July 6, 2010 at 10:00 am
· Filed under Biological, Unspoken · Posted by Wendy
I was just listening to a 60 Minutes podcast and there was a really interesting story about a woman who has been studying the same group of African elephants for almost two decades. American scientist Andrea Turkalo has been studying their behaviour, and focusing particularly on the way they communicate. She can now identify not only what different sounds mean (including greetings, sadness, anger, and all clear), but can even tell the animals apart by their voices. Turkalo’s long years of research are leading towards a greater understanding of elephant behaviour and social interactions, and even towards a dictionary of sorts, so other people can also understand the communication between the animals.
One of the big steps that lead to a lot more understanding was realising that a lot of the noises that elephants make are actually subsonic - so low that humans can’t hear them. These low frequencies are used to communicate and locate other elephants to a range of over 2km. When researchers realised that these sounds existed, they began speeding up their recordings so the sounds became audible, and also examined wave forms on screen.
The range of different ‘expressions’ that elephants use is huge, and the research is fascinating.
For more information, read the transcript, or listen to the podcast (episode released 04 July, ‘The Secret Language of Elephants’ starts around 14:00).
In the kind of news story that you wouldn’t even believe if it were in a Hollywood film, a woman from Devon started speaking in new accents after complaining of severe migraines.
She initially spoke in a Chinese accent for about a week, and then woke up speaking in a more Eastern-European sounding accent (apparent in the video below). Unfortunately there’s no evidence of the Chinese accent; I would have been really interested to see what that sounded like.
Clearly she has had some kind of brain episode affecting her speech areas, as she makes some grammatical errors as well as the perceived accent change. As she mentions in the video, she is unsure how long it will last for. Apparently some people who suffer this kind of change recover after some time.
It’s nice that her mental capacity seems unchanged, although I think it would frustrate me no end to have people think I was a bit simple because of the way I spoke!
It may be a last resort to some people, but hand gestures and miming go a long way towards getting your point across. Looking like a bit of a fool for a few seconds may save you a lot of time spent searching for vocabulary. And you may not even look so silly; many people are ‘hand talkers’ and use gestures to go along with everyday speech.
Especially when you’re a beginner, and in a foreign country, gesturing and pointing can be a great help when you don’t know specific vocabulary. I did have a friend who had to mime some unfortunate bodily functions at a hospital once, but hopefully your experience won’t be as traumatic. If you’re lucky, the person you’re trying to communicate with will provide you with the vocabulary you need (”ah…tomato!”) once they finally understand your meaning.
If you need any other impetus to start moving your hands, this study has shown that gestures, languages and symbols are all processed in the same regions of the brain, and it may be a carry-over from before humans had speech. So, waving your arms around could be considered more valid than speaking. Just remember that some gestures aren’t always polite!
We’ve all had that experience where we know we know a word, but we just can’t recall it.
An American study set out to reproduce this phenomenon to see if there was any difference between monolingual and bilingual speakers’ chances of having a ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ moment.
It has already been documented that people who only speak one language have fewer instances of words on the tips of their tongues, but researchers wanted to know if it was because people are sounding out words in their heads (and bilinguals have around twice as many words in their heads as monolinguals).
To study this, the researchers asked participants to name dozens of different objects (often with rarely-used names, like metronome and gyroscope), and counted the number of tip-of-the-tongue experiences (but only for those instances where the participant actually knew the word). They found that monolingual participants had fewer occurrences, but that English-Spanish speakers had around the same number of tip-of-the-tongue moments as English-ASL (American Sign Language) speakers.
This led the researchers to believe that we’re not sounding things out in our heads at all (as ASL does not have sounds), but looking through a catalogue of rarely-used words.
It seems like it’s human nature to try to find the easiest and fastest way to do things, and this is especially true for things we find difficult or don’t understand. Language learning seems to be one of the things that people are constantly trying to find a shortcut for. Are there quick fixes and magic solutions?
There are many websites that claim that it is possible for people to learn a foreign language easily and quickly, and you can get it done simply by being asleep. One website even tells this fantastic story, of a student who achieved great success using their methods:
In Budapest, Hungary, a student wanted to learn English quickly enough to win a BBC contest. Using the sleep-learning method , he memorized one thousand and twenty-six English words in six weeks and won first prize!
Sounds easy, right? Well, an EFL teacher thought he would ask some people who had tried similar methods. Not only did he find out that there was a lot more work involved than just listening to audio while you sleep, but that the students who had tried it didn’t feel like they were learning about grammar and sentence structures. They did report that they became more familiar with speech sounds of English, and improved their pronunciation, though. The teacher also proposed that doing about 15 minutes of study right before sleeping, and right after waking up (as was instructed in the sleep learning courses) could be beneficial to all students. Read his full post here.
Has anyone else had experience of learning or enhancing their learning by listening to things while they sleep?
Speaking of swearing, a study published last month has shown that it might actually be good for us.
Although swearing is looked down upon in polite company, researchers have begun to investigate why it’s such a common response to hurting ourselves. A study that asked college students to hold their hands in icy cold water found that those who were told to repeat an expletive of their choice could withstand the pain longer than those who chanted a neutral word.
One suggested reason for this is that swearing is related to a ‘fight or flight‘ reflex triggered deep in the brain, and may be associated with startling or attempting to intimidate an attacker.
But cursing is more than just aggression, explains Timothy Jay, a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has studied our use of profanities for the past 35 years. “It allows us to vent or express anger, joy, surprise, happiness,” he remarks. “It’s like the horn on your car, you can do a lot of things with that, it’s built into you.”
In extreme cases, the hotline to the brain’s emotional system can make swearing harmful, as when road rage escalates into physical violence. But when the hammer slips, some well-chosen swearwords might help dull the pain.
I am quite fond of the car horn analogy. A personal theory, too, is that we need to get attention when we’re injured. At the very least, letting people know you’ve just stubbed your toe might get a sympathetic ‘awww’, which always makes you feel a little better.
A caveat mentioned in the article is that the more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.
According to a recent studies, dogs are able to comprehend human pointing gestures as well as two year olds. Dogs need very little learning time to associate the gesture and its meaning.
Dogs also seem to recognise the significance of other gestures, including direction of gaze and head-turning, which puts them ahead of non-human primates. Chimpanzees routinely fail at pointing tests, which involve being able to find food or other rewards by accurately reading human hand signals.
It goes to show that centuries of domestication have influenced the ability of domestic canines to understand human helping gestures.
Both two-year-old children and dogs were able to understand pointing with fingers, elbows, and legs, but didn’t understand knee pointing or when the finger points in a different direction from the rest of the arm (three-year-olds understood all of the gestures tested). But, to be honest, unless there are extenuating circumstances, who points like that anyway?
So, the advice we can take away from this research?
When gesturing to a dog or child under three, it’s therefore best not to fidget or otherwise move in confusing ways.
I’ve talked about how people’s brains are continually trying to predict what’s going to come next, which is why we get misled by garden path sentences and sudden changes of direction.
A recent study of ERPs (Event-Related Potentials) by psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands has shown that people’s brains show a specific spike (called the N400) when they hear a word that was unexpected or seems out of place. Interestingly, the research also showed that it’s not just the words being spoken or read that matter, but other information as well. As listeners, we also take into account clues from our perception of the speaker:
In addition to the words themselves, the person speaking them is a crucial component in understanding what is being said. Van Berkum also saw an N400 effect occurring very rapidly when the content of a statement being spoken did not match with the voice of the speaker e.g. “I have a large tattoo on my back” in an upper-class accent or “I like olives” in a young child’s voice. These findings suggest that the brain very quickly classifies someone based on what their voice sounds like and also makes use of social stereotypes to interpret the meaning of what is being said. Van Berkum speculates that “the linguistic brain seems much more ‘messy’ and opportunistic than originally believed, taking any partial cue that seems to bear on interpretation into account as soon as it can.”
The material used in the study was all in written or audio form, so there were no conclusions drawn about visual information about speakers. I don’t think it would be a huge jump to assume that we also take visual clues about speakers into account, though. It’s likely that we gather a lot of information about a speaker before they even open their mouth to talk. If they say something that doesn’t fit in with what we have assumed, it takes a moment to catch up again, much in the same way as it’s surprising to hear a tall, burly man speak with a high-pitched voice.
I’ve mentioned before that musical training seems to help with language skills, and a recent American study has made progress into the specifics of the notion that ‘music makes you smarter’.
Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published today in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE.
According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.
Both the control group and the musically-trained group showed similar results after the second group had already undergone two years of musical training. There are several theories as to what this means, but the authors of the study are quite confident that multiple years of musical training have a strong positive effect on vocabulary and and reading skills.
February 16, 2009 at 7:30 am
· Filed under Biological, Grammar · Posted by Wendy
After being saddened because so many people lack the ability to use an apostrophe, it’s lovely to see that the punctuation mark being used as a yardstick in the National Geographic, albeit because of its size, not its grammatical function. It still amazes me what is constantly being discovered in the world.
At under half an inch tall (13 millimeters), Satomi’s pygmy seahorse—named after dive guide Satomi Onishi—is a strong contender for the world’s smallest seahorse. With their tails stretched out straight, two Satomi’s pygmy seahorses would fit head-to-head across the face of a penny.
These miniscule seahorses from Indonesian reefs have been seen giving birth to tiny offspring, each about the size of a 12-point apostrophe.
I was just listening to a 60 Minutes podcast and there was a really interesting story about a woman who has been studying the same group of African elephants for almost two decades. American scientist Andrea Turkalo has been studying their behaviour, and focusing particularly on the way they communicate. She can now identify not only what different sounds mean (including greetings, sadness, anger, and all clear), but can even tell the animals apart by their voices. Turkalo’s long years of research are leading towards a greater understanding of elephant behaviour and social interactions, and even towards a dictionary of sorts, so other people can also understand the communication between the animals.
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