Rap Reduplication

September 29, 2012November 22, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

I love rap and hiphop. In addition to being a great example of how different cultural traditions can combine to create a uniquely American art form and fun to listen to (I don’t get much chance to stretch my English-major chops these days) it’s often a carrier of linguistic change. I mentioned one example of this earlier, when I was discussing language games and in-group/out-group language. But I’ve recently noticed another interesting linguistic phenomena in rap that you don’t really see in English very often: reduplication.

Jay-Z: By chickswithguns [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Shakespeare: By It may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers' Company.[1] (Official gallery link) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons — Whose work displays metrical complexity, rich cultural/literary/historical allusions and healthy lashing of dirty jokes? Trick question! It’s both. Man, I hope nobody in the future tries to claim that Jay-Z was actually Dick Chaney in disguise…

Reduplication is one of my favorite linguistic phenomena and a great example of a autological word. Basically, reduplication is a linguistic phenomena where you say the same thing twice. It’s also one of those rare phonological phenomena that are semantically meaningful. There are lots of ways to interpret what saying something twice means, but you there are a couple of pretty popular choices:

Probably the best English example is “Like like”, as in “I like him, but I don’t like like him.” ~~It seems to serve as some sort of deintensifier (Yeah I just made that word up. Deal with it.) or to disambiguate between two possible meanings of the same word.~~ It seems to serve to narrow the scope of the base word. So, “like-like” is a type of “like” and “holiday holiday” is a type of “holiday”. Apparently there’s a similar relationship in Italian and French (see comments).
In Koasati, (and Cree as well apparently) it’s used to indicate a repeated action. So it would be like if I said “cut-cut” in English to mean that I chopped something finely instead of cutting a piece off of something.
In Mandarin it’s an almost juvenile marking, used to indicate “cuteness” or “smallness”. (You can see this in Hebrew as well.) You’ll sometimes see this in English, too, particularly from children. If you hang out with young kids, keep your ears peeled for things like “bunbun” for “bunny”.
On the other, Mandarin also uses reduplication to indicate plurality. Khmer is another language that does this, and I think Japanese does as well. So that’s things like “bird” for one bird and “birdbird” or “bir-bird” for a flock of birds.
Finally, and this is what I think’s going on in rap, you’ll see reduplication to intensify things. Like I’d say a “red red” is a really intense red, or that someone who’s “short short” is really tiny.

I’ve been noticing this particularly with “truetrue”. You can hear it in Chamillionare’s “I’m true”, both as “I’m true, I’m true” and “true true” in verse two. And Lil Wayne’s “My Homies Still” is absolutely rife with reduplication. You’ve got “click click” in the first line, and in verse four (which is Big Sean’s) you’ve got these lines:

Whoa, okay, boi this here’s what I do do
Got your sister dancing, not the kind that’s in a tutu
Got me in control, no strings attached, that’s that voodoo
She said can’t nobody do it better, I tell her, true true yep ***** true true
True true, my my bro bro say…

Of course, a grouping this concentrated speaks more towards an artistic choice than pervasive linguistic change… but it is something I’ve been noticing more and more. The earliest example I could find is GZA’s “True Fresh MC” from 1991, but I’m hesitant to call it reduplication, since there’s a definite pause between the first and second “true”.

Feel free to weigh in in the comments. Is this a legitimate trend or have I fallen prey to a recency illusion? Are there other examples that I’m missing? Is this something you say in everyday speech?

The Many Moods of “Alarming”

September 10, 2012September 10, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ Leave a comment

So you’ll all be doubtless relieved to know that I have cheerfully settled in Seattle and immediately returned to my old tricks. Observe this gem brought to you by Seattle City Light:

20120910_141751 — Something’s alarming right enough… but I think it’s actually my linguistics sense.

Now, as both a linguist and native speaker of American English, I find this command troubling. Not because I have a problem with civic-minded individuals alerting the power company to potentially dangerous problems, but because it’s ambiguous. I’ve written about ambiguity in language before, but it’s something that I revisit often and it’s a complex enough subject that you can easily spend an entire lifetime studying it, let alone more than one blog post.

Let’s examine why this sign is ambiguous a little more closely.

First, there’s (what I would consider) a non-standard usage of the word “alarming”. I tend to imagine something that is “alarming” to be capable of putting me in a state of alarm, rather than currently expressing alarm. Or, as the OED puts it:

“Disturbing or exciting with the apprehension of danger.”

Yeah, that’s right, “alarming” is one of the few words that the OED only has one definition for. Let’s put that aside for the moment, though, and assume that there’s a linguistically-creative sign maker working for Seattle City Light who has coined a neologism based on parallels with words like “understanding” or “revolving”. The real crux of the matter is that the command is not a sentence, and has just too many gaps where the reader has to fill in information.

These are just a couple of the possible interpretations I came up for the sign:

If [the alarm is] alarming (in the sense of performing the action which alarms traditionally do, such as whooping and revolving) [then] call.
If [you are] alarming [other people, then] call.
If [the alarm is] alarming [you, regardless of whether or not it’s currently flashing or making noise then] call.

Now, English syntax is a pretty resilient beast and can put up with a certain amount of words left out. The fancy linguistics term for this is “ellipsis“, just like the punctuation mark. (This one: …) Words have to be left out of of certain places in certain ways, though. Like you don’t have to say “you” every time you tell someone to do something. “Don’t sit there!” is perfectly acceptable as a sentence, and if someone told you that you’d have no problem figuring out that they were telling you not to sit on their cat. Like everything else in language, though, there are rules and by breaking them you run the risk of failing to communicate what you’re trying to… just like this sign.

Language Games*

July 27, 2012July 28, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

A lot of the games that we play as kids help us learn important life skills. “I spy”? Color recognition. “Peekaboo”? Object permanence. But what about language games? In English, you’ve got games like pig Latin, which has several versions. Most involve moving syllables or consonants from the front of a word to the end, and then adding “-ay”. It’s such a prevalent phenomena that there’s even a Google search in pig Latin.

And English isn’t alone in having language games like this. In fact, every language I’ve studied, including Nepali and Esperanto, has had some form of similar language game.

The weird thing, though, is that it kinda looks like the only people that language games are really useful for is linguists.

Let’s look at syllables. If you’re a normal person, you only think about them when you’re forced to write a haiku for some reason. (Pro tip: In Japanese, it’s not the syllables that you count but the moras.) If you’re a linguist, though, you think about them all the time, and spend time arguing about whether or not they actually exist. One of the best arguments for syllables existing is that people can move them around relatively intuitively without even having a university degree in linguistics when language games require it. (I know, shocking, isn’t it?)

And you can use the existence of language games to argue that there’s a viable speaker community of any given language, a sort of measure of language health, like mayflies in streams; that’s a valuable indicator, since language death is a serious problem. Or you can even use them to argue that a language is alive in the first place.

The main use of language games for language users, however, seems to be the creation of smaller speech communities within larger communities. But then, as a linguist, you probably already knew that. Keep an ear out for them in everyday life, however, and you might be surprised how often they tend to crop up–like the use of -izz in early hip hop parlance.

*If you thought I was going to bring up Wittgenstein in a blog post meant for people with little to no background in linguistics you are a very silly person. Oh, alright, here. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

What’s the loudest / softest / highest / lowest sound humans can hear?

June 25, 2012June 25, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

Humans can’t hear all sounds. Actually, not even most, in the grand scheme of things. Like how we can only see a narrow band of all wavelengths–hence “visible” light–we can also only hear some of the possible wavelengths. And wave heights. You might remember this from physics, but there are two measurements that are really important on a diagram of a wave: wave length and intensity. Like so:

CPT-sound-physical-manifestation — This should be bringing back flashbacks of asking if you were going to be able to use a formula sheet and a calculator.

So you’ve got the wavelength, which is the distance between two peaks or two troughs, and the amplitude, which is the distance between the mid-point of the wave and the tip of a peak. Which is all very well, but it doesn’t tell you much in the grand scheme of things, since most waves aren’t kind enough to present themselves to you as labelled diagrams. You actually have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the wavelength and amplitude of sound waves, though. The first is pitch and the second is what I like to refer to as “loudness”. (Technically, “loudness” is a perceptual measurement, not a… you know, this is starting to be boring.)

So there’s a limit in how loud and how soft a sound can be and a limit of how high and low a sound can be. I’ll deal with loudness first, because it’s less fun.

Loudness

So we measure loudness using the decibel scale, which is based on human perception. Since 0 decibels is, by definition, the lower perceptual limit of sound for humans, the quietest sound humans can hear is just above that, which is around 20 micro-pascals of pressure. Of course, that’s healthy young humans. The older you get, the more your hearing range decreases, which is why your grandmother asks you to repeat yourself a lot. The loudest is just under 160 decibels, since exposure to a sound at 160 decibels will literally rip your eardrum. That’s things like being right under a cannon when it fires, standing next to a rocket when it launches or standing right next to a jet engine during take off, all of which tend to have other problems associated with them. So… avoid that.

Pitch

Pitch is a bit more interesting. Normal human hearing is generally between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz–compare that to 15 to 200 kilohertz for dolphins and bats! (Because they both rely on sonar and echo-locution for hunting.) Just like hearing range for loudness, though, this gets narrower as you get older, particularly at the higher end of the range. Here’s a video that runs the gamut of the human hearing range (warning: you might want to turn your speakers down).

If you’re older than 25 (which is when hearing loss usually starts in the upper ranges) you probably couldn’t hear the whole thing. If you did, congratulations! You’ve got the hearing of a normal, young human.

How can you realistically imitate a French accent?

June 10, 2012September 10, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 3 Comments

So, my main area on interest within linguistics is the study of the individual sound systems of different languages and the rules governing them. It may sound pretty dry, but it can lead to some pretty impressive party tricks. For example, by knowing about the sound systems of different languages you can emulate them. In other words, you can have a pretty convincing fake accent. In fact, accent coaches, who work with actors to create accents and other to reduce them, tend to have linguistic backgrounds with a focus on studying the sounds of language. So I thought with this post I’d go over how to imitate a French accent by looking at the individual sounds that are different between the two languages.

Just to be clear: I’m using English as a target language here because English is my native language and everyone who’s asked me about it has spoken English natively. I’m in no way implying that English is the “best” language, or that English speakers don’t have accents. (You should hear how I butcher Mandarin. It’s pretty atrocious.) If you have any other languages you’d like me to write posts for, let me know in the comments. 🙂

I’m going to assume that you want to sound like you’re from Paris and not Quebec (Not that Quebec isn’t great! Man, now I’m jonesing for some President’s Choice snacks.). There are a couple sounds you’re going to have to learn:

Instead of the English “r”, as in “rat”, you’re going to have to use what’s called the “gutteral r”. (Okay, it’s actually called the voiced uvular fricative, but that’s a little bit harder to say.) Basically, when you say the sound, you want to vibrate your uvula, that little punching-bag-looking thing at the back of your throat. Try doing it in front of a well-lit mirror with your mouth open until you can figure out what it feels like.
Instead of the English “ng”, as in “cling”, you can use a “ny”, as in “nyan cat“. No, seriously. This will be a little difficult, since we only really use that sound at the end of words, but practice a bit and you should be able to pick it up. Or you can just go with go with a regular “n” sound.

Now the good news! There’s also a couple of sounds we have in English that don’t exist in French, and they’re the one’s that are slightly harder to say, so you can save yourself some time and trouble by switching them out.

The “th” sound, like at the begining of “thin” or “the” is actually really rare in world languages. French speakers tend to replace it with “z”.
The sounds at the beginning of “church” and “judge” are also not a thing in French. You can use the sound at the beginning of “sheep” for the sound at the beginning of “church” and the “s” in “vision” for the “j” in “judge”.

So that’s the consonants.

The vowels are significantly different than they are in English. You’ve got all sorts of things like nasalization and rounding in places where you, as an English speaker, are just not expecting it. And, frankly, unless you’ve got a really good ear, you’re going to have a hard time picking up on the differences. Long story short: I’m weaseling out of explaining the vowels entirely and using a Youtube video. (I’m also doing it so you can get some native speaker data, which I think you’ll find helpful.)

That does give me space to discuss intonation, however. Intonation is probably the single biggest difference in the way English and French sounds. In fact, intonation is one of the very first things that babies pick up, before they even start experimenting with individual sounds. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult things to learn. Here’s a few pointers, though:

French intonation isn’t as concerned with individual syllables. Rather, you tend to get whole phrases (rather than individual words) in the same intonation pattern. This is what gives French its sort of smooth, musical quality.
Instead of a slow rise and slow fall, like we get in English, pitch in French tends to rise slowly until the very final syllable of a sentence, where it drops suddenly. It looks more like the graph of an absolute value than polynomial, in other words.

There’s a ton more to be said about French phonology, and a lot of it has already been said, but this should be enough to get you started on approximating a French accent. Good luck!

Can you really learn a language in ten days?

May 28, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 4 Comments

I’m not the only linguist in my family. My father has worked as a professional linguist his whole life… but with a slightly different definition of “linguist”. His job is to use his specialist knowledge of a language (specifically Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian or one of the handful of other languages he speaks relatively well) to solve a problem. And one problem that he’s worked on a lot is language learning.

There’s no doubt that knowing more than one language is very, very useful. It opens up job opportunities, makes it easier to travel and can even improve brain function. But unless you were lucky enough to be raised bilingual you’re going to have to do it the hard way. And, if you live in America, like I do, you’re not very likely to do that: Only about 26% of the American population speaks another language well enough to hold a basic converstaion in it, and only 9% are fluent in another language. Compare that to Europe, where around 50% of the population is bilingual.

Which makes the lure of easily learning a language on your own all the more compelling. I recently saw an ad that I found particularly enticing; learn a language in just ten days. Why, that’s less time than it takes to hand knit a pair of socks. The product in this = case was the oh-so-famous (at least in linguistic circles) Pimsleur Method (or approach, or any of a number of other flavors of delivery). I’ve heard some very good things about the program, and thought I’d dig a little deeper into the method itself and evaluate its claims from a scientific linguistics perspective.

I should mention that Dr. Pimsleur was an academic working in second language acquisition from an applied linguistics stand point. That is, his work (published mainly in the 1960’s) tended to look at how older people learn a second language in an educational setting. I’m not saying this makes him unimpeachable–if a scientific argument can’t stand up to scrutiny it shouldn’t stand at all–but it does tend to lend a certain patina of credibility to his work. Is it justified? Let’s find out.

First things first: it is not possible to become fluent in a language in just ten days. There are lots of reasons why this is true. The most obvious is that being a fluent speaker is more than just knowing the grammar and vocabulary; you have to understand the cultural background of the language you’re studying. Even if your accent is flawless (unlikely, but I’ll deal with that later), if you unwittingly talk to your mother-in-law and become a social pariah that’s just not going to do you much. Then there are just lots of little linguistic things that it’s so very easy to get wrong. Idioms, for example, particularly choosing which preposition to use. Do you get “in the bus” or “on the bus”? And then there’s even more subtle things like producing a list of adjectives in the right order. “Big red apple” sounds fine, but “red big apple”? Not so much. A fluent speaker knows all this, and it’s just too much information to acquire in ten days.

That said, if you were plopped down in a new country without any prior knowledge of the language, I’d bet within ten days you’d be carrying on at least basic conversations. And that’s pretty much what the Pimsleur method is promising. I’m not really concerend with whether it works or not… I’m more concerned with how it works (or doesn’t). There are four basic principals that the Pimsleur technique is based on.

Anticipation. Basically, this boils down to posing questions that the learner is expected answer. These can be recall tasks, asking you to remember something you heard before, or tasks where the learner needs to extrapolate based on the knowledge they currently have of the language.
Graduated-interval recall. Instead of repeating a word or word list three or four time right after each other, they’re repeated at specific intervals. This is based on the phonological loop part of a model of working memory that was really popular when Pimsleur was doing his academic work.
Core Vocabulary. The learner is just exposed to basic vocabulary, so the total number of words learned is less. They’re chosen (as far as I can tell, it seems to vary based on method) based on frequency.
“Organic learning”. Basically, you learn by listening and there’s a paucity of reading and writing. (Sorry about that; paucity was my word of the day today 😛 ).

So let’s evaluate these claims.

Anticipation. So the main benefit of knowing that you’ll be tested on something is that you actually pay attention. In fact, if you ask someone to listen to pure tones, their brain consumes more oxygen (which you can tell because circulation to that area increases) if you tell them they’ll be tested. Does this help with language learning? Well. Maybe. I don’t really have as much of a background in psycholinguistics, but I do know that language learning tends to entail the creation of new neural networks and connections, which requires oxygen. On the other hand, a classroom experience uses the same technique. Assessment: Reasonable, but occurs in pretty much every language-learning method.
Graduated-interval recall: So this is based on the model I mentioned above. You’ve got short term and long term memory, and the Pimsleur technique is designed to pretty much seed your short term memory, then wait for a bit, then grab at the thing you heard and pull it to the forefront again, ideally transferring it to long-term memory. Which is peachy-keen… if the model’s right. And there’s been quite a bit of change and development in our understanding of how memory works since the 1970’s. Within linguistics, there’s been the rise of Exemplar Theory, which posits that it’s the number of times you hear things, and the similarity of the sound tokens, that make them easier to remember. (Kinda. It’s complicated.) So… it could be helpful, assuming the theory’s right. Assessment: Theoretical underpinnings outdated, but still potentially helpful.
Core Vocabulary. So this one is pretty much just cheating. Yes, it’s true, you only need about 2000 words to get around most days, and, yes, those are probably the words you should be learning first in a language course. But at some point, to achieve full fluency, you’ll have to learn more words, and that just takes time. Nothing you can do about it. Assesment: Legitimate, but cheating.
“Organic learning”: So this is in quotation marks mainly because it sounds like it’s opposed to “inorganic learning”, and no one learns language from rocks. Basically, there are two claims here. One is the auditory learning is preferable, and the other is that it’s preferable because it’s how children learn. I have fundamental problems with claims that adults and children can learn using the same processes. That said, if your main goal is to learn how to speak and hear a given language, learning writing will absolutely slow you down. I can tell you from experience: once you learn the tones, speaking Mandarin is pretty straightforward. Writing Mandarin remains one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever attempted to do. Assessment: Reasonable, but claims that you can learn “like a baby” should be examined closely.
Bonus: I do agree that using native speakers of the target language as models is preferable. They can make all the sounds correctly, something that even trained linguists can sometimes have problems with–and if you never hear the sounds produced correctly, you’ll never be able to produce them correctly.

So, it does look pretty legitimate. My biggest concern is actually not with the technique itself, but with the delivery method. Language is inherently about communicating, and speaking to yourself in isolation is a great way to get stuck with some very bad habits. Being able to interact with a native speaker, getting guidance and correction, is something that I’d feel very uncomfortable recommending you do without.

How Many Languages Are There?

May 27, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 3 Comments

This Christmas, my dad gave me a very special gift: a hardcopy of Ethnolouge. It was a great gift for two reasons. The first is that Ethnolouge is probably the single best resource for looking up basic information about the languages of the world, and the second is that I had a door that just wouldn’t stay open. (Seriously, the hard copy is about the size of a layer cake and weighs three times as much).

But the point is that you would think that if a body of linguists is going around printing big annotated lists of all the world’s languages, they’d have a hard-and-fast number ready to throw at you when you ask them how many there are. Instead you get answers like, “Around 6,500” or “Somewhere between 6000 and 7000” or “It really depends what you mean by language” or “Fewer all the time” or “6500! Who told you that? Their figure is clearly wrong!” Why all the hedging?

Languengl — Language families! Well, one person’s idea of language families, ‘cuase there’s disagreement. And the consensus is constantly changing, so it’s one person’s idea of language families at one point in time… Long story short, linguists love to argue.

Well, there’s a couple reasons, and they all seem to boil down to the same thing: language is complicated. Seriously, I spend most of my spare time thinking about language and have for the past several years… and I keep coming back to “language is complicated”.

But let’s say you’re not satisfied with our sort of fluffyish numbers of how many languages there are. So you put on your linguist outfit (which, honestly, is probably just jeans and a t-shirt) and pack your rucksack and head out to count all the world’s languages.

But right away you start to run into problems. Let’s say you’re in India. You’ve been counting the Dravidian languages and getting some pretty good data, and you decide to really quickly check off Hindi. TotalNumberOfLanguages = TotalNumberOfLanguages + 1. So next you look at Urdu. Well, huh. The people that you’re interviewing say that they’re clearly different languages… but they’re mutually intelligible, so if one person is speaking Hindi and one person is speaking Urdu they can carry on a normal conversation. And you notice that they sound alike. A lot alike. In fact, their rules for how sounds change seem to be the same. And they have overlapping speaker populations. The best way you can find to tell them apart is that one (Hindi) is written using Devanagari script, and the other (Urdu) is written using Arabic script. Soo…. are they one language or two? Two different linguists might give you two different answers and then, BAM, you’ve got a different count.

And you’ll encounter similar problems with other languages and language families all across the globe. Do it three or four hundred times and you’ve got a radically different number from the next linguist counting.

But, despite these problems, you finally manage to count all the languages. You stumble home, travel-worn and weary, and settle down to check a truly massive back log of e-mails. And it looks like one of them is very sad news. One of your friends you met along the way, the last living speaker of an Amazonian language, has died. And with her death, her language is gone. It’s a double tragedy, to be sure, and when you think back on, a lot of languages had only one or two very old speakers. Who knows how many of them have died in the years you’ve been travelling? So it looks like, due to language death, your count is even more off.

So you write up your findings and try to get them published, but people keep pointing out the hard and fast number number that you were searching for and collecting data for all along isn’t really reliable. Even if you end up giving a range of numbers, languages are dying so quickly that they won’t be accurate for long.

Man, I’m glad that this situation is a hypothetical one, and you didn’t actually spend years chasing after a mythic number that it turns out is unobtainable. Aren’t you?

Can Animals Talk?

May 26, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 1 Comment

There’s a long-running (and I really mean long-running: Plato chimed in on this one) debate about what language is. Now, as a linguist, you’d think I’d have the inside scoop on the subject. I mean, I pretty much sit around and think about language all day, so I should have this one down cold, right?

Well, as much as I hate to admit it, not really. And it’s not just me. Ask three different linguists what language is and you’ll probably get six to twelve answers. There is one point that I’m firm on, though: language is a human phenomena. Outside of the internet and fantasy worlds (which tend to overlap a lot, now that I think about it), animals don’t talk.

I’m not claiming that animals don’t make communicative noises. Far from it! As someone who has bottle-fed more than one lamb, I can tell you that there’s a definite difference between cries that indicate genuine hunger and cries that are transparent ploys to get cookies. But there are a lot of differences between communicative behavior and language.

Lying is part of language. By lying here, I mean a wide variety of linguistic expressions that express information that is counter to the truth, including joking. Language is separate from the things it describes (there’s nothing inherently tree-ish about the word tree, for example, ditto arbor, boom and träd, though there are inherent respect points in correctly identifying all three languages) and because of this can communicate abstract thought. Abstract thought, as evinced through lying, is in inherent part of language. There’s some evidence that Koko the gorilla is capable of lying, but one isolated incident really isn’t a sound basis for scientific argument.
Language is generative. I’ve written an entire post about generativity, but it’s worth repeating. Language has to have underlying structures that can be used to produce new and novel utterances. Otherwise, you’re just saying random words.
Langauge is communicative. This is part of the reason why music isn’t language, though it’s completely abstract and (at least in the Western tradition) generative. Abstraction is required, but so is a connection to thoughts and ideas. Tied to this is the fact that you have to have a community to speak in, even if it’s a community of two.
Language can communicate events at a temporal distance. This is a a biggie, and one of the main reasons that I really think that Koko and other talking animals are really using language. (Quick aside: Did you know that the Nazis attempted to train talking dogs as part of the war effort? True story.) It’s pretty easy to teach a dog to bark for a treat, but try teaching it to bark because you gave it a treat two days ago. You may think that a specific bark means “treat”, but without temporal distance and repeatability, it’s pretty much just pigeons in boxes.

Now, other linguists will take other positions (or, you know, the same position ;), but this is how I see it. So what do you think: can animals talk?

Why are tongue twisters tricky? (Part 2)

May 21, 2012June 25, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 1 Comment

Oh, so in my last post I talked about the tongue part of tongue twisters. But, as I mentioned, the really interesting part of tongue twisters comes from the brain, not the tongue. It all has to do with lexical access.

Lexical access: The process through which a speaker or listener accesses their mental lexicon (i.e. the not-so-tiny brain dictionaries we all have and are all constantly changing).

If you were a computer, your mental entries on various words would be like files you needed to access. Like, if I write “kumquat”, you probably have some sort of mental entry for it. Even if you’ve never eaten a kumquat, you’ve probably seen them, so you have that mental image associated with the words–like a .txt file with a picture in it. So, once you hear or read “kumquat”, you need to rummage around until you find that file, then open it and access the information inside. And you do! In fact, you do it very, very quickly. You do it for every single word you ever read or hear, and you do it in reverse for every word you ever write or say.

Brain Surface Gyri — This is your brain on language. Well, some of the bits that deal with language, at any rate.

So lexical access is a very important process. You need it for every single aspect of language use. The good news is, there’s a lot we know about lexical access! Remember when I talked about priming? That’s an aspect of lexical access. The bad news is, there’s a whole bunch we don’t know about lexical access.

(Is lexical access starting to sound like a fake word yet? That process, by the way, is known as semantic saturation.)

This is where tongue twisters come into play. (No, I hadn’t forgotten them.) Why? Well, it turns out that tongue twisters are a really good way to get at what happens during the lexical access process. Like many things that happen in the human brain, it can be difficult to study lexical access. Unlike physicists, linguists can’t break apart the mind to see what happens and figure out what’s going on. First, it would be deeply unethical. Second, when you break a brain open, it stops working. Sometimes, however, the brain does something weird. Like with tongue twisters. If you read my previous post, you know that the tongue itself can cause problems… but not enough to explain the most common errors, like saying “How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?” as “How clan a cam cram in a clean cleam can?”

In a 1999 study, Carolyn E. Wilshire found that there were two main contributors to making tongue twisters tricky. The first factor that made it easier to confuse sounds was whether the confuseable sounds were similar. There’s lots of technical reasons this is, but basically sounds can be grouped together and some sounds are more like other sounds. “t” and “d” are really similar, for example, whereas “k” and “m” are not really that alike. Unsurprisingly, sounds that are alike are easier to confuse. Basically, you reach for something that sounds similar, then realize that you made a mistake and try to correct your error.

The second factor was that it was easier to confuse sounds that were repeated. This is because you’re more likely to “reach for” something you’ve already gotten out once, even if it’s the wrong thing. Together, these factors make for some really awesome tongue twisters. Awesome for two reasons: the first is that they’re really, really hard to say. (Try moss knife noose muff!). The second is that we can use tongue twisters like these to help increase our understanding of the human mind. And that’s what it’s really all about.

Why are tongue twisters tricky? (Part 1)

May 18, 2012 ~ Rachael Tatman ~ 1 Comment

For me, the best part of the 2009 Star Trek movie was the scene where Kirk tries to pick up Uhara in a bar. After she says he probably doesn’t know what Xenolinguistics is, he replies:

The study of alien languages. Morphology, phonology, syntax. Means you’ve got a talented tongue.

Well. Four out of five isn’t bad. Linguists know about language, not the languages themselves–so tongue talents are a skill that linguists only develop tangentially. (Although, of course, a lot of linguists do end up learning the languages they work on.) But knowing about tongues is still pretty useful. For example, it helps explain why tongue twisters are so hard.

Basically, your tongue is a muscle like any other muscle, and it has certain limits. For example, there’s just a certain upper limit to how fast you can type, knit or eat, you can only produce recognizable words so fast. In addition to speed, however, there are certain motions that are difficult to make. Linguists often refer to correctly producing a given sound as “hitting an articulatory target”, and that’s a useful metaphor. For each sound in your repertoire, your tongue (and other parts of your articulatory system) have to be in certain positions.

Exercise time! Try saying “s sh s sh s sh” and “t k t k t k”. In the first, the tip of your tongue should move from that little ridge in your mouth (just behind your front teeth) to behind that ridge. In the second, the “t” sound should be made with the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and the “k” with the very back of your tongue. (I’m assuming that you have the “sh” sound in your native language, otherwise this exercise might have been a little fruitless for you. Sorry.)

You might have noticed that it was a little easier to make the “t k” sound than it was the “s sh” sound. That’s because you’re using two different parts of your tongue to make the “t k” pair, so while one is making a sound, the other is preparing to and vice versa. On the other hand, if your only using the very tip of your tongue, you have to finish one task before you can move onto the next, so your rate of making sounds is much lower. It’s the same reason that assembly lines are so much faster–you don’t have the additional time it takes to switch tasks. (BTW, that’s why, if you play a wind instrument, you can tongue faster with “t k t k” than “t t t t”.)

Ok, so we have two pressures working against your ability to produce tongue twisters. The first is that your tongue can only move so fast. You can train it to move faster, but eventually you will (barring cybernetic implants) reach the limits of the human body. Secondly, you have limited resources to make sounds, and when sounds that draw on the same resources are produced too close together, they both become more difficult to produce, and the speed at which you can produce them is reduced even further.

And that wraps it up for tongues, because the dirty secret of tongue twisters is that they’re mainly actually brain twisters. But I’ll cover that in part two. That’s right: brraaaaaaains.

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