Archive for the ‘Psychology of language’ Category

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Literary aphasia

March 4, 2012

An addendum to my posting on Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love, about her husband Paul’s aphasia:

Paul’s tortured search for words reminded me of work by Samuel Beckett, the wild and woolly Irish playwright, novelist, member of the French Resistance during WWII, and literary assistant to James Joyce. In his best-known play, Waiting for Godot, Beckett describes God’s inscrutability as “divine aphasia,” and God utters such aphasic gibberist as “Quaquaquaqua.” [compare Paul’s mem mem mem mem] I had a new appreciation for Beckett’s character Watt, who speaks with aphasic peculiarity, jumbling word order, letters, and sense until they’re cockeyed and no one can understand him. (p. 175)

Things get worse.

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Aphasia

March 1, 2012

Two things coming together: my reading Diane Ackerman’s moving book One Hundred Names for Love (2011), about her husband’s aphasia following on a stroke; and a Stanford Report piece on Mark Applebaum’s performance piece Aphasia. Both stress the expressive deficits characteristic of aphasias and the distress these deficits produce in the aphasic.

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Posted in Books, Psychology of language | 2 Comments »

Implicit attention

January 10, 2012

When I awoke on Sunday, a random fact (probably a dream remnant) claimed front seat in my thoughts:

Zez Confrey is the composer of “Kitten on the Keys”.

Remarkable that I should have known this in the first place — though I do have one spirited performance of the piece on my iTunes (by Alan Feinberg on his album Fascinatin’ Rhythm) — and even more remarkable that I retrieved the memory. Why?

Well, Zez is about as Z-heavy a name as you can get (and even more compact than Zardoz). Fact is, I notice words with a Z in them, especially names, and they get lodged in my memory.

Actually, I notice them even when I’m not reading text, and attending to it, but merely noticing the text in passing, at a glance. I don’t think I’m looking for names with Zs, but even when my attention is focused on something else, my mind takes me there. I’m implicitly attending to the letter Z.

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Posted in Psychology of language | 5 Comments »

Word surprise

October 27, 2011

Every so often, I come across someone reacting with surprise and puzzlement at some word or idiom — because it’s unfamiliar to them (they don’t recall having heard it before), because it strikes them as rare, because they find it opaque, because it sounds peculiar, whatever. Often the object of surprise is a reasonably common and long-standing usage, so that the complaint is itself puzzling.

In this vein, Michael Thomas cried out on Facebook on Sunday:

what the hell kind of word is “RECENCY”?

Melinda Shore weighed in with the first response (“It’s an excellent word!”); Ken Callicott playfully ventured the answer “A noun?”; and Garabato Abrelatas  Inalámbrico Arvejas thought to check a good dictionary:

Huh. OED dates it to 1620. I guess it’s pretty cromulent.

The other responses were all over the map. I’ll get to them eventually, but first a straightforward answer to Mike Thomas’s question.

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Posted in Derivation, Morphology, Psychology of language, Usage attitudes | 7 Comments »

“phonetic sounds”

October 17, 2011

Perri Klass in the NYT Science Times on October 11th, on “Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language”, reports on research on bilingual babies by Patricia Kuhl (University of Washington), Janet Werker (University of British Columbia), and Ellen Bialystok (York University in Toronto), focusing on Kuhl’s work. The background for the current research is this well-known finding about the development of “phonemic hearing” in monolinguals:

… the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

Here, Klass is struggling to talk about an important technical concept — phonemic distinctness — but without using the technical terminology or explaining the concept in a way the reader can understand correctly.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language in the media, Phonology, Psychology of language, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »

TIA or whatever

February 16, 2011

Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman reported on (in a posting entitled “Heavy burtation”)

one of the most widely discussed aspects of the Grammy Awards ceremony … the painful-to-watch on-camera aphasic episode of Serene Branson, a reporter for CBS news

It’s distressing indeed, and some of the responses to the story are even more distressing, amounting to infantile mockery of the sort directed at crips and retards. (Even on Language Log. The LLoggers have now spent some time deleting the worst of the dreck, though this means checking the comments every few hours.)

It’s not clear what the ultimate cause of Branson’s on-camera aphasic episode might have been, but it certainly looks like the immediate cause is a disturbance in blood flow to parts of the brain, which itself could result from any number of sources: a mini-stroke (either ischemic or hemorrhagic) or other insult producing temporary aphasia, or (very likely) some event leading to a transient ischemic attack (TIA) with temporary aphasia as one of its symptoms. These things can be very hard to diagnose, and the symptoms will be different depending on where in the brain the blood flow is disturbed.

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Posted in Psychology of language | 1 Comment »

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