Lingformant » Science of linguistics

Study suggests grammar is grimmer than Chomsky claims

Vili Maunula — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 05:50:26 +0000

Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences. The findings – which undermine the assumption that all speakers have a core ability to use grammatical cues – could have significant implications for education, communication and linguistic theory.

Full article: Northumbria University

Classifying ‘clicks’

Vili Maunula — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:07:07 +0000

A new way to classify sounds in some human languages may solve a problem that has plagued linguists for nearly 100 years–how to accurately describe click sounds distinct to certain African languages.

Full article: EurekAlert

Study: Scientists leave the ivory tower

Vili Maunula — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:03:51 +0000

A well-nursed prejudice in scholarly communication is that researchers avoid journalists and are disappointed with the coverage when they do have contact with the media. A current study in the specialist journal Science shows the opposite to be true: more than half of the researchers questioned described their contact with journalists as predominantly good. Four out of ten found coverage in the public-sector beneficial to their career. The idea of the “ivory tower of science” can therefore no longer be upheld. …

Full article: EurekAlert!

Gender roles and not gender bias hold back women scientists

Vili Maunula — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:54:46 +0000

Traditional roles of women in the home and a negative bias in workplace support result in less career success for women versus men at the same stage of their research careers, determined researchers at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in a study appearing in the November 2007 issue of EMBO reports. …

Read the full news release at Alpha Galileo

Ig Nobel Award in Linguistics

Vili Maunula — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:38:10 +0000

The Ig Nobel Award in linguistics has been given to “A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards”, according to BBC News.

PARC Computational Linguist Lauri Karttunen Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Vili Maunula — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:00:48 +0000

Lauri Karttunen, a research fellow at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., a Xerox Company), has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics, the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. In the area of computational linguistics, Karttunen was one of the first pioneers to realize and exploit the potential of finite-state transducers for linguistic applications. …

Read the full news release at Yahoo! Finance news

Mapping the English language â€“ from cockney to Orkney

Vili Maunula — Sat, 26 May 2007 06:28:46 +0000

If they were Scousers theyâ€™d be â€œmade upâ€; from the Black Country theyâ€™d be â€œbostinâ€. But researchers from the University of Leeds are naturally â€œwell chuffedâ€ to receive a Â£460,000 grant to examine and catalogue the dialects and diversities of the English language.

Read the full article at Alpha Galileo

Attention, Memory And Language Links In The Human Brain Mapped By Pioneering Study

Vili Maunula — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:01:30 +0000

A University of Arizona scientist who has specialized in studying how fireflies and other creatures communicate has won a million-dollar grant to conduct a pioneering 5-year study on the roles that attention and memory play when the human brain hears and processes spoken language. …

Read the full news article at Medical News Today

Is Most Published Research Really False?

Vili Maunula — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:33:56 +0000

In 2005, PLoS Medicine published an essay by John Ioannidis, called “Why most published research findings are false,” that has been downloaded over 100,000 times and that was called “an instant cult classic” in a Boston Globe op-ed of July 27 2006. This week, PLoS Medicine revisits the essay, publishing two articles by researchers that move the debate in two new directions. …

Read the full news article at Science Daily

ACL Wiki for Computational Linguistics (and Other Matters)

Vili Maunula — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:45:37 +0000

A new wiki has been set up with computational linguistics in mind. Mark Joseph writes at Linguistlist:

“The purpose of this wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. Wikipedia contains some excellent articles on Computational Linguistics, but the mandate of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia. This means that Wikipedia articles must be written for a general audience, not for specialists. It also means that content such as job ads and course outlines is not suitable for Wikipedia. Therefore this new wiki was created to fill a role that Wikipedia cannot fill.”

You can access it here.

I have, actually, for a long time thought that there should be a wiki for linguistics in general. One could take the linguistics articles available at Wikipedia as a starting point (there are, after all, a good number of them), and perhaps see if something like the Utrecht University’s Lexicon of Linguistics (which does not seem to be updated) could also be incorporated into it. And then, of course, one would need a lot of volunteers to populate the wiki.

And now that I am mentioning that, I might just as well mention another idea for a website that could turn out to be useful: a database of native speakers willing to help linguists in their research. It would be marvellous if one could, with just a few clicks of the mouse, contact native speakers of language X for information about one thing or another. At least I could do with such a feature in my own research.

More than one route to PhD success

Vili Maunula — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:24:17 +0000

The idea of a one-size-fits-all model for PhD study is simplistic, patronizing and bad for science. A recipe such as Georgia Chenevix-Trench’s, detailed in “What Makes a Good PhD Student?” is just one model for PhD success.

Read the full article at Nature

Don’t Count on It

Vili Maunula — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:13:15 +0000

A small Amazon tribe, the PirahÃ£, have no number system. Is the reason neurological–they cannot count–or psychosocial–they just do not want to? An interview with Daniel L. Everett

Read the full interview (subscription needed) at Scientific American

Pool knowledge to find the origins of language

Vili Maunula — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 07:26:39 +0000

Linguists are calling for an online public database, similar to the human genome project, that would allow researchers to collaboratively share different studies of language impairment.

Read the full article at New Scientist

New linguistics websites

Vili Maunula — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 06:56:45 +0000

Jane from lingforum.com contacted me about a new discussion forum for linguists. It works with a webforum-based interface, and can be accessed at http://www.lingforum.com/forum/. Lingforum is still very new, so comparisons with other linguistics related discussion groups such as those found at linguistlist.org should probably not yet be made. I wish all the best for lingforum.com.

I also followed some links from lingforum.com and found my way to http://www.lingnews.net/, which I might describe as a community-based version of Lingformant (i.e. rather than having one editor, any registered member can post articles). If you think that the range of articles here at Lingformant is too narrow (I didn’t, for example, bother to post about the whole linguistically rather irrelevant circus surrounding Hugo ChÃ¡vez’s recent comments on Chomsky’s book and death, which has obviously done a lot to boost the sales of Chomsky’s political writings, as well as made MIT send out a statement that Chomsky is still very much alive), then Lingnews may be something you would like to take a look at. Or better yet, subscribe to both Lingformant and Lingnet, and while you are at it, also add Inttranews, Language Log and Phonoloblog (see links on the side column) to the mix. If you still continue to miss linguistics articles, there must be something wrong with you!

Study finds U.S. bias against women in science

Vili Maunula — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:23:22 +0000

Women are being filtered out of high-level science, math and engineering jobs in the United States, and there is no good reason for it, according to a National Academies report released on Monday.

Read the full article at Reuters