CategoryLanguage
Origin of Language: Still a Mystery, Despite All We Know Now
We aren’t even sure which is the world’s oldest spoken language, though Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese have impressively long historiesWhy Animals Don’t Really Have Anything Much to Say
Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum specializes in animal communication, hoping to learn more about the evolution of human language. His 2020 book, Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, (Viking 2020) uses zoology and Darwinian evolution to paint a picture of what extraterrestrial life forms must be like. His forthcoming book is Why Animals Talk (Penguin 2024) and is the subject of an interview with Killian Fox at The Guardian: He makes the conventional noises against human exceptionalism: “on the one hand, we want animals to talk; but on the other, we’re scared of animals talking because that would mean we’re not quite as special as we thought” But he also acknowledges genuine limitations. Take dolphin names, for example. Fox comments, “I was Read More ›
Chicken Whisperers? Humans Learn to Interpret Chicken-ese Quickly
A recent paper in Royal Society Open Science found that humans can interpret chicken emotions by their clucks. Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia were surprised at how quickly humans unfamiliar with chickens picked up the skill: Participants in the study listened to a series of clucks made by chickens excitedly anticipating food. They also listened to the chirps of chickens that were later denied a meal. After listening to an assortment of “fast clucks,” “whines” and “gakels,” researchers found about seven in 10 participants could identify the chickens’ mood from chirps alone. Luca Caruso-Moro, “The ‘clucking code’: Humans can understand how a chicken feelsfrom its clucks, CTV News, January 7, 2024 Perhaps because their faces are not Read More ›
Do People Who Speak Different Languages Think Differently?
For centuries, linguists found that an intriguing, attractive idea but there is no clear evidence for itUniversity of Siegen linguist James McElvenny, author of A History of Modern Linguistics (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming, 2024) muses on the fact that this question preoccupied linguists for centuries: There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about Read More ›
Human Brain Tries Immediately to Compensate for Language Loss
Neurosurgeons recently had a unique opportunity to observe brains undergoing the loss of the speech area and compensating in real timeNeuroscientists have long clashed over a critical question: Can the human brain compensate for the loss of a critical hub like the speech area? If so, how? Epilepsy surgery led by a team at the University of Iowa recently allowed researchers a close look at the live process in real time. Two patients were having the front part of a temporal lobe — which decodes the meaning of language — removed so that surgeons could remove the deeper parts of the brain that were causing their debilitating seizures. The neurosurgery teams followed the usual procedure of asking these patients to do speech and language tasks in the operating room while electrodes were implanted. They would record data from parts of Read More ›
Study: Babies Start Learning Their Home Language Before Birth
Neuroscience researchers found that newborns responded better to a folk tale in French than in Spanish or English — when French was their mothers’ native languageJust how tiny children, who hardly know anything at all, learn their native language with ease is still largely a mystery. But a recent article in Science Advances offers evidence that, when a child hears speech before birth, the complex neurological processes that enable early acquisition of the language are stimulated. From the open access paper: Human infants acquire language with amazing ease. This feat may begin early, possibly even before birth (1–5), as hearing is operational by 24 to 28 weeks of gestation (6). The intrauterine environment acts as a low-pass filter, attenuating frequencies above 600 Hz (2, 7). As a result, individual speech sounds are suppressed in the lowpass–filtered prenatal speech signal, but prosody, i.e., the melody and Read More ›
Do Cool Floor Buttons Really Cause Dogs To Talk?
The latest fad in “Talk to the animals” appears to be a classic in confirmation bias“Emergence”: The College Level Version of “We Don’t Know How”
The word often permits the improbable to be considered probable for the purposes of sounding like science without providing anyPostmodernism’s Steady Deconstruction of Reality
How can we find truth when nothing is reliable?Sometimes, you just have to try using college professors’ ideas in the real world. One such idea is “postmodernism.” Applied to communications, postmodernism teaches that whenever we read a written text, we should not try to discover what the writer intended. Instead of looking for an objective “meaning,” we should experience what the text means to us personally. The idea goes further, urging us to start by disbelieving the text and doubting our interpretations of it, too. People with the postmodern “deconstructionist” view say, “every text deconstructs” itself, and “every text has contradictions.” Deconstruction means “uncovering the question behind the answers already provided in the text.” Standing upon the ideas of the deconstructionist guru, Jacques Derrida, and his followers, one Read More ›
Awash in a Sea of Digital Information
In the age of infinite online text, maybe less is moreSome days after I close my laptop, I’d like to pick up a novel and read or work on a short story project, but then feel like I just need to empty my mind of all the snippets and clips of textual information I’ve consumed that day. News blurbs, thought pieces, emails, provocative tweets, more emails, more news blurbs… Frequently I’ll turn to a TV show or a social media binge in place of the novel. My brain can’t take any more text. It’s burnt out. It’s no secret contemporary Americans live in a sea of images and videos. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook all vie for human attention through images and color schemes designed to catch the distracted eye. Read More ›
Some Questions and Answers About Language From Recent Research
The hardest language, the best way to learn a language, and peering into the shadowy origin of languageCan there be such a thing as “the hardest language to learn”? At ZME Science, science writer Tibi Puiu dives into the question, starting with the assumption that the learner is an English speaker: After 70 years of experience teaching languages to American diplomats, the U.S. Foreign Service has grouped foreign languages into four categories of difficulty. The easiest language group requires 575-600 hours of study (23-24 weeks of classroom study) for students to achieve sufficient competence to be posted overseas, whereas the hardest group requires at least 2,200 hours of study (88 weeks of full-time classroom study) to achieve the same level of proficiency. In other words, some languages can be 3-4 times harder to master than others. Tibi Read More ›
How Human Language Is, and Isn’t, Like a Computer Program
A key difference is that a language cannot be downloaded into the brain, like a program. It must be painstakingly acquiredGiosuè Baggio, professor of psycholinguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has mixed feeling about comparing the brain’s management of human language to computation. In some ways, it is a useful analogy: If we look at what the brain does while people perform a language task, we find some of the signatures of a computational system at work. If we record electric or magnetic fields produced by the brain, for example, we find signals that are only sensitive to the identity of the sound one is hearing — say, that it is a b, instead of a d — and not to the pitch, volume, or any other concrete and contingent features of the speech sound. At some Read More ›
Researchers: Profanity Has Some Elements of a Universal Language
They found that, in a number of languages, profanity omits certain sounds and stresses othersIn a study, researchers found that, across different languages, swear words tended to lack soundssuch as l, r, and w: Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay from Royal Holloway, University of London conducted a pilot study with speakers of five unrelated languages (20 individuals per language) and asked them to list the most offensive words they knew in their language, excluding racial slurs. The initial study revealed that swear words were less likely to include approximants, which include sounds like l, r, w and y. The authors suggest that approximants may be less suitable than other sounds for giving offense and investigated this in two further studies. Springer, “The universal sound of swearing across languages” at Eurekalert (December 5, 2022) The Read More ›
Cormac McCarthy Tries To Make Sense of the Unconscious Mind
He offers shafts of light that make the “hard problem of (un)consciousness” feel less forbiddingIn a classic piece at Nautilus, novelist Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933) — author of, among other novels, All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Road (2007) — muses on the origin and nature of the unconscious mind. As we might expect from a novelist, it’s not his grand theory that is of much use at all. His grand theory is that “the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal,” which makes no sense. He adds, “All animals have an unconscious. If they didnt they would be plants.” How does he know that pond hydras, for example, have an “unconsciousness” but maple trees don’t? Well, he doesn’t. And yet, he also offers shafts of light that make the “Hard Problem Read More ›
Neuroscientist Takes Aim at Yuval Noah Harari’s Claims re Humans
Behavioral neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan says that much of what Harari writes “sacrifices science for sensationalism” and is “riddled with errors”Many readers have read our article last June on historian and transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari’s musings on what to do with the people that artificial intelligence is rendering “useless.” Now, first off, what Harari envisions is not happening. As business prof Jay Richards is fond of noting, AI enables more people to craft the jobs they want, with AI doing the traditional drudgery. Despite automation (or because of it),there are still plenty of Help Wanted signs out there. Call the argument Homo Deus vs. The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines, if you like. But at Current Affairs, behavioral neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan offers another critique. Apart from having a disturbing attitude to fellow Read More ›
How Would an AI Chatbot Handle the Complexities of Oral Language?
University of Toronto linguist Joseph Wilson unpacks some of the differences between the way we speak and the way we writeJoseph Wilson, a linguist and journalist who has done considerable work with oral languages (languages not yet written down), offers some thoughts on claims that chatbots like Blake Lemoine’s LaMDA, really speak like human persons. He offers a sharp distinction between oral language and the written language that chatbots are trained on: But this excludes all unwritten forms of communication: sign language, oral histories, body language, tone of voice, and the broader cultural context in which people find themselves speaking. In other words, it leaves out much of the interesting stuff that makes nuanced communication between people possible. Joseph Wilson, “Why AI Will Never Fully Capture Human Language” at Sapiens (October 12, 2022) We really don’t know how old spoken Read More ›
What Happens When You Feed a Translation Program Utter Nonsense?
Indiana University cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter had a lifelong acquaintance with and admiration for the Swedish language and with the help of Swedish friends, became conversant with it. That led him in turn to try an experiment on machine translation programs such as Google Translate and DeepL. At Inference Review, he tells us, “although — or perhaps because — these programs have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, I greatly enjoy discovering and poking fun at their many unpredictable weaknesses.” Thus the author of author of Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) constructed a paragraph of pure nonsense in made-up Swedish, something like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which plays around similarly with English: All mimsy were the borogoves, And Read More ›
If DNA Is a Language, Who Is the Speaker?
Philosopher Steve Meyer talks about the significance of Francis Crick’s sequence hypothesis that shows that DNA is literally a language of lifeIn a talk at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith (2021), philosopher Steve Meyer looked at the question of whether a multiverse, as in Multiverse of Madness (2022), or God, as in many traditions is the origin of our universe. That is, is our universe designed — as considerable evidence suggests — or is ours just one of a few lucky universes whose extra-lucky conditions allow for advanced life? Dr. Meyer is the author of The Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper One, 2021) which argues that the evidence from science favors God over a multiverse. (Sample here.) In this first of four transcripts of the talk, he talks about how and why it matters to ordinary people which Read More ›
Six Brain Regions Control Language — But We’re Not Sure How
We’re learning more about human language but it remains, in its way, mysteriousNeuroscientist Saima Malik-Moraleda told The Scientist, recently that six main regions of the brain respond to language tasks but not to, say, math tasks. Using fMRI data, a recent comprehensive survey — of which she is a co-author — examined two native speakers of each of 45 languages while the speaker was performing either a linguistic or non-linguistic specific task. From the interview, SM-M: But the variability that we saw across languages was lower than the variability that we see across participants, meaning that the language network seems to be incredibly stable and similar across languages. One of the questions that cognitive neuroscientists who particularly study language wonder is: “Why do we have six areas? What does each area do?” Read More ›