Hot answers tagged language
17
This is called the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon.
People in a tip-of-the-tongue state can often recall one or more features of the target word, such as the first letter, its syllabic stress, and words similar in sound and/or meaning. Individuals report a feeling of being seized by the state, feeling something like mild anguish while searching for the ...
15
It's theorized that there is a Critical Period of language development in children below the age of five (roughly, as age ranges always are in Developmental Psychology).
Probably the most significant and readily verifiable finding is that a critical period exists for the learning of Phonemes. Research has suggested children readily differentiate phonemes ...
13
This is a hot topic of debate, so my answer will be an incomplete one.
There are actually two separate questions here. One is on language and the other one is on environment.
Language:
My answer is no; different languages do not limit the conceptual repository of human mind. The current ongoing debate is partially on the Pirahã language. Everett studied ...
8
The speech error taxonomy on Wikipedia that Jeromy Anglim links to in his answer is pretty comprehensive. If you're interested in learning more, I would suggest reading some articles by Gary Dell (e.g., Dell, 1986). He is, in my opinion, the expert in this domain. He has used neural networks to explain speech errors of different types.
When mentally ...
8
Using the English language, given two sentences that say the same thing, what makes one more readable than the other? Usually terseness while retaining clarity and removing ambiguity.
The exact same things make code more readable. Remove everything that doesn't add anything, but don't remove things that do add information. And avoid ambiguity.
In code, we ...
7
According to current models of human concept learning, the answer to your question is both.
Think of a simplified domain in which every object consists of only several features, and therefore can be visualized as a point in some multidimensional feature space. For example, the features that define objects might be its size, shape, color, and weight. ...
7
One thing that comes to mind is the discussion over why English-speaking people think submarines cannot swim, while they think airplanes can fly. Supposedly in Russian, though, they do refer to submarines as "swimming."
Meanwhile, we ask whether computers can think, without really realizing that this question turns out to be simply a question about ...
6
Communication is always a lossy and inexact process. If I am trying to convey information to you - the times of trains, for example - I can use dates and times that I can be confident that you will interpret the same way I do. But you may not - I may say the train leaves at 8:40, and you assume I mean the morning, whereas I actually mean the evening. So ...
5
This question is pretty broad, but perhaps these studies address your question.
In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer won an Ig Nobel prize for his paper Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly, which demonstrated that using overly-complex words when a simpler word would suffice resulted in ...
5
So how much information is lost when one person is trying to convey these personal experiences with another person? Will actions carry more relevant data than words when explaining a personal experience?
I believe this really depends completely upon both what specific words you use to describe the experience / emotion as well as the experiences and ...
4
There's a quite active line of research (and debate) in experimental psychology and cognitive science on this. It often goes under the rubric of the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". I only know some of the work in this domain, but I would suggesting checking out research (experiments, not just armchair discussion) by Lera Boroditsky and Gary Lupyan.
4
My understanding was that at least some sub-vocalisation is a normal part of reading and writing. The wikipedia article on subvocalisation cites several sources supporting that claim. The article also claims that there is no evidence to suggest that speed reading training that involves suppression of sub-vocalisation is effective. There is also evidence that ...
4
I'm not an expert in this field, but this seemed interesting enough I did some reading up on the topic. The two review papers I found quickly were Prasse & Kikano (2008) and Lawrence & Barclay (1998), both from the Journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians. I have no idea whether this is a reputable journal or not.
There appear to be ...
4
This question gets close to something that might alternatively be posted to stats.stackoverflow.com. Personally, I've always felt that application of Null-Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) methods to neuroimaging data does a particularly good job of highlighting their scientific deficiencies.
Personally, these days I'd use Generalized Additive ...
3
This is my current area of research (I'm a Ph.D. student in computer science and cognitive science). Like you said, there are a large number of readability/complexity metrics, but very little research trying to quantify what makes a piece of code psychologically complex. For more information on qualitative studies and models, I'd highly recommend the 2001 ...
3
I believe motherese exists to teach the infant to discriminate phonemes in the native language. Kuhl et al. (2005) show that during the first year language critical period, infants gain an increased ability to discriminate between phonemes of the native language, while their ability to discriminate between phonemes of non-native languages declines. ...
3
Fonagy and Target, although they do not specifically cite the term 'Motherese', believe that what they call 'Marking'- signalling an unreality or playfulness in mirrored displays of affect can play a crucial role in the development of a faculty they call 'Mentalization'.
According to their model, newborns experience affect as all-pervading, and do not see ...
3
A few thoughts (this is not my area):
This article on speech errors on Wikipedia is informative. The article provides a review types of speech errors. The classification of speech errors is presumably similar to writing errors.
What I take from the article, and other research on errors, is that there is plenty of structure to errors. I think an information ...
3
Great question!
To start, you are absolutely right-- a 1997 article on fMRI is considered very old as far as the field is concerned. Statistical techniques have improved dramatically since then so, while I haven't read the article in question, it's safe to assume that there are probably lots of things they would do differently if the study was conducted ...
2
I'm not sure what you mean by cognitive capacity, but I absolutely believe that language shapes the way we think. The collective nouns, verbs, and phrases of a language are the categories by which a culture interprets things.
Consider seizures. Our culture may call them seizures, and a doctor might posit that their cause is epilepsy (or something). That's ...
2
I wonder if Hungarian is particularly good in this way. It's agglutinative, like German, so the words can be unbearably long, but the grammar of Hungarian is interesting, in that word order is much more flexible than other languages. Sentences can be said in multiple word orders and still be "correct", while the emphasis required by word order gives nuance ...
2
A simple explanation for the phenomenon is top-down feedback. As the bottom-up acoustic/phonological input is coming in, there is top-down feedback based on your knowledge of the language, the situation, and all of the other contextual information, which is helping to constrain or inform your interpretation of the bottom-up signal. A classic example that is ...
1
Try keywords like: "second language learning number of words per"
Some suggest 3-6 words per hour of reading, which is afterwards used for calculation of average per week, month, year. References of studies to support this claim are missing though:
http://ip-173-201-189-182.ip.secureserver.net/archives/sla/waring120304.pdf
Several times I found references ...
1
Certain languages have words that do not literally translate into any another language. There is already a small loss of information in this sense.
Even though language is very influential for thinking (and read the The Newspeak appendix in 1984 for a thought provoking eye opener), even when you have a group with the same language level skills they will ...
1
As an addition to Jeromy's answer, I would like to point out that I sometimes think of them as muscle memory flaws. I have no evidence to back this up, but I'll explain my reasoning. The suffix 'ble' is quite common in English language, so when you type the 'bl' for ('bly' in 'possibly'), without thinking you add the 'e' instead of the 'y', because your ...
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