New course for Spring 2010: Perception and Language

Psychology BC 3164: Perception and Language
Tuesday, 6:10 – 8 pm

Next semester, Professor Robert Remez will be offering a seminar in psychology, focusing on issues of language and how we perceive and process it.

In an ordinary day, we have many, many poignant, pointless, important, ridiculous, and thrilling conversations. Why do we do it?

Who knows? People have been concocting bad answers to this awful question for several thousand years, and we still haven’t decided on a formulation we like. But, if we ask a more recent and useful question – How do we actually do it? – then we find that we have a lot to learn, because the answer depends more on discovering things than on dreaming about human nature.

Topics will include:

• The way the senses work
• The sounds of speech
• The conversion of meaning into sound and back again
• How we integrate the perceptual and linguistic pieces of an utterance

For more information and a full description of the course, download the announcement here.

T-shirts are here!

Just in time for the holidays, our t-shirts are in and ready to be picked up!

You can come to the Slavic Department Office on Friday from 10-3:30, or Lerner Ramps from 10-1 on Saturday to get them, or buy them if you haven’t ordered one already.

Can’t make it this week? Don’t worry – the shirts will be waiting patiently. We’ll be distributing and selling them again when school starts again in January.

Good luck on finals and enjoy the holiday!

12/11: Peter Connor on translation

This Friday, 12/11, Peter Connor of Barnard College will give a lecture on literary translation. Professor Connor writes:

In this talk I will offer some reflections on changing approaches to literary
translation, with particular attention to the translation of the novel. I will argue that the emergence of a globalized literary space has engendered both new translation practices and new theories of translation. The goal of the talk is to open a dialogue about the linguistic, cultural, and sociological challenges of literary translation today.

The talk will take place at 3pm, in Hamilton 703. Correction: the talk will take place in Hamilton 709.

Columbia Undergraduate Journal of Anthropology: call for submissions!

Do you have an anthropology-flavored essay, poem, or piece of original artwork burning a hole in your hard drive? Submit it to CUJA by December 24!

The Columbia Undergraduate Journal of Anthropology is seeking submissions for the Spring 2010 issue. CUJA is an annually published, inter-disciplinary journal written and edited by undergraduates from many academic majors and backgrounds.

We welcome submissions of all varieties and encourage our authors to submit creative and experimental work or academic papers. Poetry, diagrams, and artwork are just as welcome as class projects, papers, and field reports. All work that thoughtfully engages with and questions social worlds past, present, and future will be considered.

Deadline for all submissions: December 24.

We are also looking for new editors. Students interested in editing their peers’ academic work should send a short application with an overview of their academic interests, a description of the class they have most enjoyed (and why), and a short writing sample, as well as their name, class year, major, and contact information.

Deadline for editorial application: December 11.

Paper submissions, editor applications, and general inquiries may be sent to:

columbia.anthropology.journal@gmail.com

Hanging from the language tree

A recent issue of the Columbia Magazine has an article on Columbia professor Herb Terrace and his work on communication and cognition in chimpanzees. Terrace is best known for his role in the Nim Chimpsky experiments, which sought to settle the question of whether chimps could acquire human language.

From the article:

Terrace, a young Columbia psychologist who already had established himself as an expert in animal cognition, believed apes could learn to communicate, even think aloud, through sign language. All they needed, he thought, was a nurturing human- family environment.

At the time, the ape language wars were raging in academia. In one corner were the Chomskians, those who agreed with MIT linguist Noam Chomsky that only humans have innate syntactical ability. In the other were Skinnerians like Terrace who sided with Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner, who believed that language is learned, and therefore could be taught to nonhuman primates.

Originally excited by the way that Nim Chimpsky (cheekily named after a certain venerable linguist) seemed to be able to produce real, novel sequences, Terrace came to realize that his evidence did not support that conclusion. In 1979, he published a paper in Science, publicly acknowledging that the Chomskians were right. “Apes can learn many isolated symbols (as can dogs, horses, and other nonhuman species),” Terrace wrote, “but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational, semantic, or syntactic organization of language.”

Terrace continues to lecture and do research on cognition in primates. Although he does not believe that primates are capable of mastering the complexities of human language, he has a theory about how language acquisition might work. In keeping with the theory that language learning is highly tempered by environmental conditions, it has a lot to do with early intimate socialization:

Those who don’t get it, as was the case for thousands of Eastern European children orphaned during World War II, struggle to speak. The longer children are deprived of human interaction, the harder it is for them to talk. Terrace asks the question: if a baby were left on a deserted island with food and shelter, would it eventually on its own utter a word? The evidence suggests he wouldn’t.

This is the same problem autistic children face. Infants acquire language by watching their parents mouth sounds. Babies begin uttering monosyllabic words by the time they are about a year old. By 18 months, a child can point to an object, and name it: something he learns by following the eyes of his parent. Humans have a white sclera surrounding a dark iris, unlike all other animals, making it easy for babies to see where adults are looking. One of the early symptoms of autism is the inability of a baby to see where someone is pointing; instead, they often look at the gesturing hand.

It is clear that the acquisition of language has a profound effect on the way our minds function, and Terrace’s current research focuses on how animals can process information without the faculty so central to our own cognition.

Bridging ten millenia

Slate ran an article a few days ago on an interesting linguistic problem: how do we communicate with distant future generations?

The problem is simple enough: every country in the world that has the resources and the expertise to harness the power of the atom (whether to produce energy or to build bombs) is churning out radioactive waste. The stuff is toxic and not terribly useful, and ultimately, it all has to be sequestered somewhere. For now, we can tuck it away in secure places like Yucca Mountain and forget about it. No one is going to wander into the site, through the barbed wire and heavy signage, a century from now and inadvertently expose themselves to radiation.

But what if the encounter takes place not 100 years from now, but 1000 or 10,000? Assuming that any written symbols would still be intelligible at all, what could you possibly write that would unambiguously indicate danger?

The Department of Energy hired 13 linguists, scientists, and anthropologists to devise a conceptual plan for a 10,000-year marker system. The report  that came out of this project (Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) presents a plan that the author calls “as elaborate as it is futile”.

From the article:

The report’s proposed solution is a layered message—one that conveys not only that the site is dangerous but that there’s a legitimate (nonsuperstitious) reason to think so. It should also emphasize that there’s no buried treasure, just toxic trash. Here’s how the authors phrase the essential talking points: “[T]his place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.” Finally, the marker system should communicate that the danger—an emanation of energy—is unleashed only if you disturb the place physically, so it’s best left uninhabited.

As for the problem of actually getting these essentials across, the report proposes a system of redundancy—a fancy way of saying throw everything at the wall and hope that something sticks. Giant, jagged earthwork berms should surround the area. Dozens of granite message walls or kiosks, each 25 feet high, might present graphic images of human faces contorted with horror, terror, or pain (the inspiration here is Edvard Munch’s Scream) as well as text in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo explaining what’s buried. This variety of languages, as Charles Piller remarked in a 2006 Los Angeles Times story, turns the monoliths into quasi-Rosetta stones. Three rooms—one off-site but nearby, one centrally located, and one underground—would serve as information centers with more detailed explanations of nuclear waste and its hazards, maps showing the location of similar sites around the world, and star charts to help intruders calculate the year the site was sealed. According to 1994 estimates, the whole shebang would cost about $68 million, but that’s just a ballpark figure based on very incomplete data.

There is also talk of creating “artificial myths” around the sites to discourage future explorers:

In the early 1980s, the semiotician and linguist Thomas Sebeok wrote a paper for the U.S. Office of Nuclear Waste Management titled “Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia,” which proposes a folkloric relay system to pass along information: “The legend-and-ritual, as now envisaged, would be tantamount to laying a ‘false trail,’ meaning that the uninitiated will be steered away from the hazardous site for reasons other than the scientific knowledge of the possibility of radiation and its implications; essentially, the reason would be accumulated superstition to shun a certain area permanently.” Sebeok further suggested a Dan Brown-like “atomic priesthood” of physicists, anthropologists, semioticians and the like who would preserve the “truth.”

Clearly, this approach has its problems, but so do all the other ones. So what should we do? The author closes by advocating a different plan: leave the sites blank and unmarked, and hope that the future takes care of itself.

The article is here.

REMINDER: Nizar Habash today

Nizar Habash will be speaking about his work in natural language processing today from 3-5 in room 703 Hamilton.

Language families, human families

Razib Khan over at ScienceBlogs has an excellent post today on the relationship between population genetics and the spread of languages around the globe. He gives a wide background of the anthropological, linguistic and biological research behind what we know about the evolution of the world’s languages. Razib quotes a 1997 paper by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, peoples, and languages:

Most patterns found in the analysis of human living populations are likely to be consequences of demographic expansions, determined by technological developments affecting food availability, transportation, or military power. During such expansions, both genes and languages are spread to potentially vast areas. In principle, this tends to create a correlation between the respective evolutionary trees. The correlation is usually positive and often remarkably high. It can be decreased or hidden by phenomena of language replacement and also of gene replacement, usually partial, due to gene flow.*

The post also reviews a recent paper by Ger Reesink, Ruth Singer, and Michael Dunn: “Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul Using Population Models”.

The authors studied the languages of Sahul,  the continent that during the last Ice Age covered the area of modern Australia and New Guinea. Using “a Bayesian phylogenetic clustering method, originally developed for investigating genetic recombination”, the authors examine ” the underlying structure of the diversity of these languages, reflecting ancient dispersals, millennia of contact, and probable phylogenetic groups.”

The post is here, and the papers, cited below, can be downloaded by following the links in their titles.

1. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza (1997) Genes, peoples, and languages. Proc. Natl . Acad. Sci . USA
   Vol. 94, pp. 7719 –7724.
2. Reesink G, Singer R, Dunn M. (2009) Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul Using Population Models. PLoS Biol 7(11): e1000241. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000241

*Errata: The first blockquote in this post was originally attributed to the Reesink paper – that was incorrect. The quote was taken from the Cavalli-Sforza paper. That has been corrected in this edited post.

UZBK W1101: Elementary Uzbek 1

Хайрли окшом!

Here’s another cool course that is being offered next semester (Spring 2010):

UZBK W1101: Elementary Uzbek 1
Call number: 76149
Tuesday and Thursday 6:10-8pm
4 points

If you have any questions, please contact Grace at hgz2103@columbia.edu

Links and resources

• COMD News is a blog that compiles articles, news, events and research in speech, language, and hearing disorders. It is run by the Callier Library, a satellite facility of the University of Texas at Dallas. From the site:

The library supports the graduate-level programs and faculty in communications sciences which are located at the center. It also supports the work of clinicians in hearing and speech disorders who work at both campuses of the Callier Center. One of the missions of Callier Library is to be a useful source of information to the international community of researchers and clinicians in communication disorders. To that end, this web log of citations and news in the field has been built and maintained by Allen Clayton, the Callier Center Librarian.

• Omniglot is a guide to the writing systems and languages of the world. From the site:

It also contains tips on learning languages, language-related articles, quite a large collection of useful phrases in many languages, multilingual texts, a multilingual book store and an ever-growing collection of links to language-related resources.

• Finally, some books:
  • Christine Kenneally is a journalist who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and New Scientist, as well as other publications. She is the author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, about the evolution of imitation, gesture, abstract thought, and speech. Her website features some of her recent articles.
  • Daniel Everett’s book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle is now out in paperback. Everett, who spoke at Columbia in October, is an expert on the Pirahã people of the Amazon, and Don’t Sleep tells the story of his experiences and his startling discoveries about Pirahã language and culture.
  • David Crystal’s 2008 book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, discusses the effect of text messaging on language, and poses the question: “Does texting spell the end of western civilization?”