Language Learning through TV, Children of Deaf Adults

 We were discussing children’s language development in our revision session, and I said I’d look up the references for the case study of a hearing child brought up with deaf parents, expected to learn language through TV alone. The reference is Bard & Sachs, with several articles to look at: abstracts can be found here: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED150868 and here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/language-learning-with-restricted-input-case-studies-of-two-hearing-children-of-deaf-parents/4F5BF799996DCD5977A94BC5F1233578. 

A readable summary and discussion of this situation is available here: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150&context=srhonors_theses — and it also makes a good model for the structure of a Language Investigation, which is our upcoming NEA in Year 2...

Language Resources from QMU

This is a great site of resources from Queen Mary University, suggested by our exam board AQA.

Much of it is aimed at teachers, but there's some great ideas for Language Investigations and great sources of further exploration and revision of the topics we study at A Level.

Especially valuable is the Glossary, with not only brief accounts of some key terms, but links to authentic recordings of speech with ready-made transcriptions! Wow.

http://www.teachrealenglish.org

Machester University Dialects project

Fanbtastic resource for exploring how dialect and accent variation occurs across the UK. Interactive maps and tests!


http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/

Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

A cool site which can help confirm your knowledge of word classes, or aid you in tackling large amounts of text for a research project. It colour-codes a text you paste in according to the *most likely* part of speech (word class) each word would statistically represent.

BEWARE! It's just an algorithm, and it's not as clever as you! It will make errors, and needs a human to check each suggested tag.

https://parts-of-speech.info/

A Neat Summary of Linguistics

Useful summary, at undergraduate level, of issues and descriptions addressed in the study of language. Pretty good revision reading, perhaps especially for A2s…

https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/NeatSummaryOfLinguistics.pdf

Matha's Vineyard from Martha's Vineyard

The local newspaper from Martha's Vineyard reflect on Labov's seminal study there:


http://www.mvtimes.com/2011/08/16/50-years-language-study-began-marthas-vineyard-6918/


Labov's a sound writer, and you can read the original study here:


http://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/LabovVineyard.pdf

The Spread of London accents

Dialect change happening now in the UK. Funny how we all live on the south coast but speak a lot like people around the London region...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/05/26/revealed-how-london-accents-have-killed-off-local-dialects-acros/

Lexical map of the brain

Fascinating article found by A2 student Aimee with some great visualisations of how certain words and concepts seem to map to particular regions of the cortex:


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/27/brain-atlas-showing-how-words-are-organised-neuroscience#img-1

Joos' Five Clocks

We looked today at Martin Joos' five-part system for analysing the register of a text, beyond just formal/informal, but instead classifying texts (or elements of texts, as we saw), along a five-position scale.


this article gives some further discussion of Joos' system., and lays out a helpful table of the five clocks against four features of texts. it includes some more examples and features that help identify the five clocks at work.


http://ww2.odu.edu/al/jpbroder/jpb_on_joos_1976.pdf

English Spelling and Learning

This article argues that the English spelling system makes it harder for kids to learn. There are comparisons with systems in other countries -- but notably little about non-phonetic, logogram-based systems like Chinese (where symbols for words or concepts need to be learned, quite separate from their pronunciation). It leads towards an interesting revision and simplification of the spelling system on phonemic principles -- which looks like it'd be a disaster practically, but understanding its core ideas is certainly good for your grasp of phonology.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/

Internet language

Not a bad article, here, though it's not watertight -- no mention of creative emoticons of the type used in the headline, for instance -- and could do with a clearer model of language functions: it tantalisingly refers to 'interpersonal' communication, but this is just an empty premodifier, I think -- rather than, accurately, noting that most of the forms mentioned really do focus on managing the tenor of Internet discourse, showing feelings and managing human speech roles in the absence of tone, expression and gesture. 

http://gizmodo.com/is-the-innanet-ruining-teh-english-language-_o-1680686542

The definite article in decline...

Interesting, if somewhat dubious, research. The example given from the political speeches is inconclusive -- Obama is taking quite a different sort of opening tack from Washington. Perhaps it is broad rhetorical approaches that are changing; there's nothing inherently 'formal' about 'the', though it'd be informal to use a lot of ellipsis, which might include eliding the definite article. (For instance, if I'd started sentence two of his post 'Example give from political speeches...')

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/15/definite-article-radical-decline-last-century-research?CMP=fb_gu

Poetry Words

Some interesting findings from this simple frequency-count project: http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/6676-top-poetry-words.html

The simple, human-experience words are striking; but also the fact about the frequency in poems of words unique in the corpus.

Colour Words Research

Amazing visualisation of research comparing English and Chinese words for colour. Interesting for the way they break down and classify the words, and very beautifully presented. 

http://muyueh.com/greenhoney/?utm_content=buffer552f3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Multilingual onomatopoeia

Nyan-nyan, boo-boo, guf-guf, goro-goro-goro. 

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/17/animal-noises-in-different-languages?CMP=fb_gu

Twitter search and analytics

Great find from A2 student Jess: this site enables you to search Tweets and other social media posts, and gives automated graphs of changes in usage over time. Great tool to gather language data, though remember that you need to do the thinking and choose your searches very carefully -- and this stream of data is always-changing.


http://topsy.com/

Research into male and female language

This Language Log post collects some interesting statistics from a couple of corpus studies into the empirical differences between male and female language use. The caveat at the end about the culturally bound, public-space construction of appearances -- rather than any 'natural' differences -- is important to note. 

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13873

Trolling, historically

Did you know that the etymology of 'trolling' was 'fishing'? This 17th century guide explains how to do it.

http://www.dailydot.com/lol/guide-to-trolling-1682/

Swales’ Three-Move Model for Introductions

For A2s working on the introduction to their research projects, this model is a sound general guide to the sorts of things you should cover.

http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~jbl00001/swales_cars_introductions_model.htm

Texting has changed the meaning of the full stop.

This does seem to be true...

http://mashable.com/2013/11/25/texting-transformed-period/