. Despite being fully aware that I am female, my mom refers to me as “he” maybe half the time.
Subject/verb agreement.
Verb conjugation/stem errors. My favorite of this category is when she says “I am confusing” when she means “I am confused.”

In other words, she tends to make errors when English grammar has rules that don’t exist in Chinese!

This Just Sounds Wrong

Yvonne — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:59:31 +0000

I discovered the joy that is All Japanese All the Time yesterday and I just have to say: WORD to Khatzumoto’s entire language learning philosophy. At some point I may go through the language learning literature and pull references to studies that support his total correctness on everything [1], but today I’m going to focus on this:

Most learners of a foreign language – any foreign language – remain, like a novice skater to the wall of the rink, glued to their textbooks: a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of their target language. As a result, if they get good at anything at all, they get good at handling a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of…you get the picture. Their exposure to native materials is insufficient at best if not non-existent. And their language skills suffer accordingly.

An internet friend of mine once memorably said:

Americans waste their time focusing on verb conjugation. Once you have a feel for how things sound, you’ll know when to use the right form of the verb. I can always tell if someone learned HS spanish or if they learned street spanish because the HS spanish person says things that have not been used since Ferdinand wrote Cristobal Colon a cheque to buy three boats.

I’m up to Lesson 10 of Beginning Chinese Reader and while it’s been fantastic for refreshing me on characters that I once learned and forgot and teaching me new compounds, if you actually used the sentence constructions that appear in some of the readings, you would sound kind of like a Chinese Yoda.

For example:

這兩本書很好. 是你的嗎?
Zhe4 liang3 ben3 shu1 hen3 hao3. Shi4 ni3 de5 ma1?

是的. 那兩本書是我的.
Shi4 de5. Na4 liang3 ben3 shu1 shi4 wo3 de5.

多少錢一本?
Duo1 shao3 qian2 yi1 ben3?

那兩本書三塊九.
Na4 liang3 ben3 shu1 san1 kuai4 jiu3.

Translated, that’s:

These two books are very good. Are they yours?

Yes. Those two books are mine.

How much does one book cost?

Those two books are $3.90.

The whole dialogue is a bit stilted, what with the unnecessary repetition, but big issue is in the third sentence. The text has 多少錢一本?. I may not have native fluency in Chinese [2], but I was raised in a Mandarin-speaking household and that just sounds weird to me. I would reverse the construction and say, 一本多少錢?.

I’m a cognitive psychologist by training.
On the other hand, my pronunciation and grammar are such that I can pass as a native speaker for basic interactions. On our recent trip to Taiwan, people generally assumed me to be a local until I blanked on a phrase that a native speaker would know or asked for menus/brochures in English.

Chipanglish » Language Psychology

Invented Languages

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