Inside the fiercest debate in linguistics—Universal Grammar. Plus, why your brain can process short text messages so quickly.

I’ll kick off this week’s digest with another stunning infographic from Marco Giannini of Dataspoiler, about Italian place names (toponyms):

You can see all Marco’s linguistics projects, and read the details for this one, here:

project Linguistics - Dataspoiler

for La Lettura – Corriere della Sera VisualLinguistics 2020 – Present MAPPING SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS OF LINGUISTICS FOR THE LARGER AUDIENCE Within the Sunday cultural insert of Corriere della Sera newspaper, Visual Data column has been for more than a decade an important reference for information design, promoting an experimental approach to visual rendering of data. This section […]

Dataspoiler

Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Dispatch, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics.

🗞️ Current Linguistics

Recently published research in linguistics.

It seems our brains are even faster at processing short messages like texts than we previously realized. New research suggests that we process short messages in a fashion similar to how we perceive visual scenes, taking it all in at a single glance. Interestingly, this is the same skill that speed reading attempts to train you to do.

Your brain processes short messages super quickly

New research suggests “the human brain’s processing capacity for language may be much faster than what we might think.”

FuturityJames Devitt-NYU

The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Bottom–Up and Top–Down Processing during At-a-Glance Reading

Like all domains of cognition, language processing is affected by top–down knowledge. Classic evidence for this is missing blatant errors in the signal. In sentence comprehension, one instance is failing to notice word order errors, such as transposed words in the middle of a sentence: “you that read wrong” ([Mirault et al., 2018][1]). Our brains seem to fix such errors, since they are incompatible with our grammatical knowledge, but how do our brains do this? Following behavioral work on inner transpositions, we flashed four-word sentences for 300 ms using rapid parallel visual presentation ([Snell and Grainger, 2017][2]). We compared magnetoencephalography responses to fully grammatical and reversed sentences (24 human participants: 21 females, 4 males). The left lateral language cortex robustly distinguished grammatical and reversed sentences starting at 213 ms. Thus, the influence of grammatical knowledge begun rapidly after visual word form recognition ([Tarkiainen et al., 1999][3]). At the earliest stage of this neural “sentence superiority effect,” inner transpositions patterned between grammatical and reversed sentences, showing evidence that the brain initially “noticed” the error. However, 100 ms later, inner transpositions became indistinguishable from grammatical sentences, suggesting at this point, the brain had “fixed” the error. These results show that after a single glance at a sentence, syntax impacts our neural activity almost as quickly as higher-level object recognition is assumed to take place ([Cichy et al., 2014][4]). The earliest stage involves detailed comparisons between the bottom–up input and grammatical knowledge, while shortly afterward, top–down knowledge can override an error in the stimulus. [1]: #ref-25 [2]: #ref-37 [3]: #ref-40 [4]: #ref-5

Journal of NeuroscienceIndex by author

• Fallon & Pylkkänen. 2024. Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input. Science Advances 10(43). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr9951

Does ChatGPT have the same grammaticality judgments as humans? Does it find the same kinds of expressions grammatically acceptable or unacceptable? A new study aims to find out:

ChatGPT’s Grammar Judgments vs. Linguists and Laypeople

In recent years, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has revolutionized the way we interact with language technology. Among these developments, language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT h

ScienmagSCIENMAG

(Note that the above article is pretty clearly an AI-generated summary, as all of Scienmag’s articles seem to be.)

Grammaticality representation in ChatGPT as compared to linguists and laypeople - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Grammaticality representation in ChatGPT as compared to linguists and laypeople

NatureZhuang Qiu

📃 This Week’s Reads

Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.

What makes Canadian English unique? The Duolingo blog has your answer. Personally, having lived in Edmonton for two years, my favorite Canadian expression that I discovered was bunny hug, which is the term they use in Saskatchewan for a hoodie! 🐇🤗

What makes Canadian English unique?

Canadian English has some things in common with American English, but it’s a dialect all its own! Here’s what makes it unique.

Duolingo BlogDune Dills

Linguist Damián Blasi talks about the monumental task of cataloging the world’s 7,000+ languages as part of the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages for Sapiens.org:

Tackling the Impossibility—and Necessity—of Counting the World’s Languages

A language scientist delves into historic and current efforts to catalog the planet’s 7,000-plus languages, uncovering colorful tales.

SAPIENSKeridwen Cornelius

The World Atlas of Languages | UNESCO WAL

UNESCO WAL

Noam Chomsky once wrote, “We have very strong reasons to believe that all possible human languages are very similar; a Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants.” Michael Ferber in his Speaking of Words column discusses whether there’s any truth to this claim:

Are All Languages Alike?

It sounds absurd even to ask if all languages are alike, or even somewhat alike, as anyone studying a foreign language for the first time will attest. Who could say such a thing?

InDepthNH.orgMichael Ferber

On that note, PBS recently created a short (13-minute) video about the debate over Universal Grammar, which includes a lot of the sociopolitics behind the debate too. To be quite honest, it’s a pretty embarrassing episode in the history of linguistics where scholars treated each other as loathsome miscreants, but it makes for engaging journalism I guess:

Dialectal variation has always been a weak spot for speech recognition and synthesis technologies as well as AI, because the majority dialect in the training data will wind up overshadowing most dialectal variation:

AI systems are built on English – but not the kind most of the world speaks

AI models too often produce a monolithic version of English that erases variation.

The ConversationCeleste Rodriguez Louro

So it’s nice to see ChatGPT learning how to speak Aussie:

Crikey, ChatGPT’s gone bush! How AI is learning the art of Aussie slang

Aussie slang is rich, weird and wildly specific—so what happens when artificial intelligence tries to learn it?

The ConversationRoss Yates

Do you experience sounds or music visually as certain shapes? Or do you hear colors? You might have synesthesia! Some synesthetes also have extrasensory associations with words, a kind of linguistic synesthesia. And BBC’s Instant Genius podcast has an episode all about this neat phenomenon:

Instant Genius Podcast: Do you have synaesthesia? Why some of us can taste words - BBC Science Focus Magazine

Do you experience sounds or music visually as certain shapes? Or ‘hear’ colours? This is called synaesthesia. An expert explains all.

BBC Science Focus MagazineJason Goodyer

The latest issue of National Geographic has a feature about the Hittite Empire, and of course you can’t talk about the Hittite Empire without talking about Hittite language and the trove of cuneiform tablets that have given linguists and historians incredible insights into the early Indo-Europeans and the Proto-Indo-European language:

The Hittite Empire transformed the world—and then the world forgot it

They fought the Egyptians, sacked Babylon, and built elaborate cities. Then the Hittites vanished. Today, new discoveries are restoring the legend of a forgotten superpower.

History

📚 Books & Media

New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.

The Economist reviews the new book Proto: How one ancient language went global:

The language that changed the world

Around half of the world’s population speaks a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. Most know little about it

The EconomistThe Economist

The author of Proto, Laura Spinney, also just published an article with The Guardian asking, “Could the English language ever die out?”:

The big idea: could the English language die?

For the time being it’s dominant – but as the Romans could tell you, nothing lasts for ever

The GuardianLaura Spinney

🗃️ Resources

Maps, databases, lists, etc. on language and linguistics.

The First Peoples’ Cultural Council of British Columbia has put together a guide for journalists on reporting on indigenous and minority languages, language endangerment, and language revitalization:

Say it with Respect: A Journalists’ Guide - First Peoples Cultural Council

Say it with Respect: A Journalists’ Guide to Reporting on Indigenous & Minoritized Languages by ELP and FPCC.

First Peoples Cultural Council

Ever wonder about the etymology of a word but don’t know where to find it? Check out Etymonline.com. It’s a huge, very accessible database of word histories. While the compiler doesn’t include sources for the etymologies, he does list them here. So while I don’t recommend using Etymonline for scholarly research because its sources aren’t traceable, I do highly recommend it for everyday use. It’s a great place to start when diving in to a particular etymology.

Online Etymology Dictionary

The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet’s go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms.

That’s all for this week! I’ve actually mostly caught up on the most recent news and research in linguistics now, so the Current Linguistics portion of the digest might continue to be a little shorter from here, but don’t fret—I still have an absolutely ginormous backlog of interesting articles and resources to share with you! There really is a never-ending supply of fascinating things to explore with language.

Have a great week!

~ Danny