Hi Professor Hilpert, I'm a PhD student in applied linguistics. I find your videos are really easy to understand and helpful. Thank you very much for making the knowledge so available:)
I studied at a university in South Africa where a lot of students spoke a language with absolute perspective. The university then painted every North-facing wall blue so the students could give each other directions more easily while inside because even when speaking English it was really hard for those students to talk about left and right.
Amazing. Thank you, Prof. Hilpert. I am a PhD student in Applied Linguistics. My research interest is applying cognitive linguistics theories to discourse analysis. I learnt a lot from your cognitive linguistics series.
Thank you! I love this series!! It is sometimes very hard to show what is so interesting about linguistics to people with no prior knowledge in linguistics. I think this is very helpful especially to students who is wondering whether they should choose linguistics as a subject to study and what they can possibly do after choosing this path :)
You should be very careful though. There is a lot of pseudoscientific stuff coming from professional linguists. You should always be very alert when it comes to linguistic experiments as a lot of them are extremely flawed.
Balinese, my native language, uses absolute FoR (based on mountain-wards & seawards, which also have cultural-religious significance). Realtive FoR is usually an influence from Indonesian. That joy/happiness exp. is clearly ingenious.
For me the joy/happiness distinction also has to do with the momentary vs longer process. I am not a native speaker so it might be transferring from German (Freude vs Glück) but for me joy is something you experience in a specific moment trigger by a specific event, whereas happiness is something you experience over a longer period of time.
And corpus data supports your point! The adjective "joyful" collocates with short events (day, moment, ...), "happy" collocates with longer events and periods of time (life, marriage, years, ...).
That’s interesting, because as a native Spanish-speaker (from Puerto Rico) that grew up fully bilingual, I understand joy and happiness the other way around: joy (gozo) is something deeper and more permanent, while happiness (felicidad) is momentary. It seems I’ve been transferring the Spanish meaning into the English words all this time!
It helps me alot. What I am doing now is very similar to the topic you said in this video, but closer to cognitive philosophy. These experiments do shed light on me. Thx prof.
As a native Japanese speaker, it was interesting to see the result of the 2nd experiment (directions of animals) because I couldn't even imagine putting the animals in the order of how most of the Japanese examinees did. Even after seeing the result, I feel uncomfortable seeing the "Japanese" way of ordering. Is my brain closer to Tzeltal's, etc.?
After reading 'Louder than Words' (which you recommended in one of your videos thanks!) man oh man some of those experiments on embodied simulation just blew my mind!
The Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimidhirr is also structured around the absolute frame of reference. I have often wondered about people who claim to have "no sense of direction," if entire languages--i.e., human communities--clearly must have this, and if directional sense is learned.
Hello Professor! Thank you for this interesting video! The last experiment about the catagorizing of phonemes reminds me how Hong Kong Cantonese speaking learners of Japanese often mistaken the sound of consonant /k/ in Japanese as /g/. Because in Cantonese we have the difference between aspirated /k/ and unaspirated /k/, but no consonant of voiced /g/ (in fact no voiced consonant onset at all in Cantonese). However in Japanese they have the contrastive pair of voiced /g/ and voiceless /k/, but no aspirated /k/ as onset. This marks a false comparison among learners, who tend to perceive and produce Japanese unaspirated /k/ as aspirated /k/, while treating /g/ as unaspirated /k/. The problem is, there is an overlap of unaspirated /k/ here, which is the root of many mistakes from these learners when doing listening exercises or tests. What I now suspect is that perhaps native speakers of different languages have somewhat different catergorization of sounds.
You're absolutely right, phonemic systems differ across languages, so that adult learners sometimes find it very difficult to hear certain distinctions in an L2. My personal arch-nemesis: French nasal vowels...
I love your professional videos! It helps me to know more linguistic knowledge. Thanks for introducing me! I would like to buy the book "Construction Grammar and its Application to English", but I live in Taiwan, where can I buy it from?
Would sound quality not affect the A-B-X experiment? I'd be very curious to see what any modern confirmation study would find with recent speech synthesis technology, which is (obviously) lightyears apart from '57.
Yes, I'd be curious, too. In a way, the fact that the experiment works with relatively modest synth tech shows how much we want to hear language-like sounds as phonemes.
I thought the same thing. As a bilingual speaker (sort of, I guess) my result to the second experiment was different from what it was supposed to be. My native language is portuguese-BR and we have the specifics for left and right as well, which are “esquerda/direita” yet I found myself putting the animals facing towards myself and actually got very uncomfortable to see the Professor doing the opposite lol. I hope he has a comment on it (:
Maybe it's because I'm (likely) autistic or some other reason but I would have said the guy in #1 was happy (because I don't use the word "joy" in any context as i've never understood what it refers to). The items would have gone in the second order, at least given I was just turned 180 degrees. And for the last ones it sounded to me like [m̥a] and then a transition to [ŋa] and then to [ga]. I understand it may have been intended to be /b/, /d/, and /g/ but I only heard the last of those, even as a native American English speaker. Is it possible that these results are because of selection bias? Would we get different results from these experiments due to a change in culture even within the same language? Would we get different results with a different generation? Would we get different results with autistic speakers? What about people with various mental health disorders? At what percentage of respondents answering in the same way gives evidence of linguistic relativism? It seems like to me one would have to study various different ethnic groups within the same language group to ensure that the differences aren't cultural. Like, it seems like the reason these speakers can find the cardinal directions regardless of whether they are in the dark or not is because they have developed a mental map and a general sense due to practice. Likewise when modern Polynesian sailors were relearning the old sailing methods they had to develop moving maps of the night sky such that they would know where the important navigational stars and constellations were at any given moment even during the day, even when they couldn't see the stars. And they're able to do that because of practice. They were able to circumnavigate the globe without gps or maps or motors in Hawaiian voyaging canoes just with traditional wayfinding techniques.
Dear Prof. Hilpert. I need to talk to you about my master's topic about construction grammar and discourse analysis. I would be glad if you would allow me to contact. Regards.
The "joy and happiness" experience is not very convincing. The 'metaphor' explanation sounds pretty shabby. Has the same experiment ever been reduplicated by at least a couple of independent studies with all the other possible external and internal factors taken into account? Otherwise, it's not science.
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I always enjoy Prof. Hilpert’s TH-cam lectures. They are so easy to follow. You make even complex concepts so easy. You are a great teacher!
Hi Professor Hilpert, I'm a PhD student in applied linguistics. I find your videos are really easy to understand and helpful. Thank you very much for making the knowledge so available:)
I studied at a university in South Africa where a lot of students spoke a language with absolute perspective. The university then painted every North-facing wall blue so the students could give each other directions more easily while inside because even when speaking English it was really hard for those students to talk about left and right.
sounds so interesting!
Prof. Hilpert has the 2020 state-of-the-art linguistics education mindset.
Amazing. Thank you, Prof. Hilpert. I am a PhD student in Applied Linguistics. My research interest is applying cognitive linguistics theories to discourse analysis. I learnt a lot from your cognitive linguistics series.
Thank you! I love this series!! It is sometimes very hard to show what is so interesting about linguistics to people with no prior knowledge in linguistics. I think this is very helpful especially to students who is wondering whether they should choose linguistics as a subject to study and what they can possibly do after choosing this path :)
You should be very careful though. There is a lot of pseudoscientific stuff coming from professional linguists. You should always be very alert when it comes to linguistic experiments as a lot of them are extremely flawed.
Balinese, my native language, uses absolute FoR (based on mountain-wards & seawards, which also have cultural-religious significance). Realtive FoR is usually an influence from Indonesian. That joy/happiness exp. is clearly ingenious.
For me the joy/happiness distinction also has to do with the momentary vs longer process. I am not a native speaker so it might be transferring from German (Freude vs Glück) but for me joy is something you experience in a specific moment trigger by a specific event, whereas happiness is something you experience over a longer period of time.
And corpus data supports your point! The adjective "joyful" collocates with short events (day, moment, ...), "happy" collocates with longer events and periods of time (life, marriage, years, ...).
Good to know :)
That’s interesting, because as a native Spanish-speaker (from Puerto Rico) that grew up fully bilingual, I understand joy and happiness the other way around: joy (gozo) is something deeper and more permanent, while happiness (felicidad) is momentary. It seems I’ve been transferring the Spanish meaning into the English words all this time!
Mr. Hilper, your videos give me many ideas for my researches. Thank you.
It helps me alot. What I am doing now is very similar to the topic you said in this video, but closer to cognitive philosophy. These experiments do shed light on me. Thx prof.
Most enjoyable!
Very interesting , Thank you !
Hi Professor Hilper, please make more videos for linguistics for basic student of unversity ❤🙏
As a native Japanese speaker, it was interesting to see the result of the 2nd experiment (directions of animals) because I couldn't even imagine putting the animals in the order of how most of the Japanese examinees did. Even after seeing the result, I feel uncomfortable seeing the "Japanese" way of ordering. Is my brain closer to Tzeltal's, etc.?
After reading 'Louder than Words' (which you recommended in one of your videos thanks!) man oh man some of those experiments on embodied simulation just blew my mind!
I know what you mean. ;)
Thank you for inspiration for my presentation!!! I learned about Sapir-Whorf hypothesis before, but it is clear now!
The Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimidhirr is also structured around the absolute frame of reference. I have often wondered about people who claim to have "no sense of direction," if entire languages--i.e., human communities--clearly must have this, and if directional sense is learned.
Hello Professor! Thank you for this interesting video!
The last experiment about the catagorizing of phonemes reminds me how Hong Kong Cantonese speaking learners of Japanese often mistaken the sound of consonant /k/ in Japanese as /g/. Because in Cantonese we have the difference between aspirated /k/ and unaspirated /k/, but no consonant of voiced /g/ (in fact no voiced consonant onset at all in Cantonese). However in Japanese they have the contrastive pair of voiced /g/ and voiceless /k/, but no aspirated /k/ as onset. This marks a false comparison among learners, who tend to perceive and produce Japanese unaspirated /k/ as aspirated /k/, while treating /g/ as unaspirated /k/. The problem is, there is an overlap of unaspirated /k/ here, which is the root of many mistakes from these learners when doing listening exercises or tests. What I now suspect is that perhaps native speakers of different languages have somewhat different catergorization of sounds.
You're absolutely right, phonemic systems differ across languages, so that adult learners sometimes find it very difficult to hear certain distinctions in an L2. My personal arch-nemesis: French nasal vowels...
I love your professional videos! It helps me to know more linguistic knowledge. Thanks for introducing me! I would like to buy the book "Construction Grammar and its Application to English", but I live in Taiwan, where can I buy it from?
Would sound quality not affect the A-B-X experiment? I'd be very curious to see what any modern confirmation study would find with recent speech synthesis technology, which is (obviously) lightyears apart from '57.
Yes, I'd be curious, too. In a way, the fact that the experiment works with relatively modest synth tech shows how much we want to hear language-like sounds as phonemes.
I thought the Sapir Whorf hypothesis was debunked? Have you seen Steven Pinker's work on it? Great video by the way!
Prof, What about bilingual speakers? Will they give same response to these experiments as monolingual speakers do? Please tell us the difference.
I thought the same thing. As a bilingual speaker (sort of, I guess) my result to the second experiment was different from what it was supposed to be. My native language is portuguese-BR and we have the specifics for left and right as well, which are “esquerda/direita” yet I found myself putting the animals facing towards myself and actually got very uncomfortable to see the Professor doing the opposite lol. I hope he has a comment on it (:
Thank you so much! It’s so interesting)
Very informative
thank you so much for making these videos! :)
Thank you so much for your teaching
How we can understand prescriptiviness in ling
I love your videos, thank you so much
Maybe it's because I'm (likely) autistic or some other reason but I would have said the guy in #1 was happy (because I don't use the word "joy" in any context as i've never understood what it refers to). The items would have gone in the second order, at least given I was just turned 180 degrees. And for the last ones it sounded to me like [m̥a] and then a transition to [ŋa] and then to [ga]. I understand it may have been intended to be /b/, /d/, and /g/ but I only heard the last of those, even as a native American English speaker. Is it possible that these results are because of selection bias?
Would we get different results from these experiments due to a change in culture even within the same language? Would we get different results with a different generation? Would we get different results with autistic speakers? What about people with various mental health disorders? At what percentage of respondents answering in the same way gives evidence of linguistic relativism?
It seems like to me one would have to study various different ethnic groups within the same language group to ensure that the differences aren't cultural. Like, it seems like the reason these speakers can find the cardinal directions regardless of whether they are in the dark or not is because they have developed a mental map and a general sense due to practice. Likewise when modern Polynesian sailors were relearning the old sailing methods they had to develop moving maps of the night sky such that they would know where the important navigational stars and constellations were at any given moment even during the day, even when they couldn't see the stars. And they're able to do that because of practice. They were able to circumnavigate the globe without gps or maps or motors in Hawaiian voyaging canoes just with traditional wayfinding techniques.
Hi sir please can you explain the experiment of the beez🥺
love it
Dear Prof. Hilpert.
I need to talk to you about my master's topic about construction grammar and discourse analysis.
I would be glad if you would allow me to contact.
Regards.
Feel free to email me!
🎉
Native americans taught RP give more erudite answers to the same questions!
The "joy and happiness" experience is not very convincing. The 'metaphor' explanation sounds pretty shabby. Has the same experiment ever been reduplicated by at least a couple of independent studies with all the other possible external and internal factors taken into account? Otherwise, it's not science.
Ben Bergen's book "Louder than words" (Basic Books 2012) offers a useful overview of experimental work on embodiment and metaphor.