Tones and genes

According to an article in the New Scientist, researchers at the University of Edinburgh have demonstrated using statistical analysis that two genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, that govern aspects of brain development tend to differ between regions where tonal languages are spoken, and regions where non-tonal languages are spoken.

The article also mentions that there are some differences in brain structure between English speakers with facility for learning tonal languages and those who find such languages difficult. So if you are struggling with the tones of a language like Mandarin or Thai, maybe it’s because your brain has evolved to cope best with non-tonal languages.

Another article on this subject in Scientific American gives more details of the research:

Ladd and Dediu compared 24 linguistic features — such as subject-verb word order, passive tense, and rounded vowels — with 981 versions of the two genes found in the 49 populations studied. Most of the language contrasts could be explained by geographic or historical differences. But tone seemed to be inextricably tied to the variations of ASPM and Microcephalin observed by the authors. The mutations were absent in populations that speak tonal languages, but abundant in nontonal speakers.

Further details are available on this blog, which is written by the son of one of the researchers.

The pictures are better on the radio

There’s a saying that “the pictures are better on the radio”. I think there’s a lot of truth in this. You construct mental pictures of the radio presenters and other people you hear, and of the events and places they describe or evoke with sound effects. There are no actual pictures to distract you and your imagination can run wild. When you watch television or films, much less is left to your imagination.

I listen to the radio a lot, and the mental images I have of the people on the radio, based solely on their voices and names, are rarely a good match for what these people actually look like. I definitely prefer radio to television and haven’t had a telly since moving to Brighton about eight years ago. Some find this strange and wonder how I manage without a telly, but I don’t miss it, and on the rare occasions I do watch it, I rarely see programmes that make me want to rush out and buy a set. I do occasionally watch DVDs on my computer though, and like going to the cinema as well.

When I hear a radio play or see a film based on a book I’ve read, the way the characters look and talk is often different to the way I imagined them. If I hear the play or see the film before reading the book, my imagination is affected by what I’ve seen and heard in the play or film.

At work, my experience is similar to Terry’s and Polly’s, as mentioned in the comments on yesterday’s post – when I finally meet people I’ve talked to a lot on the phone, they often don’t resemble my mental image of them. It is almost as if they are one person on the phone, and another in the flesh.

When talking on the phone, do you behave in a different way to when you talk to someone face-to-face?

Music and speech

Researchers at Duke University, North Carolina, have recently discovered that 12 tone intervals of the (Western) musical scale correspond closely to the sounds of speech, according to an article on ScienceDaily.

The researchers analysed recordings of spoken English and Mandarin using spectrum analysers and compared them to musical scales. They found that 70% of the speech sounds had frequency ratios that matched the intervals between musical notes. They also believe music sounds ‘right’ to us because the notes used are similar to the sounds of speech.

Other projects they plan include one to try to find out whether the musical scales used in different countries are related to the languages spoken there. They will also investigate why we tend to perceive music a major key as happy, and that in a minor key as sad.

Maybe singing came before speech, as discussed on this blog. If this is so, then the reason why musical notes are related to speech could be because speech developed from singing, rather than the other way round.

Language switching

According to an article I found today, a study at the University of British Columbia found that babies as young 4 months old can tell when someone has switched from one language to another just from visual clues, such as the shapes and rhythm of the speaker’s mouth and face movements.

Babies aged 4, 6 and 8 months from monolingual and bilingual families were shown silent videos of people speaking sentences first in English, then in French. The 4 and 6 month old babies paid more attention to the videos and watched them longer when the languages switched, which indicates that they noticed differences. By age of 8 months, only babies raised in bilingual homes were able to tell the difference between the languages.

Perhaps it would be interesting to have a language quiz or two featuring silent videos of people speaking different languages and asking you to try to work out how many languages were being spoken and even which ones. What do you think?

If you have an suitable videos, or know where they are available, do let me know.

Names and faces

According to an study at Miami University in Ohio, we tend to associate particular names with particular face types. If a name ‘matches’ a face, we tend to find it easier to remember, while face and names that are not perceived as ‘matching’ are more difficult to remember.

In the study, 150 college students were asked to construct faces for 15 common male names using facial construction software. A second group was asked to rate how well these constructed faces seemed to fit their names. This group thought that there was a good match between many of the names and faces, with the best matches for the names Bob, Bill, Brian and Jason. The name Bob, for example, was associated with round faces. Perhaps this has something to do with sounds of the name.

To test whether names that fit faces are easier to remember, a third group of students was shown the constructed faces with their names. Later they were asked which names they could recall, and it was found that the better the match between name and face, the better they could remember the names.

Another study is planned to try to discover why there are such associations between names and faces. One possible reason is apparently that parents may name their babies to fit their general features, including the shapes of their faces.

Bilingual novels

The other day, someone mentioned that large chunks of French dialogue appear in War and Peace without any translation into Russian. In the 19th century, when the novel was written, knowledge of French was widespread among the Russian aristocracy and they tended to speak French to each other. So they would have been able to follow the French in the book without difficulty.

This got me thinking whether there are many other bilingual novels. In regions where two or more languages are a part of everyday live, you’d think that some writers might use a mixture of those languages in their stories. However, apart from a few Welsh and Irish novels which include bits of English dialogue, I haven’t come across any bilingual novels. Have you?

Word of the day – isogram

isogram, noun – a word in which the letters turn up an equal number of times.

There are different types of isograms depending on how many times each letter appears:

In a first-order isogram, each letter appears just once, as in dialogue, lexicography, ambidextrously and uncopyrightable.

In a second-order isogram, each letter appears twice, as in deed, Vivienne, Caucasus and intestines.

In a third-order isogram, each letter appears three times. These are rare, unusual words such as deeded (“conveyed by deed”) and geggee (“victim of a hoax”).

I came across this term in an article by David Crystal about his new book By Hook or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English.

Māori spelling

This post was inspired by an email I received today from someone who wanted to know why the f sound in Māori is written wh, as in Whangarei.

According to a number of sites I found, Māori was first written down by missionaries who had little or no training in phonetics or phonology, and there was considerable variation in the spelling systems they came up with. The sound represented by wh was originally a voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/ (p\), though in some dialects, particularly in the North Shore area, it was a voiceless labial-velar fricative /ʍ/ (W). It was written w by some, and wh, f or v by others.

These days, many people pronounce wh as /f/, or sometimes /h/, /w/ or /ʍ/ (W).

Sources:
http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=107120
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-RogEarl-t1-back-d2.html
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-KohStor-t1-back-d3.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cultures/new-zealand-faq/part2/section-10.html