Category: Linguistics

Speech perception

By Simon

According to a report on EurekaAlert, speech perception is not based solely on hearing, but also on sight and even touch. All these senses blend together to enable us to perceive what others say.

We use clues from the movement of the lips, teeth, tongue and other facial features to help use to decipher speech. If you watch a video of someone articulating one sound, e.g. “ba”, combined with a recording of them saying a different sound, e.g. “ka”, you will probably perceive the sound they are articulating, rather than the one on the recording, or something in between the two sounds, such as “da”. This is known as the McGurk Effect. This happens even if you know what sounds are different and concentrate on the audio.

Here’s an example:

According to the research, the McGurk Effect is evidence that the senses are inextricably integrated, and that the brain perceives the acoustic and visual signals of speech as part of a single system. Other studies have found that this link is established even before young children are able to perceive individual phonemes.

Language mainly a cultural phenomenon

By Simon

A report I found the other day suggests that language is most likely to be mainly a cultural phenomenon and that any genetic underpinnings for language probably pre-date the emergence of human language.

Researchers in the UK and USA modelled how aspects of language might have been encoded genetically and concluded that this was very unlikely to have occured given the way human culture changes. For linguistic traits to become encoded in the genes they have to provide a selective advantage and there has to be a stable language envirnoment. Human languages change too quickly for this to happen, and modern humans haven’t existed for long enough either. Therefore they believe that language evolved culturally and that the existence of a genetic language module is unlikely.

They also argue that if human populations in different parts of the world had evolved separate, incompatible language modules, they wouldn’t be able to learn one another’s languages. This is obviously not the case.

Ainu language

By Simon

An article I came across today talks about the Ainu language in which the author, a Russian linguist, talks of his quest to find Ainu speakers in Hokkaido. He met plenty of Ainu but found only two people able to speak the language.

He does find quite a few people who know a few words or Ainu and can recite poems and sing songs, even though they don’t understand them, but as he defines ’speak’ as the ability “to produce spontaneous utterances”, he doesn’t classify these people as speakers. Everywhere he goes, he hears the Ainu speaking Japanese, even in an Ainu language class.

He tentatively concludes that the number of Ainu speakers might be as many as 600, or 2% of the 30,000 people who identify themselves as Ainu. This figure is a lot higher than that reported in Ethnologue (15), or by Murasaki Kyoko, a Japanese anthropologist who said there were 5 or 6 speakers in 2003.

A correspondent has asked me whether I know of any resources (in English) for learning Ainu. Can you suggest any?

Colours / Lliwiau

By Simon

This week I’ve been gathering data for a project comparing the colour vocabulary of Welsh/English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers. The aims of the project are to find out which colour words people know, which order they name them in, and whether the bilinguals name different colours in Welsh and English. All I have to do now is write a 5,000 word report on this data. Unfortunately the colours data collected online is not useable for this project, but I’m very grateful to those of you who completed the questionnaire.

It came as no surprise that there are more words for colours in English than in Welsh – I already suspected that. Most of the bilingual participants listed only basic colour words in Welsh, but one did come up with one I hadn’t heard before – gwinau, which means bay, auburn, brown or sepia and is usually used to describe the colour of horses. The same participant mentioned that there are a number of other words used to describe the colour of horses but couldn’t think of them. I found melynell (bay), llwyd-ddu (dun), brith / brithlwyd (piebald) and broc / brych (roan).

The basic colour words in Welsh are:

black – du
white – gwyn
red –coch
yellow – melyn
blue – glas
green – gwyrdd / glas
brown – brown / gwinau / cochddu (red/black) / dugoch (black/red)
purple – porffor / cochlas (red/blue) / glasgoch (blue/red)
pink – pinc / gwyngoch (white/red)
orange –oren / melyngoch (yellow/red)
grey – llwyd

The colour glas can mean blue (sky), green (grass), grey (sea), silver (coins) or transparent (saliva) depending on the context. The same word is found in all the other Celtic languages and has a similar meaning. Llwyd is also used to refer to brown paper.

Participants also mentioned arian (silver), aur (gold), piws (puce/purple), fioled (violet) and indigo. Another word for the latter two is dulas (black/blue).

The compounds are not commonly used, as far as I can tell, and none of the participants in this survey mentioned them.

I managed to find a number of other Welsh words for colours:

amber – melyn-goch / ambr
auburn – gwinau / coch / melynwyn / llwydwyn
azure – asur / glas
beige – beis
bronze – efydd
cream – hufen
crimson – coch / rhuddgoch / rhudd / purgoch / fflamgoch
cyan – gwyrddlas
fawn – llwyd olau
magenta – magenta / majenta
maroon – cochddu / marŵn
mauve – piwswyn / porffor gwelw / porffor golau
puce – piws / glasgoch
russet – lwytgoch
scarlet – ysgarlad / coch golau
sepia – gwinau / cochddu
tan – melyngoch
tawny – melynddu

I plan to add a new section on colours to Omniglot and have start collecting colour words in various languages. So could you send me all the colour words you can think of in the language(s) you know?

Bilingualism and Emotion 2

By Simon

I just want to thank those of you who completed the questionnaire on bilingualism and emotion. There were 36 responses all together, and I’ll be giving a presentation about it tomorrow.

The information collected was very interesting, and wasn’t entirely what we expected. For example, the number of people who preferred to use their first language to express their deepest feelings and terms of endearment wasn’t as high as previous studies have found. What seemed to be more important was the context and how well people know each language.

I’m now collecting data for a study on colour vocabulary. This time I’m looking for bilingual speakers of any language, and monolingual English speakers. If you can help, please complete the questionnaire on this page.

[Update] – for various reasons I will only be collecting data about colour vocabulary from monolinguals online (the data from bilinguals will be collected offline). So if you consider yourself to be a monolingual speaker of English or another language, please complete the questionnaire.

Mimetic bootstrapping

By Simon

Yesterday I went to an interesting talk on Japanese mimetic words, which are onomatopoeia (擬声語 giseigo / 擬音語 giongo) or words connected to actions, emotions or states (擬態語 gitaigo). For example, くすくす (kusu kusu) – to giggle,ぐずぐず[する] (guzu guzu [suru]) – to procrastinate or dawdle.

Researchers in Japan have found that Japanese mothers use a much higher proportion of mimetic words with young children (60%) than with adults (10%), and their experiments found that children find mimetic verbs (those that use sound symbolism) easier to learn than non-mimetic verbs. They call this process mimetic bootstrapping. They also tested English-speaking children and adults using Japanese mimetic verbs and found that they were able to guess their meanings above the level of chance.

They also mentioned that mimetic words are not just found in Japanese – they are in fact found in the form similar to gitaigo in many of the worlds languages, though are rare in Indo-European languages.

Linguistic research

By Simon

I did some research on grammatical gender for my bilingualism class today which was similar to the experiment I tried out here last week.

The victims participants were all native speakers of Welsh and we asked them to assign male or female voices to inanimate objects, some of which are usually associated with men – (beard, hammer, screwdriver); some are usually associated with women (brooch, dress, needle); while others are semantically neutral (clock, table, television). We were trying to see whether they would be guided by the semantic or Welsh grammatical gender, and in most cases they went with the semantic gender, except for the neutral objects, for which some of them followed the Welsh genders.

Apart from the assignment of genders, I found it interesting that most of the participants learnt Welsh first and only started learning English from the age of 4 or 5, i.e. when they started school. This is quite common in this part of Wales. We also asked them estimate the percentage of Welsh and English they use. Some said they use both languages equally, others use Welsh far more than English -up to 90% of the time.

Linguistics experiment

By Simon

This is a little experiment I’ll be doing for my bilingualism class next week which I thought I’d try out on you first.

Imagine you’re making a cartoon featuring the things listed below as characters. Which ones would you assign a male voice to, and which ones would you assign a female voice to?

1. A rock 2. A tree 3. A river 4. A bear 5. A salmon 6. A boat

Could you also tell us your native language, and whether you speak any other languages fluently? If you do speak other languages, when did you acquire them, do you use them regularly, and would you consider yourself bilingual or multilingual?

David Crystal

By Simon

We met David Crystal today and had a very interesting question and answer session with him. He’s an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, but has so many other commitments that take him all over the world, he rarely has time to visit.

Among the topics we discussed whether it’s possible for major world languages such as English and Spanish, to live in ‘harmony’ with minority languages. David believes that this is possible, if the minority languages are supported politically and economically, and if their speakers are determined to continue using them. He gave the example of Catalonia, where major investment in the economy has been a major factor in the strength and growth of Catalan. In other regions where investment has been mainly in language teaching and language preservation organisations, the minority languages are not doing nearly as well.

We also talking about the future of English as a global language – David believes the current dominance of English is likely to continue, that the centre of English is shifting towards those who speak it as a second or foreign language, and that a new form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) could emerge. ELF is likely to be a simpler, formal style of English stripped of region and country-specific idioms and expressions. This is already happening to some extent. He also mentioned that English as a global language only started to be seriously discussed by linguistics about ten years ago.