Day 4, CoEDL Summer School. "Isn't that weird?"

“Just because the brain looks like a bowl of porridge doesn’t mean it’s a serial computer” (Michael Arbib, I think)

The brain is really weird. I’d love to be bothered to find a more nuanced word that captures the complexity and oddity of it, but “weird” is what I’ve been using all through summer school and weird it is. And then you get neurotypology, which attempts to make connections between one weird system (neurology) and another weird system (language) and the whole thing is completely bonkers. (In a good way.)

Like this little weirdity: stated as simply as possible, the brain makes predictions, and if something doesn’t go as predicted, you get a particular kind of "blip" or “neural signature” in the electrical activity. Due to the timing and type of the signature, it’s called an N400, but the name isn’t important - just think of it as something you can see on an EEG graph when the brain is surprised.

One way you can surprise the brain is to read a sentence where the final word is wrong for the context - for example, “She buttered her bread with socks”. In this case, “socks” is obviously the wrong word for the context, and you get an N400.

But! Again in overly simple terms, if you read that sentence and the final, wrong word is capitalised - as in,

        “She buttered her bread with SOCKS”

- then you don’t get an N400. The brain isn't surprised.

The (post-hoc) story for this is that the visual system notices the capitalisation early on before it’s even properly processed the word, and alerts the rest of the system that something weird is coming up - capitalisation spoils the surprise.

Well, that makes sense. I think.

But wait! Simply drawing attention to the incorrect word doesn't seem to be enough in itself to stop the brain being surprised; for example, you don't get this effect just by highlighting the word in a different colour. In that instance, the brain is still surprised enough to produce an N400. The fact that you can also reliably surprise the brain in these studies at all, where you might suspect that the participants are starting to figure out that “hey, some of these sentences are a bit weird”, is also weird.

What could be happening is that CAPITAL LETTERS actually encode a meaning that coloured letters don’t - in the age of computers and texting, capitalisation has started to carry the extra (emotional) meaning of shouting, and something about the visual presentation of the word having meaning - as opposed to just being visually more noticeable - might be enough to interrupt the brain's usual "I'm surprised by the rest of the meaning in this sentence" thingy.

Isn’t that weird? That’s so weird. The brain is so weird.

Moving on! Rotokas, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has one of the smallest phonemic inventories (meaning, number of sounds) in the world. It used to actually hold the world record for smallest phoneme inventory, and then a researcher more recently discovered that the Rotokas language, much like the language name itself, has an ‘s’ sound in it

At this point, “Linguists are not very quantitative” is I feel a relevant observation from Nicholas Evans.

Then there's this gem - apparently one day the speakers of a particular Papuan language had a meeting and decided to switch around the gender markings on all their words - so masculine words became feminine, and vice versa. The researcher who allegedly identified this somewhat surprising (N400!!) language switch “published a paper about it without a shred of evidence, produced a dictionary exemplifying it, and then died”.

That’s the last of my summer school updates - tomorrow I’m off to the first day of the Applied Linguistics conference. (Can someone explain to me how two of the biggest linguistic events in Australia happened to have a clashing day? I really, really need a timeturner.)

Day 3, CoEDL Summer School. Have bubbles, will travel.

Only a half day at summer school today - but what a day. Somewhere on the third floor in the Babel building at Uni Melbourne, my worlds collided again - you know those times where you think, I didn’t plan this but somehow all the elements of my life have come together and I’m exactly where I should be right now?

So no flippant remarks for this #coedlsummer post, more a genuine moment to say, “whoa”.

Child language acquisition. Just what the crap do we even know about child first language acquisition (FLA) anyway?

Barb Kelly and Jill Wigglesworth laid it out in ‘Making acquisition data part of fieldwork’, and the following two maps wrinkled my tiny little brain.

In the first world map, the size of each country is scaled according to the number of languages that are native to that country:

In the second map, the countries are scaled according to the number of languages represented in the CHILDES database, which is a repository of child language data:

Spot the difference?

We know a lot about how English-, French-, and Spanish- speaking children learn language; we have a lot of recordings, a lot of documentation of children’s speech in these countries.

But these languages are pretty freaking typologically similar, meaning they have lots of similar sounds and grammatical structures and even actual vocabulary in common. So what do we know about how children learn tonal languages, or languages with clicks? How do children learn languages with word order that isn’t subject-verb-object, or languages that stack prefixes and suffixes and infixes like Lego? Do all children tell stories in the same way?

We just don’t have the documentation for any of this. When linguists go out into the field to document a language, they’re just not recording children.

This is a massive oversight, say Kelly and Wigglesworth. Let’s start recording this data along with adult language use. Record it for your own project or at least record it for someone else to use later on.

So I’m sitting there in this lecture thinking, you know what speech pathologists are really well-trained at?

(Now might be a good time to mention, I’m trained as a speech pathologist and worked in the profession for four years.)

And look, there are lots of linguistic-y things we’re not great at, but you know what speechies are really good at?

Eliciting language data from children.

So what could a speechie with a linguistics qualification (or a linguist with a speech pathology qualification) achieve?

Give me a plane ticket, a recording device, and some bubble mix*; I think I’ve got a postdoc for life.

(*The joke, by the way, is that speech pathologists love bubbles as a language elicitation tool. Felt I probably needed to explain that in-joke.

Kelly, B., & Wigglesworth, G. (2016). Making Acquisition Data Part of Fieldwork. CoEDL Summer School: Melbourne.

Day 2, CoEDL Summer School. "You could be dead!"

Remember day one, when we ate lunch in the great hall and made new friends and our classes were filled with puzzles and possibility?

Welcome to day two.

• “Imagine what could happen in four to eight seconds. Everything. You could be dead!” - on the temporal lag of fMRI data (which measures blood flow in the brain) compared to EEG data (which measures electrical activity in the cortex)

• How do you make a room full of linguists laugh? Show them a video tracking the eye- movements of someone reading a series of unambiguous German sentences with an ambiguous sentence thrown in at the end. Classic!

• (It actually is laugh-out-loud funny. The eye-tracking dot skips across the page from word to word, line to line, like a rabbit bounding through the undergrowth. Happy little eye-movement! Look at it go! But suddenly - disaster! The reader is unable to disambiguate the final sentence, and the eye-tracking dot goes over those lines again and again and again, back and forth, unable to move on, getting more and more bewildered, frightened, scared. You start cheering it on. You can do it little eye-movement! I believe in you! It’s hilarious. I wish I had the video.)

• How do you silence a room of typologists? Ask them “what is a subject?”

• How do you silence a room of phonologists? Ask them “what is a syllable?”

• Three hour phonology lectures on a sunny Friday afternoon are like a boxing match. (Probably.) You can’t lose your concentration; can’t lose your confidence. The stories I could tell. If you get knocked out you better get up again right away. The minute you start to doubt yourself, it’s all over. Mind over matter. Hang in there. Go zen. Never mind the blood, the tears. You can do this. You are the walrus. You are the left-headed foot. You are the VC syllable. You crawl out of the lecture, bruised and battered. You survived this time. You’re alive. Celebrate.

Day 1, CoEDL Summer School. "That's like a crazy amount of exuberance."

Yesterday was the last day of Nanowrimo 2016.

For those uninitiated few, ‘Nanowrimo’ stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’, an (international) event where aspiring writers challenge themselves to complete the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

Nanowrimo isn't a “competition” - you don’t “win anything”, no one “cares”. You just pursue quantity over quality like crazy in the hope of achieving some mythical fame and glory.

Nanowrimo has been the best preparation I could have ever had for thinking about writing a thesis. (Because you can’t write a good thesis without writing a bad one first.)

This November is only the second time I’ve missed Nanowrimo in 12 years, but already I can feel myself starting to favour quality over quantity again, the temptation to not write anything unless it’s “perfect”.

But they say if you fall off the horse on one side, get back on and fall off the other side. So I’m in Melbourne for the next nine days attending the CoEDL (Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language - I pronounce it like 'curdle') Summer School and the ALAA (Applied Linguistics Association of Australia) and ALS (Australian Linguistic Society) conferences; and for the next nine days I’m going to write one shitty blog post a day.

It’ll be a like a Dear Diary blog but so, so much worse.

Now, because I’ve just spent all this space writing about writing, the rest of my Day One Shitty Blog Post is going to be a highlight reel of dot points. (And because I’m lazy, all my other Shitty Blog Posts will probably be in dot points as well, fair warning)

So without further ado:

Day One: CoEDL Summer School, The Highlights:

• In a time when I was better and kinder to myself, I only enrolled in summer school units with minimal or no required reading. I was a genius. 
• “Humans like solving problems. If we do not have problems in our everyday life, we create problems.”
• I met a postgrad who is learning Welsh through the online course Say Something In Welsh. This is also how I learnt Welsh, and is how I met the friend with whom I’m staying in Melbourne. Welsh language learners are absolutely the loveliest bunch of people, and Welsh is a global language. Fight me.
• “In German, if you’re a dative object you know something’s going to happen to you, but not as bad as if you’re an accusative-object.”
• Neurotypology: is it possible to categorise languages according to the brain’s physical, actual, neural response to them?
• Some Australian languages have 4 contrasting coronals. That's a lot of contrasting coronals - "a crazy amount of exuberance." What's particularly unusual is that they tend to neutralise those contrasts in word-initial position, where most languages tend not to neutralise contrasts because of the prominence given to consonants in word-initial position. But coronals are weird, and the perceptual cues for their contrast are usually heard in the preceding vowel rather than the consonant itself - so in word-initial position where there is no preceding vowel, the hearer can't reliably hear the contrast. Hence the neutralisation.
• What's even weirder is that I understood that whole part of the lecture and I haven't studied phonetics or phonology in eight years. Full credit to my supervisor for providing me with a solid foundation in both.
• “You can buggerise around with affixes in a way you can’t buggerise around with roots.”
• They say the best part of schools and conferences is the networking opportunities. And I did take the opportunity to network with some wonderfully interesting people today. I also took the opportunity to network with my friend's dog. (I'm in Melbourne now, I can use hipster filters.)
  
  

How I, A Millennial, Afforded A Deposit On My Own Home

On the weekend Bernard Salt published a thing in The Australian suggesting that young people should stop eating smashed avocado with feta on toast and save the money for a deposit on a house instead, and millennials/millennial-allies (millenniallies?) rightly and righteously lost their #smashedavo shit over it.

This relates to my phd adventure in that I am in the somewhat anomalous position of being a post-graduate-student/millennial/single-person-mortgage-haver (I’m getting business cards made), so I thought I would write about how many Vegetarian Big Breakfasts I had to skimp on to get into property.

(Graphic: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2016/oct/18/are-millennials-actually-bad-at-saving-or-are-houses-just-unaffordable)

The answer is, of course, are you even kidding me right now?

This is how I could afford to own my own home.

First of all, I did my masters degree in Adelaide so when I came back to Perth, it made sense for me to live with my parents for a while as I settled in and looked for a job. Four months of job-hunting later I was down to about $7 in savings (actually literally) and then the heavens opened up and I got a call back and a full-time contract. Do you know how many graduates find full-time jobs four months after graduation? 68%.  Good luck, bitches!!

It occurred to me at that point that paying for a mortgage in this city would be about as affordable as paying rent if I could get the money together for a deposit, so after I started work I spent another eight months rent-free at my parents house. They were able to put me up rent-free because they’re middle class homeowners who got free education in the 70s. I paid for my phone bill, I cooked dinner for them occasionally, I bought a secondhand car, I got $320 taken out of my pay every fortnight for my HECS debt (hahahaha nope), and I saved the rest.

Go on, millennials! Live with your parents! But also, grow up! But save money! But don’t be a sponge! Why are you like this? What’s wrong with you?

The next thing that happened is that I was lucky enough to have my contract converted into a permanent position. Banks like you to have a permanent position when you’re applying for a mortgage because it makes you look like you have a stable, reliable income. If you don’t have a permanent position, you need to show several years of contract work. Do you know how many millennials are working in permanent positions? Do you know how many Australians have permanent positions?

Nope.

So I took my savings and my permanent job and my First Home Owners Grant (fun fact! The FHOG has dropped from $7k to $3k since September 2013!) to a mortgage broker and he said I was actually a good candidate for a home loan and he told me how much I could afford and I politely laughed in his face and said I was not going to spend 40% of my post-tax income on a mortgage, thank you. When my parents bought their house in the 80s (back when houses were about as expensive as a nice holiday, I'm assuming) they could only get a loan up to 25% of just my dad’s income, on the assumption that my mum was probably going to get pregnant and have babies and quit work anyway.

Thanks for the financial advice, middle-aged mortgage broker!

The second mortgage broker I saw was a bit more realistic and gave me an upper limit that would be about 30% of my income and I thought that was reasonable and I could work with that. (This turned out to be a Very Good Decision because when I decided to go back to uni I had juuust enough financial flexibility to afford it.)

Look, I don’t want to be vulgar about money by being too specific but I think it’s a bit late in the piece for that - my upper limit for property was $200,000.

Do you know what you can get in Perth for $200k?

Sweet FA.

Actually that’s not entirely true - you can get a kind of nice one bedroom apartment in a kind of nice suburb, which is what I ended up with, and I need to tell you now that I absolutely love my place.

But there's still more to the story. I had what I thought was enough to cover a wee 5% deposit, but then it turned out that at 48m2 my place was too small for a home loan with a 5% deposit and I would have to put down a 10% deposit instead. Did you know that sometimes if you can’t afford a big enough property you need more money to pay for a larger deposit?

Back to my parents. I borrowed like another $8k from them, which again they could afford because they are middle-aged, middle-class home owners. I don’t know what I would have done if they didn’t have that kind of money on hand. Saved for another 6 to 12 months while the price of houses went up around me? Waited until I got married so I could buy property on a dual income? (Don’t even get me started on that one.) Stopped eating smashed avocadoes?

Listen. Home ownership is one of the most stressful things to happen to you because you’re the only one responsible when your hot water tank leaks all over the kitchen and you get council rates on top of your phone bill and electricity bill and water bill and you have a huge hole in the wall from that time you tried to put up a painting and the brickwork was just like, not today! But when you come home to your own place at night and you get to hang wallpaper in the bathroom if you so choose and you can decide not to clean under the sink for a while and no one cares if you own a pet and occasionally you get this tremendous sense of security - it is honestly one of the things I am most grateful for in my life.

Here’s the bottom line. I, a millennial, can afford to own property because I’m middle class and I'm lucky. I got a middle class education and a middle class job that miraculously turned into a permanent position and I sponged off my middle class parents for a year and then borrowed even more money from them and now I live in a tiny box.

But by all means, blame avocado on toast.

Screw Internal Motivation I Am Externally Motivated By Fake Virtual Trees: On Procrastination and Productivity

First of all, I hate the word “productivity”.

Productivity smacks to me of a kind of capitalist ablism, where people’s worth is determined by how much they produce. It also has connotations of quantity over quality, of tweaking factory assembly lines, of getting up two hours early and multitasking and the constant fear of wasting a single second of your life.

(Apparently the Ancient Greeks reckoned that anything that is not a waste of time is not worth doing. I like the Ancient Greeks.)

But I’m also very much inspired by the idea that “Leonardo da Vinci had as many hours in his day as you”; and I’m into the dignity of work; and I think if you’re lucky enough to be a sentient being with opposable thumbs and/or speech and/or some equivalent of these, then using part of your life to create stuff is A Good And Noble Thing.

So I want to be productive; but Getting Shit Done makes me anxious.

Like, I look at the work I need to do and I panic because I remember that every other time I’ve sat down to try and accomplish something, I’ve instead checked my phone 17 times and then gone for coffee and then stopped for a “quick chat” (lies!) with someone in the hallway and then I’ve gone to the bathroom twice and I’m like well clearly I’m not a person who gets work done quickly and easily so why should I, a loser, think that this time will be any different?

I’m scared that I’m going to distract myself into uselessness.

In the end I do actually do quite a bit of work. We all do. Well, most of us. But we spread it out over the maximum time possible and intersperse it with a crap tonne of facebook (guilty) and youtube (so guilty) and other distractions and at the end of the day we have no sense of achievement, no sense of what we’ve done, or if we've even done anything at all.

So anyway, I’m not going to write a manifesto on productivity here, but I do want to write about one particular thing that I have found helpful with the anxiety bit, which is:

Don’t do more; just be more clear about what you have done.

Because it's not the amount of work I end up wringing out of my pores that worries me; it's all the things I mix in with that work that makes me uncertain about whether I can concentrate enough to do what I need to do or whether this time, this time I'm just going to fail.

Being more clear about what I’ve done means trying to work in a more focused way over shorter periods of time and keeping a record of it.

I get that “work in a more focused way” sounds like “just don’t procrastinate!” which is really like saying “that thing that is a problem for you, don’t do that thing”, but I think my version has a positive spin on it that’s helpful to me, and also, there’s an app for it.

Look, you do you; the Pomodoro technique is great for this, and there are many other similar options. I use an app on my phone called Forest and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Very simply, you set a timer on Forest for 15 minutes or 1 hour or however long you want to do a work session, and if you don’t leave the app in that time, you get a virtual tree to add to your virtual forest. If you do leave the app, the tree dies. And you know what, screw internal motivation, I am externally motivated by fake virtual trees.




This works for me because when I grow virtual trees, I’m creating evidence to prove to myself that I have done this before and I can do it again.

Now, obviously using the Forest app on my phone doesn’t stop me procrastinating on my computer (although there is a browser version) so I do need a bit of will power to say, “when the tree is growing I’m only going to do my work”. But usually that’s enough for me.

It also makes it easier for me to decide whether I’m going to procrastinate in other ways  - like if someone wants to ask me about something, I’m like “yup, I’m just growing a tree now, can you ask me 12 minutes” or however long I have left on my timer.

And maybe 12 minutes later after I’ve grown that tree, the “quick question” turns into an hour long lunch break but that’s fine too. Again, the point isn’t to do more work - the point is to be clearer about what I’ve done by concentrating it and keeping a record of it. (”In that 30 minute session I read some of that chapter and I wasn’t distracted by questions and I have a cherry blossom tree to prove it”.)

And I find time-based goals are easier to achieve than outcome-based goals. “Read this chapter without getting distracted” is too hard; what if I never finish the chapter? “Read for 20 minutes without checking my phone” is much more achievable, and the time will pass either way.

The focus isn’t on changing your habits to be more productive; the focus is on creating evidence to use against your anxiety to give you the confidence to produce in the first place. That’s my one piece of productivity advice.

Why Not Both? On Bilingualism and Bisexuality

I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for ever, about the similarities between bisexuality and bilingualism.

First I wrote a list of 5 Things That Bisexuals And Bilinguals Have In Common:

#1: fabulous
#2: ninjas
#3: fabulous ninjas
#4: so good looking
#5: we love Freddie Mercury

It was a pretty dumb list.

What’s much more interesting are the brilliantly weird things that people say about bisexuality and bilingualism, and why they say them, and what effect they have.  

So in queer and linguistic theory, we talk about “Bisexual Erasure” and “The Monolingual Mindset” respectively, to explain the brilliantly weird things people say.

Bisexual Erasure is like when a famous lady who has previously only been known to date famous men is seen in the streets holding hands with another famous lady and the media headline is FAMOUS LADY COMES OUT AS FAMOUS GAY.

The Monolingual Mindset is like in Australia where you can speak any language you like as long as it’s English.

But I’m starting to think these are just alternative names for the same lens through which the world is viewed  - the same monocle, if you will.

This monocle works in a couple of ways.

The first is that it says you can only be one thing.

The second is that it says you can be two things, but only if you are each of those things in the same way that people who are only one of those things are one of those things; and if you’re not both of those things in the same way that people who are only one of those things are one of those things, then you’re not really both of those things - which is the same as saying you can only be one thing.

Simple, right?

Let’s see how this monocle works by having a look at some fun things people say about bisexuals and seeing how they apply to bilinguals!

“Pick a side  - are you gay or straight?”

You guys. Get suspicious when someone asks you an either/or question.

“Do you want to stop people drowning at sea or do you want to stop terrorists blowing up Australia?”
“Do you want to be fat or do you want to be happy?”
“Do you like cats or dogs?”

Both! The answer is both!

The idea of picking a side is just weird. Like what if you decide you’re only attracted to women and then you meet a really awesome guy but oh shit, you picked the wrong side, too bad, thanks for playing.

People can only want, or like, or be one thing; and oh boy, they can definitely only speak one language.

We’re really good at wanting people to speak only one language in Australia. Just look at the ‘4 hours of English’ policy in Northern Territory schools. Research shows that the best way to provide bilingual education is to start the first years of school in the home language, and then add the national language in a step wise fashion until you finish school in the national language with a strong grasp of both languages. But in the NT, the government were like ‘nope’ and instead mandated that the first four hours of school each day for all year levels had to be taught in English and only at the end of the day, the hottest part of the day, most tired ‘I want to go home I’m so done’ part of the day, could students be taught in their Indigenous languages.

Good work, government.

Pick a language. Pick a gender. Pick a side.

You can only be one thing.

Now here’s the second way the monocle works - again, let’s start with a weird thing people say to bisexuals.

“Okay, you’re bisexual. So you like men and women equally?”

(Fun variation: "how many men/women have you slept with?" Appropriate questions, people! Appropriate questions!)

This question makes us feel awkward because a lot of bisexuals are not attracted to men and women 50/50! Shh, don’t tell anyone!

Aaaactually it’s not a national secret, it’s right here in Robyn Ochs’ seminal definition of bisexuality:

“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

But this is not what people are thinking of when they ask about your preference! Usually what they’re asking is “are you really gay or are you really straight?” It’s a disguised version of question 1. Because unless you answer that yes you do like men and women equally, you’ve basically admitted you’re not a “true” bisexual. Thanks for playing.

It turns out the same is true for bilinguals.

If you're bilingual, you speak both languages fluently, right?

Francois Grosjean published this really important paper in 1989 about how bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one person. (Literally the paper is called “Neurolinguists beware! The Bilingual is Not Two Monolinguals In One Person”.)

One of Grosjean’s big arguments is that when we look at bilinguals through the monolingual mindset, we judge bilinguals’ language abilities according to monolingual standards. 

“The ‘real’ bilingual is seen as the person who is equally and fully fluent in two languages; he or she is the “ideal”, the “true”, the “balanced”, the “perfect” bilingual”. […] All the others, who in fact represent the vast majority of people who use two languages in their everyday lives, are “not really” bilingual or are “special types” of bilinguals.” (p.4)

So a lot of bilinguals aren’t fully fluent in each of their two (or more) languages - bilinguals can have different language proficiencies in different situations. But the monolingual mindset says that anyone who is not fully fluent in both languages is “not really” bilingual; the same way that anyone who is not equally attracted to or has had the same experience with both men and women is “not really” bisexual.

This is why the second way the monocle works is basically the same as the first. On the surface it seems to allow for the possibility that someone could be bisexual or bilingual, but it defines bisexuality as the combination of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and it defines bilingualism as  monolingualism x2.  The criterion for being bisexual/bilingual is based on monosexual/monolingual standards, and if you don’t meet those standards (and very few people do), then you’re not really bilingual or bisexual so pick a side, dammit.

Why is this monocle view of the world so damaging?

Because, duh.

Also because people who are told they can  like men or women but not both are being asked to deny part of who they are.

Because people who are told to speak only one language are denying part of who they are.

Because people who aren’t equally fluent in both their languages may refuse to speak one language at all out of embarrassment that they don’t speak it “perfectly”.

Because people who are attracted to men and women but not equally are made to feel like they're not qualified to call themselves bisexual, so they don’t seek out other bisexuals in a community, but they never really belong in the gay or straight community either.

And really, ultimately, because people aren’t only one thing and when we reduce people to only one thing - whether one true thing or one false, terrible thing (women should be demure, refugees are terrorists, autistic people are sociopaths) - we stop seeing ourselves as fully human; but to be fully human is to be large, and to contain multitudes. (Thank you, Uncle Walt.)

(Oh hi! If you're know me personally and you have ever said any of these things, please don't feel this post is about you! It's not. I will always give you the benefit of the doubt that you have would never say these things to be hurtful. Also, I have used a lot (so much!) gender binary language in the post, for the lazy excuse that it 'flowed better'. I'm sorry, please forgive me.)