Lingthusiasm Episode 111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!
Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that’s its own thing or part of a broader system related to doubt and certainty (spoiler: linguists are still debating this).
Patreon bonus episodes also make a great last-minute gift for a linguistics enthusiast in your life.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern! We talk about We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Episode 70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking -
happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the
other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain
scanning machines and then create very controlled setups where exactly
one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus
nonwords (of the same length, on the same background) or listening to
audio clips of a language you do speak vs a language you don’t speak.
In
this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina
Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA about figuring out which
parts of the brain do language things! We talk about how we can use
brain scans to compare language with other things your brain can do,
such as solving visual puzzles, math problems, music, and inferring
things about other people’s mental states, as well as comparing how the
brains of multilingual people process their various languages. We also
talk about the results of the fMRI language experiments that Gretchen
got to be a participant in: which side is doing most of her language
processing and how active her brain is for French compared to English.
In this month’s bonus episode
we get enthusiastic about language inside an MRI machine! Gretchen
talks with Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in Speech and
Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard University in Boston, USA,
about the details of what it was like inside the MRI machine doing the
studies we reported on here - it’s a Lingthusiasm language-in-the-brain
interview double feature!
Alice in the Language Localizer Wonderland - for more information about the study and
if you happen to be in the Boston area and want to participate! They’re
currently especially looking for people who are multilingual or speak a conlang including Esperanto,
Klingon, High Valyrian, or Dothraki (for which you can get travel
funding…), but other studies will also come along if you’re reading
this from the future.
If you wish you could see pictures of
your brain and aren’t in the Boston area, keep an eye out for any other
large research universities you might be near, as many are looking for
participants! (Googling “research subject pool” + name of a local
university may help find something.)
Here’s the image of Gretchen’s brain and a graph of her responses to listening to various languages:
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