Category: Hearing and Language

The New Republic has an article by Steven Pinker that investigates the psychology, neuroscience and cultural significance of swearing.

Swearing isn’t just of interest to cognitive scientists for its day-to-day uses. We’ve known for many years that swearing holds a special place in the brain because of how neurological damage affects language abilities.

For most people, language is heavily reliant on the left hemisphere of the brain and extensive damage to this area can so severely impair speech that both expressing and understanding language becomes near impossible (a condition known as ‘global aphasia‘).

However, patients with this sort of profound language impairment can often still swear like troopers.

Swearing seems to be much more associated with the right hemisphere, probably as the words are much more heavily emotional and so rely more on the various emotion networks in this side of the brain.

Pinker, of course, has a wide-ranging interest in language and discusses not only the neural basis for swearing, but the bizarre place it holds in our culture, as well as what it reveals about the structure of language itself.

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word – something which is apparently called the ‘fuck test’.

Simply insert the word ‘fucking’ into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the ‘fucking’ is the stressed syllable.

For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I’ve found so far.

Which just goes to show that psycholinguists are some of the coolest melonfarmers in the whole of cognitive science.

Link to New Republic article ‘What the F***?’.

A charming short article from the July 23, 1923 edition of Time magazine, about the supposedly receptive nature of the dormant brain.

Needless to say, sleeping radio operators were not adopted as the mainstay of the US Navy’s communication system.

It is true, however, that during the hypnagogic state, the transition from wakefulness into sleep, the mind can make connections between seemingly unconnected perceptions, thoughts and ideas.

The accidental falling asleep, with the phones on his head, of a student in training for a job as radio operator in the U. S. Navy led to a discovery which will vastly shorten the process of manufacturing experts in wireless telegraphy. While the code and its translation were coming through the ether, the brain cells of the sleeping man, in a state of plastic receptivity, were absorbing the meaning of the dots and dashes and forming new associations. On waking, he was able to repeat accurately everything he had received in sleep. Psychologists say that such results are feasible because of the automatic, repetitive nature of the material conveyed to the dormant brain.

Navy officials immediately instituted tests of the method at Pensacola, Fla. Twelve students who were making unsatisfactory progress were tried out. After two nights, during which the code was sent to those students in sleep, ten had learned the lesson, and the other two had left the class before completion of the experiment. The instructors now report that ” the experimental stage is past, and the method may now be termed a standard one.”

Link to 1923 Time article ‘Radio and Sleep’.

3 Quarks Daily has an extended review of Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature that highlights one of the many curiosities of the English language.

…what I’d like to try to do here is give you a flavor of the kinds of things the book is about by briefly explaining one of the many fascinating stories that Pinker tells about language and what it entails for “conceptual semantics”–the concepts and schemes that we use to think–indeed, the language of thought itself….

So now, if you heard someone say brush paint onto the fence you might guess that brush the fence with paint is also fine. So far so good. But now consider a different sentence: Hal poured water into the glass. It cannot be transformed in a similar manner: Hal poured the glass with water sounds immediately wrong to a normal speaker of English. Similarly, problems arise in the other direction with other verbs like fill: while the container-locative construction Bobby filled the glass with water is fine, the content-locative Bobby filled water into the glass is not grammatical English. Why?

As Pinker puts it, “How do children succeed in acquiring an infinite language when the rules they are tempted to postulate just get them into trouble by generating constructions that other speakers choke on? How do they figure out that certain verbs can’t appear in perfectly good constructions?”

The review goes through Pinker’s explanations for how we acquire the correct use of these aspects of language.

This example is one among many that raises the question of how children learn irregular parts of the language.

You might think that they just pick it up from hearing examples or from being corrected by parents, but it turns out that the examples too rarely occur for a complete demonstration of all these aspects and parents actually rarely correct every such mistake children make.

This situations are often where Pinker would argue for an innate ‘language instinct’ which can generate working language rules from limited experience.

You’ll have to read the review or the book for a complete explanation of how this particular rule works out, but it seems, at least according to Pinker, that it’s not just a matter of grammar – certain verbs imply certain physical possibilities and these meanings influence what seems grammatical.

And if you want to catch the author in person, Pinker is on tour at the moment, talking about his new book.

Link to review of The Stuff of Thought.
Link to Stuff of Thought lecture tour dates.

The New York Times has a review of a new book on the evolution of language that is also a concise guide to the origin and controversies within the field.

The book is The First Word (ISBN 0670034908) by Christine Kenneally and, as the the NYT review makes clear, it tackles one of the most contentious topics in psychology.

In this field, physical evidence is scarce ‚Äî language, except in its written form, leaves no trace ‚Äî and scholarly clout depends on a capacity for ingenious inference and supposition. Christine Kenneally, a linguistics Ph.D. turned journalist, shrewdly begins “The First Word,” her account of this new science, with candid portraits of several of its most influential figures. Appropriately, the first chapter is devoted to Noam Chomsky, whose ideas have dominated linguistics since the late 1950s, and who, as Kenneally reports, has been hailed as a genius on a par with Einstein and disparaged as the leader of a “cult” with “evil side effects.”

Evolutionary psychology tends to generate mixed views among scientists as it has the (somewhat unjustified) reputation of being untestable.

It typically involves discovering a psychological attribute or innate tendency and generating theories as to why we might have it, based on an evolutionary theory of why the presence of this feature might have improved survival or increased chances of sexual reproduction.

Of course, we can’t go back in time to test the theory on early humans, but the theory might suggest the presence or link with other current attributes – something that can be tested experimentally.

However, it’s probably true to say that hypothesis tend to be a little more unconstrained by the evidence than in other fields in psychology.

We now have a slightly odd state of affairs where most psychologists think that evolutionary psychology is a bit suspect, but are quite happy to throw in a few ad-hoc sentences about the possible evolutionary function of whatever they’ve discovered in their latest research paper.

Which, of course, makes the whole thing seem a bit suspect.

The NYT review charts how the debate on the evolution of language has moved from something which was originally considered either pointless or wacky, to a field which is now relatively mainstream.

Link to NYT review of ‘The First Word’.

The July 23rd edition of The New Yorker has an article by Oliver Sacks on people who suddenly experience a passion and irresistible urge to listen to music after brain injury. The article itself is only available online as a brief summary, but there’s a freely available podcast where Sacks discusses the topic in more detail.

The article has some fascinating examples of how people have, literally, been struck by the condition:

A neurologists’s notebook about Tony Cicoria, who after being struck by lightning became obsessed by piano music. In 1994, when Tony Cicoria was forty-two, and a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon, he was struck by lightning. He had an out-of-body experience. “I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m dead.’ …Then‚Äîslam! I was back.” Soon after, he consulted a neurologist‚Äîhe was feeling sluggish and having some difficulties with his memory. He had a thorough neurological exam, and nothing seemed amiss.

A couple of weeks later, Cicoria went back to work, and in another two weeks, his memory problems disappeared. Life had returned to normal, seemingly, when “suddenly over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music.” This was completely out of keeping with anything in his past. He started to teach himself to play piano. And then, he started to hear music in his head. In the third month after being struck, Cicoria was inspired, even possessed, by music, and scarcely had time for anything else.

The article and podcast are in lieu of a new book by Sacks, entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain due out on October 17th.

Link to article summary.
Link to page with Oliver Sacks podcast (thanks Justin!)

Chomsky famously argued that a core property of all language was recursion – the ability to include units of meaning inside other units. Anthropologist Daniel Everett argues in an article for Edge that the language of the Pirah√£ people is not like this, and might suggest that our understanding of the structure of language needs to be re-thought.

Language researchers like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker are often called ‘nativists’, meaning they think our core language abilities are inherited and suggest that all the individual languages have the same underlying components.

Research based on this idea looks at the structure and neuroscience of language to try and work out the basic elements.

Chomsky and colleagues argued in a 2002 paper [pdf] that human language has only one core property – recursion, which Everett also describes in his article:

The essence of human language is, according to Chomsky, the ability of finite brains to produce what he considers to be infinite grammars. By this he means not only that there is no upper limit on what we can say, but that there is no upper limit on the number of sentences our language has, there’s no upper limit on the size of any particular sentence. Chomsky has claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion: the ability for one phrase to reoccur inside another phrase of the same type. If I say “John’s brother’s house”, I have a noun, “house”, which occurs in a noun phrase, “brother’s house”, and that noun phrase occurs in another noun phrase, “John’s brother’s house”. This makes a lot of sense, and it’s an interesting property of human language.

Finding a language which doesn’t have the supposedly ‘universal’ property of recursion challenges the Chomsky theory and, potentially, the whole idea that a ‘language instinct’ is somehow genetically inherited.

Everett argues that the Pirah√£ language doesn’t have recursion (or numbers and few colour names), presumably partly as a result of the particular habitat that the tribe lives in.

Everett’s article is also fascinating as it describes his first encounter with the Pirah√£ as a Christian missionary, and his subsequent rejection of his missionary work and focus on linguistics.

It also describes the culture and mindset of the people and has some of Everett’s personal reflections on his research and experiences.

There’s also a video about the topic and its possible effect on our understanding of language on the same page, and a recent NPR radio show investigated the Pirah√£ controversy in more detail.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Austin for sending in a link to an enjoyable article from The New Yorker that is a fantastic guide to the language and its impact on science.

UPDATE 2: There are some fantastic comments, corrections and additional links in the comments that are definitely worth reading. Thanks to everyone who’s contributed!

Link to ‘Recursion and Thought: Why the Pirah√£ don’t have numbers’.
Link to NPR radio show.

Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

From p73 of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (ISBN 0099437422) by Roland Barthes. In the book, Barthes analyses the components of love and the relationship of lovers.

Retrospectacle has a great beginner’s guide to hearing for anyone interested in how sound waves get converted into neural impulses for the brain.

The article describes the wonderful mechanics of the ear. It’s quite striking how much the physical make-up of the ear filters and ‘processes’ the sound waves before they even reach the sensory cells that connect with the nervous system.

All the hair cells sit on top of a firm but flexible membrane called the basilar membrane. As the stapes bangs against the oval window, a wave is transmitted through the basilar membrane. The distance this wave travels (and subsequently, the hair cells that are stimulated) are dictated by the frequency of the sound wave. The basilar membrane becomes stiffer at the top of the cochlea, which allows different parts of the cochlea to correspond to specific frequencies. High frequency sound-specifity corresponds to the base of the cochlea while the top (or “apex”) of the cochlea transduces low frequency sounds. The area on the cochlea where the most hair cells are stimulated during a given sound wave is considered the resonance point, and loudness can be perceived by the number and duration of hair cell stimulation at that point.

The article is both informative and wonderfully illustrated for those wanting to get a grip on one of our most interesting senses.

Link to Retrospectacle on ‘Basic Concepts: Hearing’.

The BPS Research Digest reports on a new study that shows that 90 minutes of being blindfolded significantly improves our ability to locate sounds.

Next the participants spent 90 minutes sitting quietly with the blindfold on. Crucially, when they repeated the [sound location] task after this, their accuracy was improved as they no longer underestimated the location of the sounds as much… In fact their performance had become more typical of a blind person performing this kind of task.

There’s more on the study over at the BPSRD including a link to the original paper.

Link to BPSRD article.

Amusia is like colour blindness for music. Affected people can’t grasp the subtleties and structure of music despite having having intact hearing. The problems seems to be with the relevant auditory brain systems.

BBC Radio 4 science programme Frontiers recently had an edition on this curious condition that explores the neuroscience of why this occurs and talks to people with the music perception difficulties.

They also link to a musical listening test so you can test your own abilities.

Link to Frontiers page on amusia.
realaudio of programme.
Link to good BBC article on amusia.

Via badscience.net, the Japanese War Tuba Hack! (Or maybe we’ll call it “improve sound localisation by increasing interaural distance” or something).

Similarly the way your visual system calculates depth from the different images that your two eyes get, you use the difference in when sounds arrive at your ears to calculate their location. Bigger distance between the ears means bigger differences in arrival times, means more sensitivity in detecting sound location. How do you increase the distance between the ears? Ear horns! Don’t they look great?

More here and here

hypocoristic A pet name, such as Willie or honey. Ingenious and bizarre coinages may be encountered, as seen in the love messages published in some British national newspapers on St Valentine’s Day.

From p152 of the Penguin Dictionary of Language (ISBN 0140514163).

There’s more on hypocoristics here and here.

Ever wondered if you are tone-deaf? The Distorted Tune Test page can help. You listen to 25 simple tunes and judge whether they are played correctly or not (it takes about five or six minutes). Based on your responses, you’ll be told how well you can judge pitch. If the results suggest you are tone-deaf then you are eligable to take part in a US National Institute of Health study into the conditions, so that’s some compensation.

Language Log is a site that keeps track of language science, and the changes in the subtleties of language use.

It’s updated daily, and discusses everything from curious new uses of words to archaelogical findings that shed light on the early development of language.

One of my favourite long-running themes is spotting what Language Log have called ‘snowclones‘.

A snowclone is a popular sentence structure which is recycled and adapted from the original quote by replacing key words.

For example, “On the internet, no-one can hear you scream” is a snowclone of the original movie tag-line “In space, no-one can hear you scream.” Of course, it could be endlessly recycled by replacing ‘space’ with whatever comes to mind.

I am guessing the name ‘snowclone’ is an allusion to the American ‘snowcone’ frozen deserts desserts, which consist of plain crushed ice to which flavour is added.

I, for one, welcome our new snowclone overlords.

Link to Language Log
Link to snowclone definition.

In blindsight you lose the conscious experience of vision due to loss of the visual cortex, but you retain the ability to respond to visual information (due to intact subcortical visual processing). You don’t think you can see, you have no experience of ‘seeing’, but you can make rudimentary visually guided behaviours. I’ve been told that the experience is a lot like being able to make guesses which feel completely uninformed but are startlingly accurate.

Parallel to visual processing, auditory processing is also done subcortically and cortically (replace ‘visual cortex’ with ‘auditory cortex’, replace ‘superiour colliculus’ with ‘inferior colliculus’). I’m sure the correspondence isn’t exact, but how’s this for a prediction: deafhearing – following loss of auditory cortex the conscious experience of sound would be lost, but the ability to make responses based on noises would be retained due to intact subcortical auditory processing.

I haven’t trawled the annals of neuropsychology to see if this condition has ever been documented – and I‚Äôm not going to just yet since I prefer to sit here and speculate! – but I think it is strong possibility.

(interesting tangent: the link above, and here, draws out the parallel between blindsight and normal ‘intuition’ where we are required to make choices before all the (sensory) evidence is in)

ABC Radio’s Health Report has a programme about Superior Canal Dehiscence Syndrome, a condition that leads to supersensitive hearing. So sensitive, in fact, that whispers can sounds like thunder, and sufferers can hear their own bloodflow and eyeball movements.

The condition is thought to occur due to a crack in the bony casing that surrounds the inner ear.

Normally, sound is channeled from the outside world, through the ear canal to the inner ear. Here lies the cochlea, the organ that translates sound waves to nerve impulses for the brain.

This arrangement efficiently picks up and filters external sound. When the bony casing to the inner ear is damaged, however, the filtering is thought to stop working as efficiently, so sounds ‘leak in’ from other places – including from the inside of the body.

People with this condition have very sensitive hearing, sometimes leading to pain and discomfort. Occasionally, their strange experiences are mistaken for mental illness, where unusual perceptions can sometimes occur.

A person interviewed for the programme describes her experience as where:

Eyeballs sound like creaking doors, eyelids opening and closing have a scratchy sound, bones and joints creak.

mp3 or realaudio of programme audio.
Link to programme transcript.