Language Trainers Blog

New research conducted at the Aix-Marseille University in France shows that baboons have the ability to identify words. By using different combinations of four letters, the primates are showing signs of being able to recognise which combinations of letters are real words and which aren’t.

They are “actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables,” says the study’s lead research author Jonathan Grainger.

A testing area was installed into the baboon’s play area, with four touch screen computers. A mixture of real words and nonsense words were displayed on the screen, and the baboons had to touch either a green oval signs on the screen for the real words, or a blue cross to signal the nonsense words.  The baboons were free to choose when they used the computers and for how long, but were given treats when they correctly identified the real words.  The study concluded that the baboons identified the correct words three times out of four.

The researchers now believe that the ability to recognise words is related to object identification rather than spoken language skills.

Source: Science Journal

New research from the University of Haifa in Israel suggests that reading in Arabic is more challenging than reading in English or in Hebrew.

“It emerges that the contribution of the two halves of the brain to processing written language depends on the graphic and linguistic structure of these languages,” says Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim from the Learning Disabilities Department, one of two researchers involved in the study.

Each side of the brain, which are referred to as cerebral hemispheres, is responsible for different functions within language interpretation. The left side processes verbal messages, grammar and literal translation, whereas the right side functions to process spatial tasks such as contextualisation.

The results of the study show that for readers of Hebrew and English, both sides of the brain are independently involved in the task of reading. For readers of Arabic, it was found that the right side of the brain was not able to function independently of the left side.

Further information on the study can be found here.

Other peoples’ ability to pronounce your name could affect how successful you are, a new study has found. Researchers at Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences say that easy to pronounce names are generally perceived more favourably when it comes to job promotions, voting preferences and even at school.

The study, which is published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, looks at the “name pronunciation effect,” using surnames from a variety of nationalities. Amongst the easiest to pronounce was Sherman, whilst Farquharson proved more challenging to pronounce. Author Dr Simon Latham claims that the effects can be independent of the length of the name, or how unusual it is.

I adore my cats, and I’m also a huge fan of lettering and typefaces. As if by magic, popular site I Can Has Cheezburger recently posted Cats as Fonts, which I just have to share, since I feel it’s pretty accurate!

Source: icanhascheezburger.com

In other typeface trivia, I’ve never like Comic Sans, but was surprised to come across a site dedicated to getting rid of it!

Those of you hoping to go to China and only speak in English have had your plans thwarted!

The planned controversial English language town project, which was to be based in Miyun, a county in the suburbs of Beijing, was vetoed by local government officials who felt that it was discriminatory against the Chinese language and people.

The proposed European-style town was in the process of being developed by a private enterprise, with the main objective of promoting the learning of the English language to internal tourists. Visitors to the town would have only been able to communicate in English.

I realised a while ago that I could type my friend’s name with just one hand (it’s Dave, so I guess it’s not as impressive as a longer name would have been). Still, I found it interesting that I could type several words with just my left hand.

Recently on Wordnik I came across a whole list of words that you can type just using your left hand. They include:

It feels kind of weird to type a whole list of words using just one hand! Do you have any to add to the list?

Oh, in case you didn’t know, there are actually keyboards that are built specifically for one-handed typists.

There was huge excitement on the weekend, what with the royal wedding and the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. I’m not going to go all political on this blog, but I’ll just say that I don’t agree with the people who were vehemently happy about the death. One of the quotes that caught my eye on Facebook (it was posted by about half a dozen people within minutes of each other) was this:

‎”I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Admittedly, I didn’t take too much notice of this quote. I did wonder briefly what issue Dr King could have been talking about that involved the loss of so many lives, but I liked the sentiment. Soon after, the quote was cut down for Twitter – and only the first sentence remained. It was this that led Atlantic writer Megan McArdle to question the validity of the quote. It turns out that the quote was wrongly attributed to Dr King through the simple act of relocating punctuation.

The majority of the above quote was, in fact, said by Dr King. It was just the first sentence that wasn’t (and the first sentence was what was propagated on Twitter, notably by Penn Jillette, of magician duo Penn and Teller). The first sentence was a well-written comment by Facebooker Jessica Dovey, attached to  the beginning of the quote, as so:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” MLK jr

So simply placing the quotation marks around four sentences instead of the correct three has attributed more beautiful words to Martin Luther King, Jr, even though he didn’t write or say them himself.

For the full article, visit the Atlantic. For an interesting piece on quotable misquotes, visit the New Yorker.

We all know that there are some pretty weird and specific phobias out there, like asymmetriphobia, the irrational fear of things that aren’t symmetrical. I didn’t know that there were so many related to language, though. I had heard of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia – the totally unfair name for the fear of long words – but a few unknown ones caught my eye today.

There are some sort of general ones, like:

Verbophobia - the fear of words.
Logophobia – the fear of words or speaking.
Graphophobia – the fear of writing or handwriting.

Then there are some quite specific ones:

Onomatophobia - the fear of hearing a certain word or name (often to do with connotations or superstitions).
Scriptophobia - the fear of writing in public (perhaps due to not liking their own handwriting, or not being confident in their ability to spell correctly?).

The ones that we, as language learners, should definitely try to avoid are xenoglossophobia (the fear of foreign languages) and glossophobia (the fear of speaking in public or of trying to speak).

Do you know of any more language-related phobias?

With the devastating earthquake in Canterbury two days ago, there’s not much that anyone else in New Zealand is talking about. The area was hit by a bigger earthquake last September, but because it was further away and in the middle of the night, there was no loss of life. Unfortunately, the earthquake that hit on the 22nd was at lunchtime and much nearer to populated areas. Reports are still coming in of damage, loss of life, and people reported missing. The stories that are coming out from survivors are only a reflection of the devastation that the residents are going through.

Something that was brought to my attention by a friend is that this 6.3 magnitude quake is still classed as an aftershock of the 7.1 earthquake on September 4th. Usually aftershocks are associated with smaller, less destructive quakes that happen fairly soon after the initial quake. Still, experts say that the two big quakes are definitely related to each other. More interesting, though, is that, according to the Wikipedia entry: “An aftershock is a smaller earthquake that occurs after a previous large earthquake in the same area (the main shock). If an aftershock is larger than the main shock, the aftershock is redesignated as the main shock and the original main shock is redesignated as a foreshock.” I suppose some things have to be redesignated sometimes, but it would make sense to me if there were more than one word for aftershock, to include whether it was bigger or smaller in magnitude?

Linguistic anomalies aside, there is a good summary of ways to donate money and time on the NZ Herald site, and if you have an offer of a place to stay for displaced Cantabrians, register on Quake Escape. Our thoughts are with the people of Canterbury.

Chinese New Year is just a couple of days away, and it begins a two week celebration full of fascinating traditions and general merriment for Chinese people all over the world.

One of the most interesting things (for me) is the way Chinese people love to play with words. The language has a limited number of syllables, so has quite a lot of homophones. It is not uncommon for these to be switched around to make sayings or even traditions.

At Chinese New Year it is very common to see one character hung on people’s front doors. The character is 福, pronounced fu with a rising tone. The odd thing is that the character is almost always hung upside-down. This is because of the phrase 福到了, fú dào le, meaning fortune has arrived. The middle character 到 has the same pronunciation as the character 倒, which means upside down. So with one character, a whole phrase can be shown: fortune is upside-down, or fortune has arrived. Brilliant.