Category: Hearing and Language

The latest edition of RadioLab is a fantastic exploration of how the world might be different if we experienced it without the benefit of words that shape our concepts.

As always, it sounds effortlessly beautiful, and this episode takes a diverse look at the different ways in which we might understand our lives wordlessly.

Essentially, the programme looks at how the lack of language tells us about language itself.

The idea that we can study problems, absences and disorders to get an insight into the normal mind and brain is the core idea in the sciences of cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry.

While both powerful scientific approaches, I’ve always been attracted to this way of understanding the mind and brain because it emphasises how everyone, no matter how different, is a window to our common humanity.

This edition of RadioLab captures that idea perfectly:

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We speak to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, and we hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke. Plus: a group of children invent an entirely new language in Nicaragua in the 1970s.

 

Link to ‘Words’ edition of RadioLab.

Amusia is a condition in which people can’t distinguish musical notes or tunes. This has been investigated for the first time in Mandarin Chinese, a language that relies on tones to convey meaning, with the study finding that music perception problems also affect the ability to distinguish spoken words in tone language speakers.

One common finding is that people with amusia have a difficulty with hearing the difference between two musical notes or sounds that are close together in pitch and it is suggested that this is the basic problem that underlies the condition.

Amusia can appear after brain injury, but it is also know that some people seem to be ‘born with it’. However, as most studies have been done on adults, it has never been clear exactly what role early experience plays in the development of the condition.

Most amusics report never having an interest in music, and it could be that a low-ability mixed with a lack of experience led to a more serious impairment in later life.

On the other hand, such a person might be less likely to have adult amusia if they grew up having to distinguish tones all the time – perhaps in a very musical family – or perhaps because of their language.

This is exactly the case with Mandarin Chinese, a tone language where speakers need to begin to distinguish closely related tones from birth.

For example, in Mandarin there are four different ways of changing the tone of a syllable and each give it an entirely different meaning. The researchers give the example of the syllable ‘ma’. When pronounced with with a level tone it means ‘mother’, while the identical syllable pronounced with a dipping tone means ‘horse’.

With this in mind, the researchers, led by psychologist Yun Nan, set about testing how many Mandarin speakers were amusic, and whether they could reliably detect the difference between speech tones.

Interestingly, amusia was no less rare in Mandarin speakers and those people with music perception difficulties show similar patterns found in studies of amusic people from the West who spoke non-tonal languages like English and French.

The Chinese people with music problems also had difficulties in distinguishing between syllables in their own language that differed in tone, to the point where a small number some seemed completely unable to detect the difference between key syllables.

This suggests that the condition of ‘amusia’ may be misnamed. It might not be a music specific problem, but just seems that way, because, in the West, it is one of the few situations where pitch distinction problems cause a problem.

Instead, a general problem with pitch perception might exist which interferes with anything which requires this fine grained distinction. Speakers of tonal languages, of course, will be affected more strongly.

 
Link to study summary and DOI entry.

Some awesome geek moves from the science of phonetics, as applied to the new wave punk classic ‘√áa Plane Pour Moi’ previously and falsely believed to have been sung by Plastic Bertrand.

From the AV Club report:

A staple of any new-wave dance night (ask a white person), “Ca Plane Pour Moi” made a chart-stopping star out of Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand (né Roger Jouret) and provided him with his most lasting legacy—except an expert linguist has just proved that Bertrand didn’t actually sing on his most famous record. The battle over “Ca Plane Pour Moi” has been brewing for four years now, stemming from a 2006 lawsuit involving original producer Lou Deprijck, who released his own version of the single under the marketing claim that he was the “original voice.” At the time, Deprijck found himself sued by record label AMC.

As a result, a panel of experts was appointed to study the track, and today a linguist announced that, after three months of study, during which he compared the original to Deprijck’s 2006 version, he had determined that ‚Äúthe way the phrases end on each record show that the song could only have been sung by a Ch’ti‚Äîotherwise known as someone from the Picard region of France. It could therefore not have been Plastic Bertrand‚Äîwho was born in Brussels‚Äîand was surely Monsieur Deprijck.‚Äù So it’s been settled: Plastic Bertrand was the Milli Vanilli of the punk era.

Link to AV Club on the fake Plastic Bertrand (via @sophiescott).

Stanford Magazine has a fascinating article on how speakers of different languages think differently about the world.

The piece focuses on the work of psychologist Lera Boroditsky and covers many of her completely intriguing studies about how the conceptual tools embedded within languages shape how we think.

“In English,” she says, moving her hand toward the cup, “if I knock this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, ‘She broke the cup.'” However, in Japanese or Spanish, she explains, intent matters.

If one deliberately knocks the cup, there is a verb form to indicate as much. But if the act were an accident, Boroditsky explains, a smile dancing across her lips as she translates from Spanish, the speaker would essentially say, “The cup broke itself.”…

She has shown that speakers of languages that use “non-agentive” verb forms‚Äîthose that don’t indicate an animate actor‚Äîare less likely to remember who was involved in an incident. In one experiment [pdf], native Spanish speakers are shown videos of several kinds of acts that can be classified as either accidental or intentional, such as an egg breaking or paper tearing. In one, for example, a man sitting at a table clearly and deliberately sticks a pin into the balloon. In another variation, the same man moves his hand toward the balloon and appears surprised when it pops.

The Spanish speakers tend to remember the person who deliberately punctured the balloon, but they do not as easily recall the person who witnesses the pop but did not deliberately cause it. English speakers tend to remember the individual in both the videos equally; they don’t pay more or less attention based on the intention of the person in the video.

The article has an element of Stanford University blowing their own trumpet, but it is also full of delightful examples of how language and understanding interact.

The piece discusses the work in terms of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which originally claimed that language categories reflected or constrained the categories of the mind but is generally used more widely to suggest that people think differently about concepts in different languages.

Not being a linguist, I never understood why this idea was controversial in the first place, as it seems obvious to me that people are limited or enabled by the conceptual tools available to them through language.

The irony that psychology itself seems limited by the conceptual language of computation seems to have been widely missed by all concerned.

Link to ‘You Say Up, I Say Yesterday’.

The New York Times covers a fantastic project that is attempting to track down some of the world’s most endangered languages – by scouring the streets of the Big Apple.

The Endangered Language Alliance is a project that aims to connect speakers of rare tongues but also to use the opportunity to study the languages academically potentially before they disappear.

The article notes that New York City is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet and there are often more speakers of endangered tongues there than in their place of origin:

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

There’s also some good context for the piece at a post on the ever-excellent Language Log and don’t forget to watch the accompanying video

Link to NYT piece on lost languages in New York.

In light of the retraction of the infamous Lancet paper that first started the MMR panic, the Point of Inquiry podcast has a fantastic interview with doctor and vaccine developer Paul Offit who has received death threats for publicly refuting the spurious connection between childhood jabs and autism.

He’s also the author of the book Autism’s False Prophets that traces the emergence of the vaccine protestors, the origin of their fears and the faulty thinking which has driven their campaign.

Offit reflects on the reaction to the book during to the interview and gives a coherent account of what conclusions we can and can’t draw from the science on how autism develops.

It’s a lively and important interview that is well worth 30 minutes of your time.

Link to Point of Inquiry interview with Paul Offit.

The Economist has an article based on rather a daft premise (‘in search of the world’s hardest language’) that nevertheless manages to cover numerous interesting ways in which diverse languages demand mental somersaults from the speaker or require that the speaker has to think about the world in specific ways.

Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes.

Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

The article is clearly inspired by psychologist Lera Boroditsky’s recent article for Edge on how language affects how we reason about the world, but it has a wider scope and is a fascinating look at the diversity of the spoken word.

Link to The Economist article ‘Tongue Twisters’.

Sometimes songs get ‘stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm‘ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.

What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity”.

What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to ‘repeat something back to ourselves’ – often called the ‘phonological loop’ in a popular model of working memory.

This tells us that ‘earworms’ are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.

However, it’s interesting seeing a study address what the experience typically consists of:

Earworms (‘stuck song syndrome’): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts

British Journal of Psychology,

C. Philip Beaman and Tim I. Williams

Two studies examine the experience of ‚Äòearworms‚Äô, unwanted catchy tunes that repeat. Survey data show that the experience is widespread but earworms are not generally considered problematic, although those who consider music to be important to them report earworms as longer, and harder to control, than those who consider music as less important. The tunes which produce these experiences vary considerably between individuals but are always familiar to those who experience them. A diary study confirms these findings and also indicates that, although earworm recurrence is relatively uncommon and unlikely to persist for longer than 24 h, the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity. Active attempts to block or eliminate the earworm are less successful than passive acceptance, consistent with Wegner’s theory of ironic mental control.

The reference to ‘Wegner’s theory of ironic mental control’ is just the fact that when you deliberately try not to think of something (sometimes called thought suppression) you tend to think about it more often.

Link to study summary.

After a post we featured earlier this year on whether deaf people can hear hallucinated voices, I was sent an amazing study that attempted to distil the variety of ‘hearing voices’ experiences in deaf people.

It was published in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry in 2007 (there’s a full text copy available online as a pdf) and attempted to avoid some of the pitfalls of studying auditory hallucinations in people with absent or limited hearing.

Some of the earlier research on deaf people who hear voices has been criticised for assuming that when a deaf person describes a ‘voice’ it automatically means they are having a similar experience to hearing people.

For example, when a deaf person describes the experience as ‘loud’ they may just mean it is particularly intrusive, rather than that it has specific auditory properties.

This later study used a sorting method, were a number of statements about what the experience could be like (some illustrated) were presented to deaf participants and they are asked to select the ones that best describe their experiences.

The data was then analysed using factor analysis – a statistical procedure that, in this case, was used to group participants whose experiences were similar.

Five groups or ‘factors’ were found, and I’ve reproduced the descriptions below as they are a completely fascinating insight into how these experiences appear in their diverse and varied forms.

Factor A: Nonauditory voices with subvisual perception of voice-articulators in the mind’s eye

These experiences were mostly reported by profoundly deaf participants who were deaf at birth or before the development of language.

Voices were reported to be nonauditory, clear, and easy to understand. Participants were certain that they did not hear any sound when voices were present. They did not consider questions about pitch, volume, and loudness relevant to their experiences. Participants knew the identity and gender of the voice but did not deduce this information from the way it sounds. They reported seeing an image of the voice communicating with them in their mind’s eye when voice hallucinations were present. All participants had experienced seeing an image of the voice signing or lips moving in their mind. Imagery of fingerspelling was also seen but was less common. These images appeared to be subvisual in nature and distinct from true visual hallucinations. They were clearly understood as originating internally and several participants stated that the image could still be perceived with their eyes closed.

Factor B: Mixed perception and uncertainty about how voices are perceived.

These experiences were mainly reported by deaf people who had experience of hearing speech and used hearing aids.

The participants were uncertain about whether their voice hallucinations were auditory in nature. Comprehensibility and clarity are variable. The voice used speech/lip movements to convey its’ message and occasionally fingerspelling and gesture. The voice was perceived as sometimes being silently articulated and sometimes having sound. Participants were uncertain if the voice was mouthing with or without vocalisation. Despite this uncertainty, Participant 10 was able to make attributions about voice pitch, volume, and loudness. No primary visual hallucinations were reported, although Participant 10 described seeing a stationary image of her deceased husband when the voice was present. There was less certainty about whether a visual image was present when the hallucinations occurred but participants agreed that the hands/lips of the voice could be perceived but that they were unclear. Strange sensations were perceived in the body both when the voice was present and not present. These included the perception of air currents, electric currents, and vibrations.

Factor C: Poorly defined voices.

These experiences were largely reported by participants who were born deaf in developing countries and spent their early years without hearing aids or formal language, only acquiring sign language as their first language after moving to the UK after the critical period for language development

The voices were poorly defined, hard to understand and unclear, with no definitive statements about exact voice properties but rather a picture of what they were not. There were contradictory responses about whether the voices made sound or not. It was not clear whether participants were completely unable to make judgements about pitch and volume because the voices were not auditory in nature, or because they did not possess a sufficiently developed concept of sound-based descriptions. There was a great deal of uncertainty about voice genesis that may have led the participants to speculate that they might be ‘‘hearing’’ something when they were present. This factor is unique because participants did not perceive imagery of the voice articulators during hallucinations. The gender and identity of the voice were unknown and there was much more uncertainty about which language or modality the voice used to communicate. Participants were unable to articulate voice content but merely described a sense of being persecuted and criticised by an external other.

Factor D: Auditory voices.

These experiences were reported by deaf people who were born moderately or moderately severely deaf and used hearing aids.

Voices were auditory and participants report that they could always hear sounds when the voices were present. Participant 11 was able to make judgements about auditory properties including pitch and volume. Participant 7 was less able to provide qualitative description of acoustic aspects but she was convinced that she could hear the voices. Interestingly, the bilingual participant showed a mixed pattern of voice perception. She experienced predominantly auditory hallucinations but also reported silently articulated sign language hallucinations, with concurrent subvisual imagery of the articulators similar to those experienced by participants on Factor A.

Factor E: Voices and true visual, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile phenomena

These experiences were reported by two deaf participants who were both profoundly deaf.

This factor was distinguished by the presence of true visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory phenomena, which occurred separately to voice hallucinations. These included tinnitus, the perception of a black shadow darting through peripheral vision, strange smells emanating from the body, and a petrol taste in the mouth. Other phenomena occurred in conjunction with the voices such as vibrations and electric currents in the body, which occurred only when the voice was present. Participant 25 reported seeing a true visual hallucination of someone signing to her in real space as well as imagery of the voice in her mind’s eye.

Thanks to Mind Hacks reader Sanjay for sending me the study.

Link to PubMed entry for Cognitive Neuropsychiatry study.
pdf of full text of study.

I’ve just found an odd study on whether rap and heavy rock music encourages ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in psychiatric patients when compared to easy listening and country tunes.

It sounds like it could be something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but as I don’t have access to the full text, I’m still not sure what the ‘inappropriate behaviours’ were (air guitar? MC Hammer trousers?)

A comparison of the effects of hard rock and easy listening on the frequency of observed inappropriate behaviors: control of environmental antecedents in a large public area.

Journal of Music Therapy. 1992 Spring;29(1):6-17.

Harris CS, Bradley RJ, Titus SK.

Observation of clients at a state mental health hospital by direct care staff indicated that they appeared to act in more inappropriate ways when “hard rock” or “rap” music was played in an open courtyard than when “easy listening” or “country” music was played. A study was conducted to compare the inappropriate behavior of clients when hard rock and rap music were played (21 days), followed by easy listening and country and western music (21 days). This comparison was followed by a reversal phase in which hard rock and rap music were again played (18 days). The behaviors of the clients were observed and recorded via a controlled methodology. The results demonstrated that more inappropriate behavior was observed under conditions in which hard rock and rap music were played than when easy listening and country western music were played. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Link to PubMed entry for music study.

ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor has a short but thoroughly fascinating programme on how human pre-history and cultural change can be uncovered through the study of languages. It’s an eye-opening insight into how patterns in our language are relics of our past and how they can be a window into the interplay of societies.

The presenter is linguist Claire Bowern who does most of her research in the field. Bowern particularly studies the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and how they’ve interacted with each other and with English.

She gives the example of various ‘loan words’, such as koala or kangaroo, used in English but adopted from native speakers.

Loan words like this show us that there were enough contacts between Aboriginal people and settlers for the settlers to learn the names of local animals in those languages, rather than making up their own names. However, the loans are mostly confined to plants, animals and environment terms, and this tells us something about the depth and type of contact between the two groups. The European settlers did not adopt Aboriginal kinship terminology, for example, or other cultural terms.

We might compare this to the English wholesale adoption of French legal terms like judge, jury and trial, following the Norman Conquest. Many of the loans of Aboriginal words in English come from the Sydney region; it’s therefore reasonable to assume that this was the place that European settlers first came into contact with animals like koalas and dingos.

It really is like archaeology for language as she often has to uncover quirks of languages that are spoken only in remote places and then builds of picture from feint traces left by past generations.

Link to Ockham’s Razor on ‘Language and prehistory’.