#linguistics experiments

We're running a Lingthusiasm listener survey for the third and final time! As part of our eighth anniversary celebrations, we're running this survey as a way to learn more about our listeners, get your suggestions for topics, and to run some linguistic experiments! 

If you did the survey in a previous year, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. There's also a spot for asking us your linguistics advice questions, since our first linguistics advice bonus episode was so popular!

https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey24

The survey will be open for anyone who has listened to 1 or more episodes of Lingthusiasm until December 15th (anywhere on earth) 

You can hear about the results of the previous surveys in two bonus episodes:

Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz

2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji

Data from the 2022 survey also featured in this research article we published in 2023:

Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study

We’ll have the results from this survey in an episode for you in 2025, as well as future research publications.

An interesting article about an experiment in language evolution, by Cathleen O’Grady for Ars Technica. Excerpt: 

The children had to play a game similar to charades. One of them had to convey a meaning, like “bicycle” to their partner, who then had to choose the correct picture from an array. The kids weren’t told to gesture—they were just told to communicate and placed in a situation where speech wasn’t an option.

The very youngest children, who were four years old, had to be prompted to use gestures. But six-year-old kids figured it out quickly on their own, and played the game with each other with high levels of success.

The same pictures came up repeatedly throughout the game. This gave the researchers the chance to see what happened when the kids had to refer to the same concept over and over again. They found that the children quickly developed conventions, with their gestures bearing less obvious resemblance to the ideas they were trying to communicate.

In one pair, Bohn says, the child had the tricky task of communicating a blank white space—the idea of “nothing.” After a few failed attempts, she noticed a white spot on her shirt and pulled her t-shirt to the side, pointing to the spot. Her trick worked, and her partner guessed correctly.

In the next round, when the blank image came up again, the other child pulled her shirt to the side and pointed to it—even though her shirt had no white spot. In a single round, the gesture had gone from being tangibly linked to the concept of “nothing” to being completely divorced from it. An outsider looking in wouldn’t be able to figure out what the gesture meant by looking at it—just like in real languages, where no-one can figure out what “elephant” means just from the shape of the word.

In a later experiment, six- and eight-year-old children also started to develop mini-grammars by establishing “words” that they could combine in different ways. For instance, instead of gesturing “a big duck” by using the “duck” gesture with bigger movements, they developed a sign for “big” that they could use with a range of different words. When they combined gestures, they didn’t stick to German word order, which suggests a limit to how much their native language was coming in to play.