feeding the five thousand » Language Log

John McWhorter on Talk of the Nation, "DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move", 9/6/2010. (Download mp3 here.)

Dan Bloom just sent me this photograph that is making news in Taiwan:

Riders are advised against taking bus no. 1203, because the authorities don't know where you might end up if you do.

As a matter of fact, there's no serious problem with the translation, since, with the addition of an "n" ("unknown"), that's what the Chinese says:

Bù zhīdào 不知道 ("don't know")

This is one of the first, and handiest, utterances one masters when learning Mandarin.

Mark Swofford at [www.pinyin.info] specializes in keeping track of problems with signs in Taiwan. I wonder if he knows about this one and the story behind it.

Geoff Nunberg sent around a link to C.W. Nevius, "Coit Tower attacks a catalyst for park crackdown",  San Francisco Chronicle 9/4/2010. The Landmark's Revenge?

The following picture appears on the cleverly named "Ni Howdy" blog:

Since some folks are confused by the wording, and since Ni Howdy doesn't explain the sign, it behooves me to do so. The Chinese part of the sign reads:

Wēnxīn tíshì 溫馨提示 ("Gentle Reminder")

Cāo kè zhōng 操课中 ("Exercise Class in Session")

Qǐng wù dǎrǎo 请勿打扰 ("Please Do Not Disturb")

The English part of the sign only translates the last two lines of the Chinese. There's no problem with the third line, but we have a colossal slip-up with the second line. Cāo 操 basically means "to grasp, hold, operate, control, manipulate," but it also has the very general meaning of "make an effort to do" and the more specific connotation of "exercise," which is the intended meaning here, hence "exercise class." However, cāo 操 also has the vulgar meaning of "to fuck," which is what leads to the mischief here. I think that most translators and most translation software can probably handle cāo kè 操课 moderately well, and would probably come up with something like "exercise class," "military drill," and so forth. What seems to have thrown off the translator or the translation software is the zhōng 中 at the end of the line. Zhōng 中 usually means "in, inside, within, center," and so forth, but in the language of signs and notices it often signifies "in session, going on," etc.

The troublesome cāo 操 of this sign is the same word that is punned as "grass" in the name of the naughty mythical creature called the "grass mud horse," for which see Mark Liberman's dissection in "Franco-Croatian Squid in pepper sauce", 3/12/2009.

Incidentally, although Ni Howdy or someone else has blackened out most of the name at the top of the sign, enough remains for me to determine without any hesitation that it belongs to a physical fitness club.

[A tip of the hat to Anne Moreau.]

The background: in 2009, the Bishop Miege high school football team had a 12-0 record and won the state championship in the 4A division. This year, they moved up to the 5A division. And according to Candace Buckner, "Bishop Miege’s step up into 5A not a hard one in opener", Kansas City Star, 9/4/2010:

[senior lineman Shane] Ray said, “Every article I read, it’s more so like ‘Miege is moving up to 5A, will they be able to compete against these other teams? And I don’t really like that. As a team, we don’t like that feeling of being underlooked because we did win a state title. Not any team can just win a state championship, otherwise everyone will have one.”

I mean, if you can overlook things, why shouldn't you be able to underlook something? (By not looking high enough, naturally.)

Note, by the way, that Mr. Ray's sentence needs to be parsed as

[we don’t like that feeling [of being underlooked]]  [because we did win a state title]

not

[we don’t like that feeling  [of being underlooked [because we did win a state title]]]

This is the sort of thing that's well marked by intonational phrasing in speech, but is more problematic in writing  — though perhaps a comma after underlooked would not have been amiss.

Jack Maloney, who sent in the link, wrote:

After no research and only a little thinking, I speculate that "underlooked" is a blend of "overlooked" and "underestimated."

And I think that he's probably right, as far as the thought processes of Shane Ray are concerned. But Mr. Ray is far from the first to think along similar lines. The OED has a literal sense "To look at, or inspect, from beneath", with citations back to 1682:

1682 HICKERINGILL Black Non-Conf. iii. 14 They would be Shepherds and feed his Sheep, and anoint them for the Scab, and underlook them.

And there's also a figurative sense, glossed as "To miss seeing by looking too low", which is exactly what Mr. Ray had in mind:

1802 BEDDOES Hygëia II. 56 Do they not underlook that sole essential condition to happiness, the inward state?

Is there a name for a coinage that re-discovers an old and rare word?

A few days ago, I asked for help in tracking down some of the scientific support for Matt Richtel's claims about the bad effects of "digital overload" ("More factoid tracking", 9/1/2009). One of the more trackable factoids was the "study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks". And sure enough, The Neurocritic quickly came up with a reference that fits: Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, "Cognitive control in media multitaskers", PNAS, Published online before print 8/24/2009.

I believe that the full paper is freely available at the link given above (please let me know if this is wrong), and if you're interested in this topic, I urge you to read it. As in the case of the last paper by a Stanford psychologist that was discussed here, you should start by asking "Never mind the conclusions, what's the evidence?". And again, you may conclude that the descriptions of this research — in the popular press and even in the original paper — lead readers pretty far beyond the interpretations warranted by the research itself.

Here's the paper's abstract:

Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

Note, by the way, that the authors (unlike Matt Richtel) carefully avoid any suggestion of causation, instead writing about "systematic differences in information processing styles" and "a distinct approach to fundamental information processing". This way of putting it is consistent with media multitasking causing cognitive disabilities (in this experiment's sample), or cognitive disabilities causing more media multitasking, or some third variable influencing both. But as we'll see, it's not completely clear that the claimed association (between media multitasking and certain information-processing deficits) even exists.

What's the evidence? It starts, of course, with that "trait media multitasking index". They administered a 20-minute online questionnaire to 262 Stanford undergraduates, presumably from the Psych Department's subject pool.

The questionnaire addressed 12 different media forms: print media, television, computer-based video (such as YouTube or online television episodes), music, nonmusic audio, video or computer games, telephone and mobile phone voice calls, instant messaging, SMS (text messaging), email, web surfing, and other computer-based applications (such as word processing). For each medium, respondents reported the total number of hours per week they spend using the medium. In addition, they filled out a media-multitasking matrix, indicating whether, while using this primary medium, they concurrently used each of the other media “Most of the time,” “Some of the time,” “A little of the time,” or “Never.” As text messaging could not accurately be described by hours of use, this medium was discarded from the analysis as a primary medium, although it still appeared as an option in the matrix (meaning respondents could still report text messaging while being engaged in other media).

They then created a "Media Multitasking Index" (MMI).

Step 1 was to translate verbal responses about concurrent media usage into numbers, on a scale from "Never" = 0 to "Most of the time" = 1.

Step 2 was to create the sum mi of the numeric responses about concurrent media use for each of the 11 primary media. Thus a student who indicated that while web surfing (the 10th medium in the list), she listened to music "Most of the time", engaged in voice phone calls "Some of the time", checked email "Some of the time", engaged in IM conversations "Some of the time", and responded to SMS messages "Some of the time", would get  m10 = 1+0.67+0.67+0.67+0.67 = 3.68.

Step 3 created the individual's MMI as a weighted sum of the mi values,

where hi the number of hours per day that the student estimated she spent using primary medium i, and  and htotal is the sum of all media hours.  Note that multimedia hours are counted multiple times, so that a respondent's htotal may be larger than her number of waking hours.  Unsurprisingly, therefore,

Media multitasking was correlated with total hours of media use, r (260) = 0.46, P < 0.001.

The authors observe that

The MMI produced a relatively normal distribution, with a mean of 4.38 and standard deviation of 1.52. This suggests that there is not a bimodal distribution of “heavy multitaskers” and “nonmultitaskers.” Nonetheless, we can identify individuals who very frequently use multiple media and those who tend to limit their use of multiple media. […]

Based on the questionnaire, those students with an MMI less than one standard deviation below the mean (LMMs) or an MMI greater than one standard deviation above the mean (HMMs) were invited to participate. The invitation yielded 22 LMMs and 19 HMMs who gave informed consent and participated in the study for course credit.

(In fact, the number actually participating in the various subexperiments varied, down to 15 "Low Media Multitaskers" (LMMs) and 15 "High Media Multitaskers" (HMMs).)

Before going on to the behavioral experiments and their results, it's worth saying a few things about this Media Multitasking Index. First, high MMI values may correspond to many different patterns of life experience. You might be someone who has music coming into at least one earbud during many other life activities, media-related or otherwise; you might be someone who likes to keep a baseball or basketball game going in the background while studying or websurfing; you might be someone who's often talking on the phone or IMing friends while surfing the web. Each of these patterns could contribute the same amount to the MMI, but it's plausible that their psychological causes and effects (and their associations with other relevant lifestyle variables) are quite different.

Given this likely diversity of HMM experience (and we'll see later that the HMM group tends to have more variable performance on the behavioral tests),  the rather small number of subjects is a reason for concern.  Given that the study aimed to understand the effects of interactions among 12 different forms of "media", it's troubling that there were only 15-19 "High Media Multitaskers" tested, and that we don't know what sorts of media multitasking they actually reported engaging in. (And while we're focusing on this issue, it's worth noting that the pool of survey responders with MMIs at least one sd above or below the mean should have been (2/3)*262 ≅ 175, raising as usual the possibility that the transition from 175 possibiltiies to 19+22=41 volunteers might have introduced some sort of selection bias.)

This is Yet Another Reason to publish raw data — there's no reason that the authors couldn't have published (in a convenient digital form) all their media-use matrices, keyed to the performance of individual subjects on the various behavioral tests. This might make it possible to consider various alternative theories about which aspects of the media-use responses explained how much of the observed differences in performance (to the extent that the small number of subjects permits).

But this brings up a second — and much more important — issue with the MMI: it's entirely based on self-report. It's well known that self-reported measures of life patterns are not very reliable.  Specifically, according to Bradley Greenberg et al., "Comparing survey and diary measures of Internet and traditional media use", Communication Reports 18(1):1–8, 2005:

Between the survey and diary methods, correlations range from .20 for listening to music off-line to .58 for email sent. Internet estimates are correlated .39 and television time estimates are correlated .35.

In general, subjects tend to over-report such activities in survey responses — by about 25% overall, in the just-cited study. But more important, the divergences between facts and self-reports are subject to several forms of recall bias, as a result of which conclusions based on self-reported data always need to be interpreted with great caution.

Let me give a personal example that may be relevant to this case. If you were to ask me to estimate how many stair-steps I encounter per day, the answer I give today would be significantly higher than the answer I would have given before August 3, when I tore some ligaments in my left knee.  For someone on crutches, with one leg unable to bear weight, stairs are a lot more salient than they are for someone who can bound up and down them without any problems or concerns. There are a surprising number of stairways around Penn's campus that I never really noticed before, even though I go up and down them almost every day.

So it wouldn't be surprising to find that people with certain physical handicaps tend to give a higher estimate of the number of stairsteps they encounter in daily life, just because climbing stairs is more salient and thus more memorable to them. If we use such self-reported estimates as  the basis for an epidemiological study of the effect of chronic stair-climbing on physical agility, we risk being led astray.

Similarly, it's plausible that people who "have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks" might find the distractions of everyday multitasking more salient and thus more memorable, and therefore might tend to give somewhat higher estimates of how much of such multitasking they engage in.  So given noisy estimates of media multitasking, and even a modest salience effect of this kind,  the set of subjects with high MMIs may be significantly enriched in individuals who are more distractable or otherwise cognitively less able to deal with the demands of such multitasking.

I'm not going to discuss all of this paper's experimental results in detail, but I'd like to point out three things that seem to apply across all of them: the differences between the LMM and HMM groups are rare (that is, they appear only in a fraction of the experimental conditions where they might have been found), modest in effect size, and associated with higher variance in the HMM sample.

Thus consider their "Filter Task", where "participants viewed two consecutive exposures of an array of rectangles and had to indicate whether or not a target (red) rectangle had changed orientation from the first exposure to the second, while ignoring distractor (blue) rectangles":

Fig. 1. The filter task. (A) A sample trial with a 2-target, 6-distractor array. (B) HMM and LMM filter task performance as a function of the number of distractors (two targets). Error bars, SEM.

The only statistically significant difference between the LMM and HMM groups appears in the 6-distractor case, where there is a difference of about 0.3 (1.4 to 1.7) in the performance measure K. K is a somewhat complex measure, described in Edward Vogel et al., "Neural measures reveal individual differences in controlling access to working memory", Nature 438:500–503, 2005:

We computed visual memory capacity with a standard formula that essentially assumes that if an observer can hold in memory K items from an array of S items, then the item that changed should be one of the items being held in memory on K/S trials, leading to correct performance on K/S of the trials on which an item changed. To correct for guessing, this procedure also takes into account the false alarm rate.

In the crucial six-distractor case, the standard error for the HMM group was about 0.15 items, which corresponds to a standard deviation of about 0.15*sqrt(19) = 0.65, or more than twice the difference in the groups' mean values.  The standard error for the LMM group was about a third of that.  We don't have the raw data to check, but this is consistent with a pattern in which the lower performance of the HMM group was driven mainly by a few individuals with especially low scores, who are in the HMM group not because they actually engage a lot media multitasking, but because they are "multitasking handicapped" and so overestimate their consumption.

I'll end with their "two- and three-back" task, a version of a classic short-term memory experiment:

[P]articipants were presented a series of individual letters in the middle of the screen. Each letter was presented for 500 ms, followed by a white screen for 3,000 ms. Upon presentation of a letter, participants were to indicate whether or not the present letter was a “target,” meaning that it matched the letter presented two (for the two-back task) or three (for the three-back task) trials ago.

Before seeing the data, you might expect that the HMM group would be more likely to forget the correct letter in all conditions, and even more likely to do so in the three-back condition compared to the two-back condition.  But what happened was this:

There was no significant difference in the hit rate for the  2-back or 3-back conditions, or in the false alarm rate for the 2-back condition. The only difference was in the false alarm rate for the 3-back condition.  Again, the difference was modest in terms of effect size: about 4.8% vs. 3.2%, or a difference of about 1.6% in false alarm rate in the 3-back condition, where the HMM group has a standard error of about 0.7, or a standard deviation of 0.7*sqrt(15) = 2.7, corresponding to an effect size of about d=0.6.

The authors also performed a more complicated piece of data analysis:

This [pattern of performance] indicates that the HMMs were more susceptible to interference from items that seemed familiar, and that this problem increased as working memory load increased (from the two- to the three-back task). This problem also became more acute for HMMs as the task progressed, because proactive interference from irrelevant letters accumulated across the experiment. Specifically, a general linear model of the likelihood of a false alarm in the three-back task revealed: (a) no main effect of HMM/LMM status nor of time, but (b) a significant HMM/LMM status*time interaction, such that the number of false alarms increased over time more rapidly for HMMs, B = 0.081, P < 0.001. These data demonstrate that HMMs are not only less capable of filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment, but also are less capable of filtering out irrelevant representations in memory.

This seems plausible.  But it leaves entirely open the question of causation. Are the members of the HMM group "less capable of filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment [… and] less capable of filtering out irrelevant representations in memory" because their brains have been damaged by media multitasking? Or are they in the HMM group, not because they actually do more media multitasking, but because they're less able to deal with it and therefore more likely to remember and report it? Or, perhaps, are they more tolerant of media multitasking because they just don't care as much about the details of what happened where and when?

This paper also leaves open the question of what sorts of media multitasking are really in play here, and what other variables might be associated with MMI differences. The authors did consider the problem of associated variables:

[A] new group of 110 participants filled out the MMI questionnaire as well as their SAT scores, gender, the Need for Cognition index questionnaire, the Big Five Trait Taxonomy (including measures of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness), and a creativity task derived from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The data from participants with an MMI one standard deviation or more above and below the mean (16 HMMs and 17 LMMs) were compared.

They found no significant differences — but again, it's a very small sample, and differences that would be rejected in this test as plausibly due to sampling error might still have been large enough to affect the experimental results in the earlier sample.

If we had access to the raw media matrix and the associated experimental scores, we might find (say) that their HMM group happened to include a subgroup whose MMI is high because they (report that they) listen to music during all other life activities, and who tend to smoke pot more often than their peers.  Alternatively, Ophir et al.'s 15-19 HMM  students might happen to include a substantial mix of driven over-achievers who network obsessively while studying and web-surfing, and are also among the substantial percentage of Stanford undergraduates who take Ritalin or Adderall in order to improve their academic performance and decrease the need for sleep.

From a certain point of view, all of this criticism is unfair. You can always think of alternative models to fit and new controls to run, to check and perhaps to challenge the conclusions of any study. And compared to some attempts to enlist science in discussions of social policy, Matt Richtel's (implict) reference to this paper rates very highly: the research is actually on the topic, and supports the desired conclusion.

But in my opinion, it doesn't support it nearly strongly enough. What's at stake here is a set of major choices about social policy and personal lifestyle. If it's really true that modern digital multitasking causes significant cognitive disability and even brain damage, as Matt Richtel claims, then many very serious social and individual changes are urgently needed. Before starting down this path, we need better evidence that there's a real connection between cognitive disability and media multitasking (as opposed to self-reports of media multitasking). We need some evidence that the connection exists in representative samples of the population, not just a couple of dozen Stanford undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology. And we need some evidence that this connection, if it exists, has a causal component in the multitasking-to-disability direction.

What does all this have to do with language? Well, most of the types of "media" at issue here involve speech or text. This is also an interesting example of the rhetorical trope "studies show that …". And it's part of my on-going investigation of the interpretation of generic plurals.  Of course, all of these connections are minor compared to the possibility that digital media are ruining our brains.

Here's one sent in by Jeffrey Kallberg:

And a contribution from Laura Pearle:

She notes

I read "Facebook Alternative Diaspora Launches" as FB having an alternative to the Diaapora, or perhaps a Diaspora for alternative peoples.

This one, submitted by David Boone, turns out to be more of an odd story than a crash blossom as such:

When the stresses and strains of university department administration get me down, when I need a break and I really want to giggle till I'm helpless, I simply close my office door, bring a box of Kleenex over to near the computer so I can wipe off the tears running down my cheeks, and watch, once again, the Facebook ranting toddler video. Victor Mair first brought it to our attention here at One Language Log Plaza, and we have been watching it occasionally ever since. The extraordinary intensity of this little girl's concentration on the nonsense she is babbling, together with the strange fantasy of the wandering themes in the subtitles, yields an experience the like of which I have never seen anywhere.

I'm assuming the performance is a result of a truly unusual degree of energy being put by this little girl into the babbling phase of language acquisition. All young children go through a stage of trying out vowels and consonants and syllables without any connection to meaning. It is usually quite early: babies in cradles can be heard trying stuff out phonetically before they go to sleep, at a point where they have absolutely no clue (so far as we can tell) about how to put together a proposition or express an idea. But I have never before seen such a commanding performance of meaningless rhetorical nothing as this. I wish I could tell you some more interesting stuff about the babbling phase of language acquisition, and make this post nominally educational, but I can't (as the great Jim McCawley would sometimes say to a class after a digression, "I've already told you more than I know about this"). It's not my area. I'm not a serious and responsible child language specialist; I'm just an admiring audience member. This little girl is a star, and I want to join her fan club.

Occasional Language Log contributor Steven Bird reports that when he showed the video to his computational linguistics class someone asked whether the subtitles were being done automatically by computer. I still don't know whether to believe him. But if it's true, fantasy and reality and the inanities of machine pseudo-translation and transcription are combining (in at least some students' addled brains) in a mix of truly surrealist strangeness; nobody knows what to believe any more.

Except that you can believe that the Facebook ranting toddler video will lift your heart and lower your stress level. Visit the bathroom before you watch it (it is forbidden to urinate in office chairs belonging to your employer), and keep the helpless giggling down so as not to disturb co-workers.

Despite the best efforts of two dozen stellar native and non-native scholars and teachers of Chinese, we still have not reached a consensus about the exact meaning and syntax of the sign at a Shanghai construction site presented in "Next Day's Chinese lesson":  Jìnzhǐ xiǎobiàn, fǒuzé sǐrén 禁止小便,否則死人 ("prohibit urine, otherwise die person").

Such is not the case with the sign in this photograph, taken a few years ago in Bohol in the central Philippines.  The photographer was Piers Kelly, editor of Fully (sic), and the language is Visayan (also called Cebuano).

Transcription:  Guinadili ang pag-pangihi dinhi. Ang silot [bang!]

This can be roughly analyzed as:

forbidden TOPIC act.of-urination here. TOPIC penalty [bang!]

More freely: "It is forbidden to urinate here. The penalty is [bang]"

One could hardly be more explicit, especially since the "bang" is vividly illustrated with a picture of the tool that will produce the sound.

Last summer, I posted on an ad in the New Yorker sponsored by the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism in which a string of Chinese characters was inverted mirror-fashion: "Masschusetts is red(-faced)", 6/5/2009.

When I saw this photograph in the Wall Street Journal, I immediately did a double-take and thought that I had caught the WSJ committing the same error (Paul Mozur, "Taiwan and China work on their thesaurus", 8/31/2009):

What is shown in the photograph is the reverse image of the following:  台北富邦銀行, the name of a bank (Taipei Fubon Bank).  Looking more closely, though, one can see that the characters are written on the other side of the glass, and the photographer shot through the glass, showing a man behind the characters, which gives a nice effect.  Thus, the mirror inversion was not the fault of the editors, designers, and printers.

More interesting than the writing on the glass, however, is the article, entitled "Taiwan and China Work on Their Thesaurus," that the photograph accompanies.  The "thesaurus" refers to something called the "Chunghua [i.e., China] Chinese-Language Thesaurus," which is intended to be an online reference work that will supposedly enable the PRC and the ROC to bridge the sizable gap that has developed between the writing systems on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.  This follows on the heels of the recent enactment of the sweeping Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) between Taiwan and China.

For Annette Lu, former Vice President and a leader of the opposition party, the rush to bring script on Taiwan and in the People's Republic of China closer together raises the specter of political unification:  “When Qin Shihuang (China’s first emperor) established his empire one of the first things he did was to unify the writing system.”