Day 7, ALAA/ALS joint day. Middle-finger pointing, money, and making an online shell for language lessons

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Pretty sure Shakespeare was talking about the ALAA/ALS joint conference day.

The really great thing about attending not one but two linguistics conferences at the same time is finding out the amazing scope of linguistics, all the different things that we do in this big crazy family.

The tricky part is attending all these different sessions and not changing your phd topic afterwards.

For example, children’s pointing gestures in Murrinhpatha. There’s a whole area of study of the development of how we point at things, and there seem to be some “universals” like using your index finger, but then is this really a universal? In some language groups, people point with an open palm, or with an eyebrow, or with their lip. Apparently “nobody” points with their middle finger but that’s not a universal either (linguists probably ought to stop using words like “universals”, “everybody”, and “nobody”). Arrernte speakers for example use their middle finger for pointing, according to David Wilkins, and according to Barbara Kelly’s group it seems that Murrinhpatha kids do it as well.

This is a really interesting observation to me because I’m sure I’ve seen vaguely white English-speaking kids occasionally use their middle finger for pointing, to the chagrin of their parents, and certainly there are whole internet forums of parents who are worried about how they can stop their child from pointing with their middle-finger lest they be read as rude - but the point (so to speak) seems to be that this kind of finger-pointing isn’t a transmitted behaviour. That is, English-speaking kids don’t learn to point with their middle-finger from their parents, they just do it almost by accident.

So first of all, is this actually something English-speaking kids sometimes do? And if it is, does it have the same (morphological) properties as Arrernte and Murrinhpatha pointing? And if this is the case but it isn’t transmitted, would we characterise it as sort of the finger-pointing equivalent of a kid having the potential to produce all the sounds of the world and then having their phonetic inventory shaped by the language they’re exposed to? Hmm…!!

The plenary keynote was from Asif Agha, about ‘money talk’ - how we talk about money, but more importantly how how we talk about money makes money money - if you see what I mean. Objects (coins, notes, shells, salt) function as money only if other people do the same things with them, and the act of using them as money makes them so. I’m not going to pretend to understand anything more about discursive semiotics (there are more things in heaven…), but I will just speak to something I do have authority on, which is that Sir Edmund Hillary, as he appears on the New Zealand five dollar note, was A Bit Of A Babe:

A great set of sessions in the afternoon about Indigenous languages: the (sometimes sordid) history of language policy, the national curriculum, and the affordances and constraints that places on bilingual education in the NT (Samantha Disbray - Charles Darwin University); trends in Indigenous language usage which turned into a fascinating conversation about how you would even collect language use data in the Australian census (not least considering the last time we had a census; remember that?) (Maria Karidakis - University of Melbourne); and the creating of an online 'shell' (like a basic framework into which you can add content for any language) for Indigenous language and culture sharing (Cathy Bow - Charles Darwin University).

Thinking about the online language programme created for Bininj Kunuwok, surely one of the biggest challenges language teachers face is how to teach polysynthetic languages in a way that doesn’t frighten people. Here I wonder if we’d be better avoiding grammatical or linguistic description all together and just presenting example after example until students start to internalise the patterns. I have a sticky note on my office wall that says “the brain is a pattern detector, not a rule applier” (which has been attributed to Patricia Cunningham), and this was the mantra of the 'Say Something In' language learning course I used  - “don’t worry about it now, you’ll get it”. But of course people do worry about it now, and feel that it would help them to be able to see the rule spelled out in front of them. I think we need to see a lot more research about whether adult language learners really are helped by learning grammar explicitly, or whether they just think they’re helped by it.

Day 6, ALAA conference. Black Hitler, positive psychology, and Melbourne is a Welsh ghetto didn't you know?

When I got to the ALAA conference this morning there was a largish group of school children - 5 and 6 year olds, I think - on the lawn out the front, singing what I eventually worked out was the Circle of Life from the Lion King. There is nothing I like more than people doing something earnestly and badly. (Obviously my own life is a endless source of entertainment.)

Interesting plenary from Rod Gardner and Ilana Muskin about using Conversational Analysis (CA) to research classroom interaction in early primary school-aged children. The essence of CA seems to be to ask “why that now?” - why that repair, that change of speaker, that laughter - and the result is an amazingly rich source of data.

(I think children are fascinating because they’re just like tiny adults, with the same motivations and desires and weaknesses, but without the slightest capacity to hide those things.)

Five three-minute “lightning” presentations today - or as one presenter put it yesterday, “lightning and thunder” presentations. Was particularly taken by Carolyn Pogson’s (Uni of Woollongong) project to create a syllabus for supporting Indigenous kids to develop their articulation/phonological skills within an Indigenous curriculum framework, and without bulldozing their own Aboriginal English speech.

I’ve become a bit cynical about university-level education - the new academia, the business models, etc. etc. - so it was refreshing to listen to Antonia Rubino from the uni of Sydney present on her group’s work to combine language learning activities with positive psychology, to improve the students’ motivation for language learning but also to support the students’ resilience and well-being. I mean we all sort of talk about language learning as being “hard”, but that doesn’t mean it should make you miserable; and to actually be concerned with the wellbeing of students is kind of radical, in my opinion. A really lovely pedagogical approach.

Now I have to admit I didn’t understand too much of the second plenary keynote of the day, from Howard Nicholas, except in a very gestalt way. I think part of his point is that communication is multi-faceted and complex - “speaking ain’t speaking, writing ain’t writing” - and how we interpret meaning involves an understanding of our entire selves, which he demonstrated brilliantly with a clip from Trevor Noah’s “Schwarze Hitler” sketch. I’m not sure where we go from there to integrate these complex communicative repertoires into curricula, though - any thoughts?

Came home from day 2 of the ALAA conference to find the house had gone from predominantly English-speaking to predominantly Cymraeg (Welsh) speaking. I had been forewarned of this sudden language shift  by the friend I’m staying with, but had not truly appreciated the number of siaradwyr (speakers - Welsh speakers, in this context) that could converge on one suburban home in Australia on a summer’s night. Did you know there is actually a Welsh ghetto in Melbourne? And everyone’s Cymraeg was of such high-quality, second-language speakers included. Someone ought to do an ethnographic study of second-language Welsh-speakers outside of Wales. Really nos da, it was.

Day 5: ALAA conference. Do you want some neoliberalism with that?

Why bother learning a second (or third, or fourth) language when “everyone speaks English anyway”? Really fabulous plenary lecture from Ema Ushioda on the first day of the Applied Linguistics conference about motivation and the multilingual mind.

So historically, research on motivation - why do language learners learn languages? - has focused on the instrumental value of learning a second language. That is, it has asked what learners stand to gain by learning a language, in terms of business and educational opportunities, and so on. From this point of view, language learners are assumed to be striving towards native-like proficiency, and in never quite reaching native-like proficiency, are always at a deficit.

What if, asks Ushioda, this way of thinking about language learning motivation is constrained by English language globalisation and neoliberal ideologies?

(I mean dayum.)

And in any case what does it mean to have “native-like” proficiency in English? Whose English? English has long been an international language, belonging to everyone and no-one, and target language norms are a problematic frame of reference.

What if, instead, we ask questions about language learning motivation from what Ushioda calls a 'holistic, constitutive' view - one in which languages are “an essential element of human being’s thought processes, perceptions, and self-expressions”, where speakers have multiple competencies in multiple languages that are neither inferior nor defective but simply different?

When we view language learners holistically as multilingual communicators, we’re not trying to prescribe where second language learners “should be”; we’re describing how second language learners are.

Pedagogically, when language learners are allowed to have multilingual competencies, they can stop 'progressing' (read: struggling) towards some monolingual idea of proficiency, and start expanding and diversifying their linguistic and communicative abilities.



The implications of what Ushioda laid down today for learning endangered and minority languages are manifold. There’s been some talk for a while that ‘instrumentative motivation’ isn’t a very useful concept in situations where there are limited economic or educational opportunities associated with learning a minority language; and when a language with no speakers left is being reclaimed from books and old recordings, it’s difficult to see how you would compare a language learner’s proficiency with some ‘target’ proficiency. So we need a different framework, a different point of view, to research motivation for learning minority and endangered languages in a way that allows us to say something meaningful about why people learn languages, and I think this multilingual mindset is vital.

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.)