Listen & Learn Blog

Steven Pinker is a well-known linguist (amongst other things), with specializations in visual cognition and psycholinguistics. He’s also very good at making complex ideas seem very understandable and engaging, which is why I love this video illustrating a talk he gave to the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in the UK).

In it, Pinker “shows us how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings”. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Update: I can’t seem to embed the video here, so this link will take you to it.

There’s constant debate about whether endangered languages are worth preserving, but it seems fairly rare that we hear directly from those who are studying languages.

The Economist’s Johnson blog has asked linguist K. David Harrison seven questions about what is lost when a language dies – his answers are pretty interesting. Take a look at the interview here.

Harrison asserts that:

We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages—monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands—erode.

What do you think of this comparison?

A linguist studying a long-dead Native American language has been rewarded with a ‘genius grant’.

Jessie Little Doe Baird was awarded the $500,000 MacArthur Fellows grant for her work in resurrecting the Wampanoag language, an Algonquian language of New England. The language was spoken until the mid-1800s, when it disappeared, and appears to have an interesting history:

According to Baird, her ancestors were “the first American Indian people to use an alphabetic writing system,’’ and the first Bible published on this continent — a key document in her research — was printed in 1663 in Wampanoag.

After English missionaries arrived on this continent, the Wampanoag people were quick to realize the power of the written word, Baird said, especially to resolve land disputes with the Europeans. “And so Wampanoag people started to record land transfers, wills, personal letters,’’ she said. The result is what she called “the largest collection of native written documents on the continent.’’

But there are no documents from the second half of the 19th century, which to Baird suggests that Wampanoag disappeared then. Much of her task in reconstructing it as a written and spoken language is a kind of detective work.

“There was no standardized spelling for English, and there was no such thing as a dictionary,’’ she said. “So the rule of the day was spell a word any way you like. And Wampanoag people started the same tradition.’’ (Source: Boston.com)

Baird is the director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project and one of the principal authors of a Wampnoag-English dictionary. She has also written children’s books in the language and certifies volunteers to teach it. Baird has a long list of possible uses for the grant – all of which will hopefully reinvigorate the language.

There’s currently a lot of controversy in Arizona over the removal of teachers with accents from classes with English language learners.

The reasoning behind the removal is that English-learners should have a good model of how to speak the language, and heavily accented and/or ungrammatical teachers do not provide this. This has attracted heavy criticism from many angles, including the question of how to determine who has the ‘right’ accent.

It seems that officials may need to review their stance. A new research study from Israel shows that “it may be easier to learn a foreign language from someone who teaches it in the same accent as your own”. Published recently in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, the study was conducted by professors from the University of Haifa who all had an interest in the effects of accent on language acquisition.

The sample size of students at the University of Haifa was adequate and similar enough in composition to test the accent hypothesis. Sixty participants were chosen, aged 18 to 26. Twenty were native Hebrew speakers; 20 were from the FSU; and 20 were Israeli Arabs who had started learning Hebrew at around seven years of age.

In the study, the researchers made recordings of Hebrew phrases where the last word was recorded with one of four different accents: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian or English. The students were then tested to see how long it took for them to recognize the Hebrew word in one of the four accents.

They found that the Hebrew speakers could decipher Hebrew words adequately regardless of the accent in which they were spoken, while the Russian and Arabic speakers needed more time to understand the Hebrew words presented in an accent foreign to their own.

The researchers feel that additional research is needed to determine just how much extra effort is involved in the attempt to process both an unfamiliar accent as well as new material.

“This research lays emphasis on the importance of continuing investigation into the cognitive perspectives of accent in order to gain a better understanding of how we learn languages other than our native tongue. In Israel and in other countries where the population is made up of many different language groups, this understanding holds great significance,” they write.

While many foreign language programs pride themselves on teaching students a second language in its true and native accent, this new study suggests that English taught to Mexican students as a second language, for example, can be taught just as well by a Mexican teacher speaking English, as by a native American who’s been speaking English since birth. (Source: Israel 21c)