Class Presentation about Language Abilities and Brain Degeneration

This semester, I’m taking a class called Language Processing and the Brain with Dr. Ann Laubstein. There’s been some pretty interesting things so far, though admittedly we’ve covered mostly psycholinguistics (psychology of language) rather than neurolinguistics (language and the brain) material. When we’re not reviewing the material from last class (which I suffer through for the sake of people who find it helpful), I’m pretty engaged with the material. Specifically, I want to argue with everything. That’s… probably good, but I think there’s other fields for me in the long term.

Side note: I realize I haven’t posted about what classes I’m taking this semester. The reason I haven’t posted about this semester is because I still have to post about last semester. And the reason I haven’t posted about that is because I haven’t posted about my summer. But I’ve written that post! I just need to break it up into a series of posts because it’s long.

Anyway, back to the point: one of the required projects was a group presentation. We were assigned groups by last name, and my group presented this past Tuesday. The task was to find a recent paper that had made a significant contribution to the field, and present it to the class in ~10 minutes. On the advice of our TA, our group went with the paper Cognition and Anatomy in Three Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia (note: paywall, sadly). I realize no one has any idea what that means, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

You can see all the materials over on UniNotes. The “Merged notes” documents have the notes each person took while preparing their section (plus full paper notes from me), so that’s the best free explanation you’re going to get about what the paper is about. The images are the graphs I created for the presentation, using the data I pulled from the HTML version of the paper, which is in “aphasia.csv”. Which took way too long for me to reformat for proper processing (Me: “Why is this being parsed as ordinal data rather than numeric…?” Professor Biddle: “Great question, let me know when you find out!”). Then the code for producing those graphs is in “aphasia.r”, which was a five-hour long foray (plus time spent looking at online help and such) into programming in R.

Then there’s the presentation itself. I was handling the introduction and conclusion, and by virtue of being relatively comfortable presenting, spent too much talking about. We put the presentation together using Prezi, because the first group that presented used it, and now the entire class is forced to. I mean, it would just be rude to assault their eyes with PowerPoint slides. So that’s available online here, if you’re curious. In case Prezi dies, I’ve got it on UniNotes too. Anyway, you can see there’s very little text in the sections I handled, which makes the whole thing pretty confusing for anyone who wasn’t around for the presentation.

Anyway, I actually like this paper. Their results are genuinely compelling, to me anyway: “damage in areas X, Y, and Z led to problems X, Y, and Z”. “We’re pretty sure Area Y is related to Problem X, so that suggests Areas Y and Z are related in some way to Problems Y and Z.” “Based on genetic profiles, the underlying cause may be X rather than Y.” Direct links like that are pretty rare, generally speaking.

Response to R.M.W. Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Languages

[[This is a short paper I wrote near the end of my Introduction to Linguistics course. The assignment, for bonus marks actually, was to read a book and write a brief summary and respond to the reading. Hopefully it stands well on its own, without the book. Dixon’s book was a pretty good introduction to historical and comparative linguistics - topics we didn’t have a lot of time for during the course itself. At any rate, the material he presented was basic enough and clear enough that I was able to understand it easily. So hopefully this essay is equally digestible.

The other main goal was for us to read about a controversial alternative to the accepted (as far as textbooks are concerned) wisdom about language change. It sounded pretty plausible to me, so I figured I’d go along with it. In retrospect, the most useful things I learned from the book had nothing to do with Dixon’s model itself. At any rate, it was a good experience, and I’m glad Professor Anonby gave us the assignment. Looking back almost two years later, it’s striking how much I’ve taken to heart that if something sounds too good to be true in science… it probably is. Look, ma, I’m a critical thinker.

A couple of good readings on the topic I found when I started looking for other papers using Dixon’s model:

• Claire Bowern provides an overview of the model’s biological roots and other aspects of historical and comparative linguistics. Her paper is both more informed and more critical of Dixon than what follows. Worst of all, she cites a reference reporting a wealth of counter-evidence (see page 8) to Dixon’s theory about Australian languages - pretty damning when it’s his strongest example.
• Simon Greenhill writes about a supporting result, though as I understood it, it supports a punctuated equilibrium model that merely posits differing rates of change rather than Dixon’s specific formulation. Of particular interest is the discussion in the comment section with Claire Bowern and others.]]

Response to R.M.W. Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Languages

In his book The Rise and Fall of Languages, R.M.W. Dixon discussed the problems with the family tree model of genetic language relationships and proposes an alternative model to supplement it. While the family tree model works well for Indo-European languages, he shows how it has failed to apply to other linguistic areas. As an example, he discusses groups of Aboriginal languages in Australia. Many of them can be grouped into sub-groups based on location, but construction of a proto-language and creating the upper levels of the family tree proved to be difficult. Dixon’s proposed model of punctuated equilibrium claims that in linguistic areas in equilibrium, such as Australia prior to its invasion in the 18th century, language features tend to diffuse amongst neighbouring languages. This leads them to converge towards a common prototype. On the other hand, when that equilibrium is punctured – by invasion in Australia, though there can be other causes – languages tend to split and form the kinds of genetic relationships seen in the Indo-European family tree.

              Dixon describes the kinds of linguistic features that tend to diffuse amongst languages in contact in a linguistic area, and provides an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the family tree model. As a transition into his theory of punctuated equilibrium, he describes the possible modes of change in languages – that language can change quickly and decisively, or it can change gradually over time. The first applies to the family tree model, while the second is more appropriate for the punctuated equilibrium model. Dixon then elaborates on recent human history, and how nearly every part of the world has undergone drastic punctuations to their equilibrium, making it easy to think the family tree model applies everywhere in the world. The nature of European invasion is such that, by trying to study an equilibrium situation, it is punctured by the linguist attempting to study it. In any event, few areas of the world still exist in such isolation, so the task of the linguist becomes that of a historian of language, trying to capture snapshots of how languages were before they were influenced by outside sources.

              While I am certainly not an expert, I am tempted to agree with Dixon’s punctuated equilibrium model. It seems to provide for the shortcomings of the family tree model for language areas outside modern Europe, where clear genetic relationships are more difficult to define than within the Indo-European family. Indo-European languages have existed in punctuated equilibrium for most of recent history (the past several thousand years), creating the ideal family tree style model, but that’s likely not the case for more isolated areas such as Australia where various groups would have co-existed relatively peacefully for thousands of years. Additionally, the punctuated equilibrium model does not claim to invalidate the family tree model, because it is naturally included for linguistic areas with punctuated equilibrium. Instead, Dixon’s model supplements the existing theories and expands upon them to account for other linguistic areas. I don’t know enough about world history to think of an area of the world that has neither been isolated in linguistic equilibrium nor affected by punctured equilibrium, but I would think Dixon’s model applies for just about every linguistic area of the world.

              Dixon discussed two types of responsibilities that linguists have – first a social responsibility, then a scientific responsibility. The social responsibility, for the benefit of our understanding of human language, is to document undocumented (or minimally documented) languages to preserve them and see the massive range of possibilities that exists in human language. The scientific responsibility, which is not unique to linguistics, is not to take established theories for granted. To assume that the family tree model applies everywhere in the world, and to use comparative linguistics to “prove” tenuous links between languages, is to deny the possibility that other options exist in the world’s languages. The social responsibility feeds into the scientific, as well, because documenting new languages that may not fit the accepted theories will help to refine linguistic theory.

              The question of where linguistic research should focus its attention, on data or on theory, is tied closely to the responsibility of a linguist. Speculative theories can be used to direct research – Dixon’s theory of punctuated equilibrium is a good example – but they cannot exist without any data to support them. Data can be used to create new theories, but new theories cannot be created without any data. If the available data is never expanded by linguistic research on undocumented languages, then new theories are unlikely to appear. Dixon is an example here as well. He did field work in areas he felt needed study, and found that the data he collected did not fit with existing theories of genetic relationship. The new data led to the creation of a new theory, which could not have existed otherwise.

              Overall, I’m quite glad that I read the book. It was enlightening to see what a linguist really does, and I appreciated the theory and how it helps to describe language development outside modern Europe. Sometimes it’s tempting to forget that other parts of the world do not have history defined by bloody wars and political strife, and the fact that a culture could exist so peacefully that it would have no concept of competition (Dixon 113, footnote) is remarkable to me. I knew about the Germanic and Romance languages, in a general sense, but I had yet to be convinced by family tree theory that all languages in the world conform to a genetic relationship pattern. My budding linguistic knowledge now includes the family tree model and the punctuated equilibrium model, which should prove helpful in the future. It’s always good to have more ways to approach a problem, and that’s certainly something Dixon’s book provides.

Kickback: All The Right Reasons

Years ago, when I would listen to songs that made me think of anything related to relationships, I didn’t stop to put into words what the song made me feel. I’d get a vague approximation of some thoughts, and I’d be appropriately happy/miserable/both, and that was all I needed. Now that I’ve got more time between myself and the relationship in question, I don’t get the same feelings, and so I literally can’t remember what it was that I liked about these songs. Listening to them now, I know there was something about the song, but can’t quite grasp it.

        You can see the vague, unformed idea effect in some of the music posts I made back in 2010 - I’d post the song and the lyrics, but not say a whole lot about it. A prime example is this post about Kickback UK’s All The Wrong Reasons. I was listening to the song last night and thinking it meant something to me in 2010, but I couldn’t say what it was. At a guess, I’d say I felt like I was trying to help people so I could feel better about myself - the most cynical way of reading my behaviour at the time. There were a couple people I was “friends” with at the time mostly for that reason, and it took me a while to realize that wasn’t the way to go. But that’s only a guess - I can’t say for sure what I was thinking when I made that post.

        What I can tell you is what the song makes me think now, which you will (hopefully) be glad to hear is much more positive. I was up late writing an essay for my Linguistic Analysis class, and I took the lyrics in a very different way. (Chalk it up to vague interpretations, I guess, when the same song can mean a totally different thing two years later.) I was feeling good about the essay and wanted to reflect a bit on how I’ve changed lately, and where I’m heading in the future. Moral of the story, for the tl;dr crowd - I feel like I’ve gone from “all the wrong reasons” to “all the right reasons”, and I’ve got big plans. Read on if you’re interested! Best if you take a stop by the old post, first.

        "Head’s in the future, but your heart’s in the past" is an apt description of me circa 2010. Things were looking up, but definitely not all the way up. Which is a stupid metaphor if you try to picture it, but it works verbally. “And we’ve seen it all before, you’re holding out for more” follows from that, obviously. Neither of those things still apply to me, which is a good sign. Head and heart are both set on the future, I suppose. Getting to the future I want means working hard in the present, but it feels more and more and more natural as I put out work I’m legitimately proud of. Nobody’s ever going to look at the C++ assignment I’m working on right now, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make it good and shoot for a mark of 110%.

        The next line is what gets me now, and probably what got to me in the past as well. “When that call never comes it’s time to face what you’ve become - there’s no point doing all of this unless you know you’re having fun.” At the time, there were a lot of things I wasn’t terribly happy with. I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun with the work I was doing back then. Although it got me here, so I can’t complain - but it was all delayed gratification at the time. At least now I get some of that gratification! A little, anyway. Still lots of delay right now. But I’ve recently realized what I should be working towards, although I’d been thinking about it for a few weeks. I said I didn’t have many important goals for 2012, but I take that back now! I’ve got two, which I strongly feel I can accomplish, and which all of my work now contributes to:

• The first: have my name on a publication.
• The second: learn as much as possible, with an eye towards distinguishing myself from the competition.

Both of these are practical goals that will, hopefully, put me in a great position when I finish my education and set out for a job. So - “what have I become”? Someone who strives to be the best they can be. (Time will tell where I’ll fall on the sweet/awesome dichotomy.) I’m not necessarily having fun, but I’m seeing the big picture now.

        From where I stand, that means a number of different things. Most recently, it means improving my writing consciously, the way I used to while I was in AP English. (If you’re interested in that writing analysis tool but not interested in Emacs, I can look into creating an independent version, with the author’s permission.) Going back a few weeks, I’ve started to really dedicate myself to programming well. I’m getting tons of inspiration on that topic as I dig up tidbits of information about Emacs, and inevitably get linked to some other brilliant piece. There’s Steve Yegge and Avdi Grimm over the past few days, who have both Emacs secrets I can steal and general programming knowledge. Meanwhile, Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman write about quality of life as a programmer - improving your tools, improving your office, improving your lighting, etc. Aside from that, I’m always trying to synthesize what I know about the seemingly-disparate areas of linguistics (at least, that’s what the separation in course content would lead you to believe). I want to say with some confidence that I’m a linguist - not some kid who “maybe heard about that in university, but didn’t think it was important”.

        In a similar vein, I’m connecting all the dots in this “cognitive science” thing. Philosophy is cognitive psychology, cognitive psychology is neuroscience, neuroscience is linguistics, linguistics is computer science… And the whole conglomerate is cognitive science. I may not use every part of it for the rest of my life, but understanding them all matters. Even if I were to be a career programmer, I’d keep usability testing in mind. Even if I were a linguist for the rest of my life, I know for a fact I’d land in a crossover field - computational linguistics and neurolinguistics seem equally likely right now.

        So what I’m getting at is: I know what I’m doing here, and I know who I am. I can’t tell you what I’ll settle on for a job, but I know what the core components of that job will be. This is where I belong. The lows may be low, but the highs are home.

Male sparring, female submission, and fencing

It is not - as it seems to many women - that men are bums who seek to deny women authority. Many men are inclined to jockey for status, and challenge the authority of others, when they are talking to men too. If this is so, then challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination. The inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behaviour alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s style: Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.

        A very interesting quote from an article in my applied linguistics class about gender differences in language. The author, a woman and an expert in her field (sociolinguistics), cited various examples of men controlling conversation - even men who knew nothing about linguistics trying to challenge her authority.

        Then she cited a study where pairs of men, pairs of women, and mixed pairs were videotaped while discussing the effect of television violence on children. Before the discussion, some of the subjects were given extra information on the subject - basically, making them the experts in their pair. Men, when confronted with a male expert, would often gain the upper hand in the conversation. When confronted with a female expert, the men would control the conversation and the woman - despite being more knowledgeable - would spend MORE time agreeing with the man than they normally did. And when the man in a mixed pair was the expert, he would control the conversation from beginning to end.

        I felt this was a very utopian quote, despite the whole gender imbalance thing. Or maybe even because of it. I wouldn’t say that being a utopian is “a male thing” - rather, I’d say that it’s all the more impressive for a girl to hold her ground against this kind of jockeying for position. And, I think, that it would be good for we Y-chromosome folk (men) to be conscious of our tendency to take control and quell it somewhat to level the playing field.

        Case in point: There are a lot of girls in the fencing club, especially among the beginners, and even moreso among the foilists. There are, by my count, three male beginners fencing foil and… five or six girls. You know what happens when two guys fence? Intense competition. I fenced a guy last night who’d been dominating in his bouts against a few of the girls, and destroyed him - the score was 5-1. We shook hands, and he told me I was the “king of parrying.” Funny that I didn’t parry once the entire time, except to counterparry (ok, the distinction is kinda important) his ripostes.

        When I fence the other guy, who’s less competitive with me but more aggressive against the girls, it’s more or less the same - we’re always testing each other to see who will win this time. But as I said, when he fences one of the girls, he goes nuts (which is poor technique) and tends to win because they back off. Case further in point: when two girls fence each other, it’s pretty much an even split.

        Case further in point, the girls fence each other on pretty much even footing. When I fence one of the girls, I try to give constructive criticism so they can beat me next time. I try not to use the same trick over and over, but if they do fall for a nasty one, I’ll show them how they can stop it. But, yes, I do try to control the bout. Why? Because the person in control is the one who gets to attack, and I want to practice and learn what works and what doesn’t. When I started fencing, I thought I could be a master defender and win through perfect reactions, but I lost every damn time. I know winning doesn’t matter, because it’s all for practice, but half-assed practice is almost worthless. So I go all out, and occasionally, that does result in a one-sided bout. I love to lose, though, because then I get twice as much experience. I can learn what they did well on the offensive, and I can learn what I did poorly on the defensive.

        However, I admit one failing in this - the extremely aggressive girls were told to fence sabre (slashing weapon, run at each other and swing), and the tall girls were told to fence epée (long pokey weapon, touch them before they touch you) so that left the submissive girls on foil. Also the girls who were too meek to insist on fencing a different weapon. So, yes, there are girls who dominate the dudes, and guys who don’t try to compete against them. Just not among the ones I fence with.

vael:

demi is rude by accident, forgets that vael does not know everything

vael says knowledge gained by money (aka post-secondary education) bothers him, asks for psychoanalysis

        I don’t start abnormal psychology until second semester :( So I don’t want to provide theories that essentially consist of shots in the dark. Could be that we (people who are specializing in something very specific) tend to be condescending about our subject of study or some other attitude related thing. Or maybe your decision not to study something has something to do with it.

        Did I say I wouldn’t do that? I did. Oh well.

        What I can do, for certain, is provide a psychological reason for what is and isn’t a language! If you’re interested, check out my notes for the first chapter of my linguistics class, in particular the “design features of a language” section that provide the (more or less) official list of criteria for language status. Essentially, a language is a distinct (perhaps not unique - some languages are, of course, related historically) way of communicating messages. This extends to every single part of the language - its sentence structure, its word structure, even the sounds it uses to make those words. For example, when I write a sentence in French using English sentence structure, it sounds weird and my teacher tells me to change it. And I have no idea what’s wrong with it because I have no clue how to formulate a sentence in proper French.

        A code, however, is just a different way of using the same language. It won’t have its own unique sentence structure, word structure, set of sounds, grammatical rules (these are different from what you learned in school, but we won’t get into that), and more importantly, you can’t learn it natively. You can grow up speaking English, Klingon, and even American Sign Language (it has a sentence structure entirely different from English, and uses signs for words). But you can’t grow up speaking Signed Exact English II (uses English sentence structure, uses signs for letters), because it’s a code, not a unique sign language. The reason for this is that in order to speak it, you need to speak English first. This is great if you lose the ability to speak and know English perfectly well, but if you’re born deaf, American Sign Language is practically essential. You might learn English later, for the sake of reading maybe, and then learn SEE II, but signing the spelling for English words is really damn slow.

        *deep breath*

        Does that make sense? I may have forgotten to explain certain things. We’ve been dealing a lot with sign language in my applied linguistics class, but there’s a lot of linguistics in there as well. Linguistics chapter 1 covers what signed languages are, what codes are, and what languages in general are. Some of my applied linguistics notes, for example the day we had a presentation from a deaf professor, are pertinent.

        Anyway, so the reason Utopian isn’t a language is because all it does is spell English words differently. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize it isn’t even a code - it’s a cipher. It might not accept non-Latin alphabets (how does it do with letters that aren’t in English, by the way?) but it would work perfectly well with a French sentence like “Quand j'arrive, je vois quelque chose dans l'eau…” A cipher is a cryptology thing, where you swap letters around with a very specific algorithm, and they have to be re-ordered by the exact same algorithm. Or maybe that algorithm in reverse. But the fact that (I assume) you need to pass any message you send or receive through the English-to-Utopian machine establishes it as a cipher.

        I know some people can memorize the switched letters in something like Al-Bhed from FF X, but it’s still a cipher even if you memorize it.

        edit: the relevance of me forgetting that vael doesn’t know everything is that, in my mind, I was merely reminding him of something to correct a poor choice of words

Linguistics is more applicable than you might think!

And actually more applicable than I might even think when reading the textbook. Diagrams of how you breathe when you make sounds?! That’s so forgettable and not at all interesting to people who don’t have a Ph.D. in Linguistics, namely, the people taking intro to linguistics.

        First, something I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days: the schwa. Basically, it’s a mid-central laxly produced vowel - and it’s all over the place in tons of languages, though very few include it in their alphabet. North American english actually deletes it a lot (how do you pronounce chocolate - with or without an o? that letter o is actually a schwa), and that’s another neat thing about language - we’re optimizing for speed, so we throw away useless sounds and don’t pronounce things properly. Back to what mid-central laxly produced vowel means, it’s pretty much the very middle of your mouth. I’m assuming that would be the natural resting position for your tongue. So at any give time, if you were to just open you lips (no tongue movement allowed) and make a noise, it would likely be a schwa!

        So the schwa is in tons of words because it makes them easier to pronounce, and a great example is foxes. Try to pronounce fox, and add a -zzz at the end for the s, WITHOUT any sound in between. Very difficult to produce, harder for the hearer to understand that you mean multiple foxes - so a schwa goes right in between those sounds as a transition and to make them more pronounceable.

        I thought that was neat so if I explained it poorly just pretend it’s really cool.

        Next thing is I’m going to write a paper about how communication on the internet is still communication. It’s a little bit rough because linguistics has proved that writing, whether it’s a letter or an “instant message” is not equivalent to pure language use, but I’ll just have to pick my thesis carefully. The reason I say “pure language use” as opposed to “speech” is because sign language is equivalent to spoken word, and actually ten times more amazing in certain ways. But suffice to say that sign language uses the language centric parts of your brain (a couple places in the left hemisphere) exactly like spoken language, AND it develops an extra part on the right hemisphere dedicated solely to understanding the spacial dimension of signed language. So, as far as your brain is concerned, speaking with your hands and speaking with your mouth are just as good.

        What I want to somehow work into this paper is that communication over the internet is similarly equivalent to communication face to face - that’s not to say I don’t think there’s any point to meeting someone in person to discuss something with them, just that internet friends are as valid as friends who sit beside you in class.

        Take vael’s post about a support system - who says a “support system” is restricted to people physically close to you? You want to see an internet support system, go to deviantArt or Gaia Online and see all the little peoples complimenting eachother and generally just making everybody feel good about being average. It’s as easy as that to prove. I don’t have the equipment to do brain scans and crap like that, but I’m willing to bet there’d be a lot of similarities between a kind word from an internet friend and a kind word from a friend in the same room. Maybe we internet kids (and don’t doubt that people who grew up on computers have differently developed brains from those who didn’t - look at 3D artists, a field requiring spatial knowledge that could never have existed before, and imagine trying to teach such a program to an older artist) connect avatars with our concepts of “others,” the vague sense that in fact someone does exist, as easily as other people connect faces.

        This is what I’ve been learning at university.

        This is optional reading, consider the post done, but what I meant by ‘concepts of “others”’ is by contrast to the concept of self. Turns out, concepts and exercises that relate back to your sense of self use distinct areas of your brain from ones that don’t. Which is to say that science is working on determining where in your brain YOU, as a person and an idea, exist. Based on that, I’d definitely say it’s possible there are similar areas in the brain related to other people, as concepts and as people with feelings and thoughts of their own, that I can guarantee would relate back to the monkeysphere.

        The easiest way to test that would be to lesion someone’s brain and see if they stop understanding that other people exist just like they do. Easy way to figure out where I should try that would be to test people with severe autism. Now, I don’t necessarily need to cut/burn anyone’s brain for this (electromagnets and drugs can actually turn your brain off temporarily - god I love science - and see what would happen if we theoretically destroyed a part of your brain) but where would the fun be in that?

        Line-up for electrodes in the brain starts to my right, folks. Don’t be shy, we’ve got enough for everyone!