Seeking language experiments!
December 3, 2009 2:04 PM Subscribe
Linguisticsfilter: I'm looking for experiments that reveal something surprising or fascinating about the way we use and respond to language.
Here's an example of what I'm looking for: in an experiment by Donald Rubin, undergraduate students were given a short, pre-recorded lecture by a native English speaker. A photograph representing the speaker accompanied the lecture; for half the subjects, the photograph depicted an Asian woman, and for the other half it was a similarly-styled Caucasian woman. The recording played for both groups was identical, yet the students who thought they were listening to an Asian woman rated her accent much stronger than the other students. What's more, they scored significantly worse on a test of lecture comprehension.
There's another experiment I had in mind, where students at a college in a Southern state were given one of two speeches. The content and speaker were the exact same for both groups, but at one the speaker used a Southern accent and at the other he used a standard American English accent. The students were then asked to rate the speaker on a number of qualities, such as articulateness, intelligence, competence, integrity, and so on. Basically they rated the speaker much higher on all qualities when he used the standard accent, with the exception of friendliness. I thought this was surprising because the students themselves spoke with Southern accents and I would have expected them to show preference for their own variety.
If you know of any language experiments that have similarly startling or interesting findings, please share! The examples I used have a sociolinguistic focus, but I'm interested in other areas of linguistics as well.
Thank you!
Here's an example of what I'm looking for: in an experiment by Donald Rubin, undergraduate students were given a short, pre-recorded lecture by a native English speaker. A photograph representing the speaker accompanied the lecture; for half the subjects, the photograph depicted an Asian woman, and for the other half it was a similarly-styled Caucasian woman. The recording played for both groups was identical, yet the students who thought they were listening to an Asian woman rated her accent much stronger than the other students. What's more, they scored significantly worse on a test of lecture comprehension.
There's another experiment I had in mind, where students at a college in a Southern state were given one of two speeches. The content and speaker were the exact same for both groups, but at one the speaker used a Southern accent and at the other he used a standard American English accent. The students were then asked to rate the speaker on a number of qualities, such as articulateness, intelligence, competence, integrity, and so on. Basically they rated the speaker much higher on all qualities when he used the standard accent, with the exception of friendliness. I thought this was surprising because the students themselves spoke with Southern accents and I would have expected them to show preference for their own variety.
If you know of any language experiments that have similarly startling or interesting findings, please share! The examples I used have a sociolinguistic focus, but I'm interested in other areas of linguistics as well.
Thank you!
I have a few ideas (and will have more when I sleep on it), but, some questions first that might help people answer this:
-Are you just looking to know of the studies?
-Are you hoping to demonstrate them to an audience, in a very short (30s-5min) fashion?
-If so, what's the audience's background, intellectually?
Some basic psycholinguistic demos:
-categorical perception
-McGurk Effect
-Sine wave speech
-Semantic priming
One I have no citation/webpage/name for, but I've seen work on it (I think) is about the ordering of adjectives. Let's say you have a pair of red houses that you're showing the audience. The one on the left is bigger than the one on the right. Ask them to write down how they'd describe the one on the left. Overwhelmingly, people should have "the big red house", not "the red big house". According to my quick Googling, this is sometimes called adjective/adjectival ordering.
By age 6 months, infants are already sensitive to the phonetic categories of their native language, while losing sensitivity to contrasts not present in said language. (Kuhl et al 1987) And even in the first few days/month of life outside the womb, infants show evidence of experiencing some aspects of language (particularly prosody, low-filtered) inside the womb. (Decasper and Spence 1986 but also lots by Melanie Spence)
I could go on & on...
posted by knile at 3:06 PM on December 3, 2009 [2 favorites]
-Are you just looking to know of the studies?
-Are you hoping to demonstrate them to an audience, in a very short (30s-5min) fashion?
-If so, what's the audience's background, intellectually?
Some basic psycholinguistic demos:
-categorical perception
-McGurk Effect
-Sine wave speech
-Semantic priming
One I have no citation/webpage/name for, but I've seen work on it (I think) is about the ordering of adjectives. Let's say you have a pair of red houses that you're showing the audience. The one on the left is bigger than the one on the right. Ask them to write down how they'd describe the one on the left. Overwhelmingly, people should have "the big red house", not "the red big house". According to my quick Googling, this is sometimes called adjective/adjectival ordering.
By age 6 months, infants are already sensitive to the phonetic categories of their native language, while losing sensitivity to contrasts not present in said language. (Kuhl et al 1987) And even in the first few days/month of life outside the womb, infants show evidence of experiencing some aspects of language (particularly prosody, low-filtered) inside the womb. (Decasper and Spence 1986 but also lots by Melanie Spence)
I could go on & on...
posted by knile at 3:06 PM on December 3, 2009 [2 favorites]
Here it is:
Linguistic Profiling Pilot Studies on Restaurants, Car Dealerships, And Apartment Rentals
posted by a.steele at 3:13 PM on December 3, 2009
Linguistic Profiling Pilot Studies on Restaurants, Car Dealerships, And Apartment Rentals
posted by a.steele at 3:13 PM on December 3, 2009
If you know of any language experiments that have similarly startling or interesting findings, please share!
I guess I'm having trouble finding a way to answer this, because there are literally at least tens of thousands, and probably more, experiments that have been done on language since experiments have been being done (I was coming up with estimates that maybe even that many are run in a single year). Now many of these probably won't be interesting except in a very specific domain, but the number of interesting (by some measure) experiments is still quite large and hard to narrow down without specific requests. I would recommend that in order to get a sense of what is out there (if that is your goal), you would be better served by taking a course on psycholinguistics, looking through a textbook, or at least looking at an introductory course's website/syllabus to see what someone doing this research classifies as the most important work. This will help you also evaluate what actually is startling/interesting. (As a linguist, neither of the examples you list strike me as extremely startling or interesting in linguistic or psychological way; rather, the crucial properties that they have is that they are easily explained to anyone with just a few sentences, and make a catchy & socially relevant/interesting point.)
Here are a few textbooks that would be approachable; here is a course with lots of primary source references.
posted by advil at 4:49 PM on December 3, 2009
I guess I'm having trouble finding a way to answer this, because there are literally at least tens of thousands, and probably more, experiments that have been done on language since experiments have been being done (I was coming up with estimates that maybe even that many are run in a single year). Now many of these probably won't be interesting except in a very specific domain, but the number of interesting (by some measure) experiments is still quite large and hard to narrow down without specific requests. I would recommend that in order to get a sense of what is out there (if that is your goal), you would be better served by taking a course on psycholinguistics, looking through a textbook, or at least looking at an introductory course's website/syllabus to see what someone doing this research classifies as the most important work. This will help you also evaluate what actually is startling/interesting. (As a linguist, neither of the examples you list strike me as extremely startling or interesting in linguistic or psychological way; rather, the crucial properties that they have is that they are easily explained to anyone with just a few sentences, and make a catchy & socially relevant/interesting point.)
Here are a few textbooks that would be approachable; here is a course with lots of primary source references.
posted by advil at 4:49 PM on December 3, 2009
Sorry, I couldn't find a citation on Google, but perhaps someone can confirm/deny this: I saw once in a documentary that young Russian children use the word for "book" that suggests it (the book) is the actor, and they (the children) are the object of the action.
posted by forthright at 7:35 PM on December 3, 2009
posted by forthright at 7:35 PM on December 3, 2009
the one knile is looking for I think is by Noam Chomsky about universal grammar, and uses the "big red balloon" as the example. This is only a partial answer to that. Here's a link with some info on that.
Discovering the Human Language “Colorless Green Ideas”> This link also has a list of names of linguists whose research might also be interesting.
posted by kch at 9:27 PM on December 3, 2009
posted by kch at 9:27 PM on December 3, 2009
small experiment I read about years ago (don't remember where exactly) - but, funnily enough, it works!
write down - "unionised", and have different individuals pronounce it out loud
if they have a scientific background/education they will (typically) pronounce it "un-ionised"
if they have another background/education they will (again, typically) pronounce it "union-ised"
posted by alchemist at 12:56 AM on December 4, 2009
write down - "unionised", and have different individuals pronounce it out loud
if they have a scientific background/education they will (typically) pronounce it "un-ionised"
if they have another background/education they will (again, typically) pronounce it "union-ised"
posted by alchemist at 12:56 AM on December 4, 2009
William Labov's landmark social dialect study definitely goes on this list.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 3:53 AM on December 4, 2009
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 3:53 AM on December 4, 2009
You might be interested in the work of Stanford's Lera Boroditsky:
posted by kristi at 10:34 AM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]
What is the relationship between language and thought?You can download several of her papers, including "English and Mandarin speakers' conceptions of time" and "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination".
Do people who speak different languages think differently about the world? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?
We've looked at the influence of language on the patterns of early vocabulary acquisition in English and Navajo, on thinking about time in English, Greek, Spanish and Mandarin, on color memory and color perception in English and Russian, on people's thoughts about the gender of toasters (and other inanimate objects) in Spanish and German, and on people's representations of actions and events in Indonesian, Mandarin, Turkish, and Russian.
posted by kristi at 10:34 AM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by a.steele at 2:25 PM on December 3, 2009