Lingoland

Forsøgspersoner søges til et forsøg om oplevelse af fortællinger

2011-05-16T12:40:16Z

Der er godt gang i de lingvistiske forsøg i Aarhus for tiden og vi kan dermed igen viderebringe endnu en eftersøgning efter deltagere til et eksperiment. Også dette eksperiment belønner deltagerne med et beløb som tak for tiden.

Hør en god historie og få penge for det: 18/19-5

Forsøgspersoner søges til et forsøg om oplevelse af fortællinger.

Forsøget tager ca. en time og involverer lytning til en fortælling og spørgeskema.

Du skal have dansk som førstesprog for at deltage.

Der gives en godtgørelse på 100 DKK for deltagelse.

Forsøget udføres d.

18/5 kl. 9

18/5 kl. 10

19/5 kl. 9

19/5 kl. 10

Hvis du er interesseret i at deltage, så kontakt:

Mikkel Wallentin,
Center for Semiotik,
semmw@hum.au.dk

Angiv evt. hvilket tidspunkt, der passer dig bedst.

MVH
Mikkel Wallentin

Deltagere søges til psykolingvistiske interviews

2011-05-11T18:01:47Z

Vi viderebringer hermed en opfordring til at deltage i et psykolingvistisk forsøg fra Lingvistiks nyhedsbrev:

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics er i gang med en omfattende kortlægning af den sproglige kategorisering af rumlig orientering, farver, husholdningsgenstande og den menneskelige krop. Projektet hedder Evolution of Semantic Systems og jeg står for den danske del af projektet. I løbet af maj måned vil jeg gennemføre en serie af interviews/forsøg.

Interviewet/forsøget:

foregår på lingvistikafdelingen, Aarhus Universitet

varighed: ca. én time

kan foregå formiddage eller eftermiddage efter aftale

honoreres med 160 DKK

Man kan deltage hvis man:

Taler dansk som modersmål

Er over 18 og under 50 år gammel

Ikke har fulgt kurset Sprog, Kultur & Samfund (F11)

Nyhedsbrevets læsere opfordres til at kontakte mig hvis man har lyst til at deltage. Og til at videresende indbydelsen til potentielt interesserede venner og bekendte.

Kontakt mig venligst på mail-adressen lincal@hum.au.dk

- Carsten Levisen

Postulerede Wernicke kun to sprogcentre i hjernen?

2010-12-09T12:54:50Z

Image via Wikipedia

Den almindelige opfattelse er at Carl Wernicke hævdede, at der i hjernen er to afgrænsede sprogcentre i hjernen, henholdsvis Wernickes og Brocas områder, men er det nu også den helt korrekte læsning af teksten? Ikke hvis man skal tro Greg Hickok ovre på Talking Brains.

Han har begået en genlæsning af teksten som lader ham mene at Wernickes udlægning er noget mere nuanceret end man ellers har gjort den til.

Jeg ved selv alt for lidt om neurolingvistik til at kunne vurdere Hickoks nye læsning, men det er under alle omstændigheder et interessant blogindlæg.

"Did Wernicke really postulate only two language centers?" @ Talking Brains

Praat Tutorial

2010-11-17T17:56:59Z

Since it’s already written, I might as well put it here for more people to use. For now it only covers how to draw nice spectrograms and do custom garnishing. More will probably be added over time.

No prior experience with Praat is needed, although I do assume that the reader has some very basic computer skills (e.g. installing/opening programs).

Get rev. 2 (based on Praat 5.1.29) at: http://goo.gl/0yj19

Et tab, der er til at leve med

2010-08-14T21:13:08Z

Politiken skriver i artiklen: SAS glemte at tjekke Dash 8-fly for alvorlig fejl, at “[f]lyene kunne have mistet vingedele, der gjorde dem umulige at flyve.” Nu ved jeg så ikke om den alvorlige fejl er, at flyene åbenbart pr. design er umulige at flyve, eller om det er, at SAS rent faktisk har betalt for dem.

Whorf Still Haunting Cognitive Linguistics

2011-02-17T00:02:27Z

It’s more than 50 years since Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed that the structure of the language we speak forms our world view — what is today known as linguistic determinism or strong linguistic relativism — and apparently some cognitive scientists are still strong proponents of that idea. The Wall Street Journal recently published a short paper by associate professor in psychology at Stanford University, Lera Boroditsky, claiming to have proven the Whorfian hypothesis (like so many others before her), and at the same time emphasizing why psychologists should always ally themselves with a linguist before putting forward such claims. (I can’t deal with all the ridiculous claims put forward in the article, so I’ve selected a few “highlights”.)

About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Well, yes — or no actually. It might as well be the language that reflects a skill acquired by necessity. There’s no evidence to support the claim that the skill is acquired as a result of how their language is structured. That would indicate that at some point — without any motivating factors — they just constructed a system of absolute spatial terms and afterwards found a use for it. If language structure dictates world view, then they could not have had that particular “world view” before constructing the system in the language. But why construct a linguistic system that you are not going to use? Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) suggest that basic image-schemata are acquired way before any sort of language mastery, so without language where does this pre-linguistic cognition come from? Some sort of universally inate language structure common to all human beings? And are you sure you really want to be sleeping with Chomsky?

50 years ago we had no need for a specific word refering to the act of searching for something on the internet, but today we google stuff like there was no tomorrow — mind you, even if we don’t use the particular search engine that the verb is derived from. We, the language users, adapt the language to our needs, not the other way around.

[...] my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

Of the Pormpuraawans (pop.: 653), the Thaayorre mainly speak Kuuk Thaayorre (~150 speakers) or a dialect thereof, while the Mungkan speak a variety of Kugu or Wik languages. Looking up these languages on Ethnologue, it’s clear that most (if not all) of these languages are in serious decline and close to extinction. Another thing that immediately springs to mind is the fact that Ethnologue mentions nothing about any of these languages having a writing system. If speakers of English, Chinese, Hebrew, and what have you, think of time in relation to their respective writing-/reading-directions, where does that leave the Pormpuraawans? Well, they could think about time in relation to — dun-dun-duuuun! — time! As the day passes, the most prominent object in the sky, which is incidentally also the object that defines the starting and ending points of a day, moves from the east to the west. In the east-most position you have the beginning, in the west-most position you have the end. The acts of reading and writing are inherently ego-centric, but when you have never done either why would you chose it as the basis for your temporal cognition? That’s right. You wouldn’t! In any case it may be a simple case of cognitively utilizing the strategy most readily at hand, which in this case happens to be the reading-/writing-directions of languages priviledged enough to have such, and the movement of the sun for speakers of languages where the sun’s movement is psychologically more salient. This is not entirely unlike the triad experiment by Kay & Kempton (1984), in which they determined that if speakers had the option of relying on language in color discrimination tests, they would. They dubbed this the naming strategy. Paul Kay eventually teamed up with Terry Regier and others and published some great papers on how relying on language for cognitive categorization is a question about maximization and subconscious choice (Regier, Kay & Khetarpal, 2007). It does not prove anything about language determining world view. Again it might just as well be language reflecting cognition. And once a specific linguistic system is in place in a language it is not easily discarded.

English has gender-specific 3rd person pronouns, so when you use English you have to be aware of that fact. Finnish has no distinction of gender in the 3rd person pronouns, but that does not imply that speakers of Finnish are not able to cognitively distinguish male, female and neuter. Likewise, Danish has four 3rd person pronouns: male (“han”), female (“hende”), common gender (“den”) and neuter (“det”), but the common gender and neuter pronouns are never used about humans, so Danish “lacks” a gender neutral personal pronoun for humans. Some attempts have been made to create such a pronoun (e.g. Hans Arndt’s “høn”), but none have caught on. This could be interpreted as a failed attempt to use language to change the world view of the speakers, not because the speakers do not agree with the proposed world view, but because there is no linguistic need for such a construction. Should the need one day arise, the language users will find a way to satisfy that need and the language will change accordingly.

All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

No. Just no. I will never understand — nor respect — why people apparently choose to only read litterature/articles that support their view on the subject in question. There is litterally tonnes of articles that disprove these Whorfian “facts” that always seems to be presented without any solid supporting evidence; and almost always by psychologists eager to share their paradigm-shattering linguistic discovery with the world.

That being said, I am not trying to say that the structures of the languages we speak in no ways reflect our world views, I am merely saying that it goes both ways rather than just being a unidirectional highway to the human cognition. It may be time that someone came up with a theory of quantum linguistics, because this whole language <=> cognition debate reminds me a lot of Schrödinger’s Cat . . . or does it?

Bibliography and related articles

Boroditsky, L. & Gaby, A. (2010). Absolute spatial representations of time in an Aboriginal Australian community. Psychological Science (PDF; requires log-in)

Davidoff, J. (2004). Coloured Thinking. Psychologist 17 pp.570–72

Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press

Kay, P. & Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist 86 pp.65–79

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press

Levinson, S., (1997). Language and Cognition: The Cognitive Consequences of Spatial Description in Guugu Yimithirr. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 pp.98–131.

Núñez, R.E. & Sweetser, E. (2005). Aymara, where the future is behind you: Convergent evidence from language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive Science (PDF)

Regier, T., Kay, P. & Khetarpal, N. (2007). Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space. PNAS 104 pp.1436–41 (PDF)

Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I.R.L. & Shapiro, L.R. (2005). Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis. Cognitive Psychology 50 pp.378–411

Whorf, B., (1971). Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Real-time MRI of Vocal Performance

2010-06-04T21:37:15Z

Thanks, Krishna Nayak, for sharing this video.

This video illustrates real-time MRI of vocal performance. It includes examples from a soprano and an emcee/beatboxer. This video was featured at the Sounds and Visions Session, of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions, May 2006, Seattle.

the diva and the emcee from Krishna Nayak on Vimeo.

Fra svinkeærinde til svinggerning

2010-05-30T13:15:09Z

En ven henledte min opmærksomhed på brugen af ordet ‘svinggerning’ i et forum på nettet. Google lader til at kende til 16 sider, hvor ordet bliver brugt (19, nu hvor Google har indekseret denne blog). Ud fra brugen af ordet er det tydeligvis en (sikkert utilsigtet) reanalyse af ‘svinkeærinde’.

Og hvorfor ikke? Hvad betyder ‘svinke’ egentlig? (Ja ja, man kan selvfølgelig slå det op — men det er næppe et leksem, der findes i særlig mange sprogbrugeres aktive ordforråd.) Og virker det ikke som om, at ‘ærinde’ bliver brugt mindre i dag end for f.eks. 50 år siden? Man kan næppe fortænke nutidige sprogbrugere i at høre et mere plausibelt kompositum bestående af to velkendte ord, end det arkæiske ‘svinkeærinde’ bestående af et (for sprogbrugeren) fuldstændig ukendt ord tapet sammen med et relativt infrekvent ord i vores synkrone kollektive ordforråd.

‘Svinggerning’ må vel fortolkes som en slags ‘handling på omvejen/afvejen’ og fungerer — efter min mening — fint som reanalyse/rekomposition af ‘svinkeærinde’.

Deltag: Internetundersøgelse om det danske sprog

2010-03-26T09:10:41Z

Jeg har modtaget denne forespørgsel fra Ken Ramshøj via lingvistiks nyhedsbrev. Det drejer sig om en kort spørgeskemaundersøgelse, som han har behov for at flest muligt danske modersmålstalende udfylder. Hans opfordring er hermed mangfoldiggjort.

Jeg er ved at lave en internet-undersøgelse om sprogforståelse, og jeg har brug for jeres hjælp. Det er en spørgeskemaundersøgelse med 44 danske sætninger som man bare skal sige hvad betyder. Det eneste krav er at man skal have dansk som modersmål.

Testen kan tages i eget tempo, men som udgangspunkt tager det ca. 10-15 minutter.

Da resultatet skal behandles statistisk, er det vigtigt at så mange som muligt tager testen. Så jeg håber at rigtigt mange vil deltage (og I må også meget gerne opfordre andre til at deltage).

Testen findes her:

http://www.hum.au.dk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=33655&lang=da

Er der spørgsmål, er man velkommen til at kontakte mig (email: engkrc@hum.au.dk ).

På forhånd tak for hjælpen.

Med venlig hilsen,
Ken Ramshøj Christensen
Institut for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur
Aarhus Universitet

Foredrag: Language & Sexuality

2010-02-13T23:40:31Z

Yet another interesting guest lecture at the linguistics department. Costas Canakis from University of the Aegean will give a talk titled Articulating male homoerotic desires and subjectivities on the internet.

The lecture will be held February 17th, from 14:00 til 15:30 in room 1453-116.

Abstract below:

This study focuses on the language employed for self- and other-representation in online personal ads posted on www.gay.gr, a popular Greek site meant as a forum for “gay, lesbian, bi, and trans”, with the intention of examining aspects of the indexical relation between language, gender, and sexuality (Ochs 1992) among men who pursue same sex relations (i.e. of men who generally identify as homosexual, gay, or using local labels such as pustiδes, aδerfes). Although these ads provide limited information, as they lack the interactive character and thick contextualization of viva voce discourse, they nevertheless allow for highly condensed snapshots of stances and conceptualizations of masculinity and sexuality. Recent research, drawing on some 200 randomly selected ads, has focused specifically on the articulation of desire (cf. Kulick 2000, Cameron & Kulick 2003, 2006) and documented that stereotypical predicates of masculinity, such as manliness, seriousness, discretion, etc., are eroticized and sought after in this particular context. Moreover, in interpreting these findings, it has been suggested that the stress placed on masculinity among the users may well be a reaction to the stereotypical representation of gay men as effeminate (still current to some extent in Greece); an instance of transgressive appropriation of a hegemonic masculinity typically denied them. This line of work has focused on the erotic and abstained from a discussion of “identity” issues in order to avoid the pitfalls of illicit groupings and essentialization. However, revisiting the same pool of data, it becomes apparent that questions of the users’ “identity”/subjectivity are closely intertwined with desire. Indeed, in describing themselves, users talk of their desires while imparting information about who they are in general; and in explaining what they look for in others they tend to eroticize identities rather than sexual acts alone (cf. Bucholtz & Hall 2004). Crucially, rather than shying away from overtly sexual talk in the interest of constructing politically advantageous identities (or attempting simplistic one-to-one alignments of identities and desires), I will attempt to show how the construction of desire and “idenity” appear to be co-present, often indexically related in the data, and, indeed how subjectivity is eroticized in the online personals of gay men in www.gay.gr.

Selected references

Bucholtz, M. & K. Hall. 2004. Theorizing idenity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33: 469-515.

Cameron, D. & D. Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cameron, D. & D. Kulick (eds.). 2006. The Language and Sexuality Reader. London: Routledge.

Kulick, D. 2000. Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 243-285.

Ochs, E. 1992. Indexing gender. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 335-358.

Foredrag: Undervisning af ordblinde i Danmark

2010-02-13T23:25:42Z

Anne Karina Steen fremlægger sit speciale i lingvistik 19. februar kl 13. på Aarhus Universitet i lokale 1412-229. Foredraget holdes på engelsk

Nedenfor står foredragsholderindens eget resume af specialet:

Fokus for specialet er undervisning af ordblinde i Danmark, fordi ordblindhed er et stort problem for individet og dets muligheder for at vælge uddannelse og karriere og for samfundet.
Ordblindhed er et voksende problem for samfundet, fordi personer med ordblindhed og læsevanskeligheder er en voksende gruppe grundet det faktum at man alle steder i samfundet mødes med øgede læsekrav for, at kunne følge med i udviklingen i samfundet. Derudover er ordblindhed en byrde for samfundet i og med, at mange ordblinde ofte ender på pension til deres store ærgrelse. Nogle skøn siger, at mellem 2-10% af befolkningen er ordblinde og det er tydeligt, at det er et problem, hvis 2-10% ikke kan bidrage til samfundet.

Derfor er afhjælpning af ordblindhed så vigtig, for at personer med ordblindhed kan bidrage til samfundet og føle, at der er brug for dem, hvilket vil resultere i en øget følelse af selvværd hos den enkelte. De primære undersøgelsesspørgsmål for specialet er: Hvordan underviser speciallærere og ordblindeundervisere? Hvilke undervisningsstrategier bruges på de forskellige uddannelsesniveauer? Og hvad er undervisernes kvalifikationer for at arbejde med personer med ordblindhed? For at besvare disse spørgsmål, sender jeg spørgeskemaer ud til ordblindeundervisere på forskellige uddannelsesniveauer, dvs. folkeskolelærere, gymnasielærere og undervisere på specialiserede højskoler og aftenskoleundervisere. Endvidere har det været nødvendigt at klassificere de undervisningstilgange, som de danske undervisere bruger, disse tilgange har jeg kategoriseret i tre overordnede tilgange, en lyderingstilgang, en holistisk tilgang og en alternativ tilgang, disse tilgange vil kort blive eksemplificeret ved de tre mest udbredte undervisningsstrategier, som bruges indenfor dansk og engelsk sproget undervisning af ordblinde.

Den teoretiske basis for at forstå ordblindhed kræver en forståelse af læseindlæringen hos normalt udviklede børn, til dette formål bruger jeg Coltheart & Harris’ fire faser teori til og en forståelse af læseprocessen hos normalt læsende voksne, hvilket forklares vha. dual-route modellen. Ud fra de spørgeskemaer jeg allerede har fået retur er det tydeligt, at de fleste ordblindeundervisere bruger mange forskellige undervisningsstrategier, som de forsøger at tilpasse til den enkelte elev. Dog lader det til at de færreste af disse undervisere holder sig stringent til én undervisningstilgang eller i det hele taget er bevidste om, hvilken tilgang de vælger.

Et førstehåndsindtryk af de indkomne svar angående lærernes kvalifikationer viser, at størstedelen af underviserne har været på flere kurser omkring læseindlæring og ordblindhed. Det er dog en mulighed, at disse data er upræcise af den grund, at mange, specielt folkeskolelærere, undlader at besvare spørgeskemaet, og at dem der gjorde, muligvis har været dem der har de bedste kvalifikationer og uddannelse indenfor undersøgelsens område. Dette er et problem, som kræver nærmere undersøgelse.

Lingoland, nu i Unicode!

2010-02-13T21:42:40Z

Lingoland har længe været plaget af problemer med at vise specielle tegn rigtigt. Dette er selvfølgelig ikke specielt heldigt, når man er en blog, som beskæftiger sig med sprog.

Problemet var at vores database brugte en uheldigt valgt tegnkodning, hvilket betød at alle tegn, som ikke findes i Latin-Swedish-tegnsættet ikke kunne vises.

Efter længere tid nørklen, har jeg nu formået at konvertere vores database så den nu bruger Unicode (UTF-8). Det skulle således nu være muligt at benytte alle de tegn man måtte have behov for på en lingvistikblog, deriblandt IPA- og Dania-lydskrift.

Jeg har desuden tilføjet links til Ruben Schachtenhaufens fremragende tegnvælgere til IPA og Dania nede ved kommentarfeltet.

Retskrivningsreformer

2010-02-13T21:52:41Z

I det 16. århundrede ændrede man i England stavningen af visse ord for klart at vise deres latinske oprindelse. ’det’ blev til ’debt’ (latin: dēbitum), ’scol’ blev til ’school’ (latin: schola) og ’etik’ blev til ’hectic’ (latin: hecticus). Men det var ikke altid helt uden fejl fra retskrivningsreformatorernes side. De ændrede ’iland’ til ’island’ i den tro, at ordet var relateret til ’isle’ fra latinsk ’insula’ – men i virkeligheden stammer ordet fra det oldengelske /īeġland/ - en kombination af /īeġ/(ø) og /land/ (jord).

Det samme skete i Frankrig. Bogstaver blev tilføjet for at afspejle ordenes »latinske oprindelse, selvom lydene for længst var gået tabt. ’doi’ blev til ’doigt’ (finger) (latin: digitum), ’pié’ blev til ’pied’ (fod) (latin: pedem), og ’set’ blev til ’sept’ (syv) (latin: septem). Også de franske reformatorer har været lige lovligt ivrige, for eksempel med ’pois’, som blev til ’poids’ (vægt) udfra en tro om, at ordet stammer fra ’pondum’ (vægt), mens det faktisk stammer fra ’pensum’, som er intetkøn af perfektum-participiet til verbet ’pendo’ (at veje).

Dansk — nu med mindre engelsk end nogensinde

2010-01-24T12:28:12Z

I en nylig artikel i Politiken, beretter Pia Jarvad via Kim Faber om hvor meget bedre vi er, end nordmænd og svenskere til ikke at lade engelsk pwne vores sprog alt for meget. Blandt eksemplerne er rush hour, som i dansk er blevet til myldretid, mens det på norsk er blevet til rushtid. Det må da kunne berolige og glæde nogle af sprogrøgterne derude i landet.

Post-mortem mentalization processes in the Atlantic Salmon

2010-01-13T23:50:41Z

Better be careful when drawing conclusions from fMRI scans. The salmon scans (poster) and the story behind it.