Vicki Hollett

Lots of handy study tips here for traditional classroom learning and also for independent learners.

As many of you must have realised, the poll in my last post was inspired by the psychologist Eleanor Rosch. Back in the 1970’s she ran a series of experiments getting people to rate how prototypical of a category particular words were.

Here’s the start of some instructions from one of her experiments:

Think of dogs. You all have some notion of what a “real dog,” a “doggy dog” is. To me a Retriever or a German Shepherd is a very doggy dog while a Pekinese is a less doggy dog. Notice that this kind of judgment has nothing to do with how well you like the thing… You may prefer to own a Pekinese without thinking that it is the breed that best represents what people mean by dogginess. In this study you are asked to judge how good an example of a category various instances of the category are.

So in my poll I gave you pictures of a German Shepherd (Dog 1) and a Pekinese (Dog 2) and nobody chose the Pekinese as ‘the-doggiest’. Tony made me laugh by suggesting it was for dusting the furniture!  

Dog 1                                                                                     Dog 2

But several people chose the German Shepherd and Cat pointed out that it’s closest to a wolf which is a sort of dog prototype. It sounds like Clarissa was tempted to vote for the German Shepherd as well because it was brown, and it could well be that brown is a prototypical colour for dogs. Result: Eleanor Rosch is bang on target.

Dog 3

The third dog I stuck in the poll was a mut. Several people mentioned how hard it was to choose between Dog 1 and Dog 3. I think being a mix of many kinds of dogs is what eventually won dog 3 ‘the-doggiest-dog’ vote in the poll.  More on Dog 3 in a minute.

So what did Eleanor Rosch find out?  Here are some more examples from her experiments.  In a lot of them people had fifteen, twenty or fifty words to rank in a category, but to keep life simple, I’ll just give you three and it’s a little puzzle. You have to work out how well the words represent the category on the left. Are they good representations, so-so or a bit dodgy? (There’s one of each). I’ll post the answers in the ‘Comments’.

The most striking thing about Eleanor Rosch’s research was how consistent the answers were. Time and again items would come up in the same or similar position in the list. She concluded that the more an item has attributes in common with other members of the category, the more it will be considered a good and representative member of the category.

However, she also found that the people she was experimenting on had persistent illusions about how the categories were working:

Subjects, upon receiving feedback from the experiment, and audiences, upon being told of it, generally argue that they feel positive that there are many attributes common to all members of the category even when they cannot think of any specific attributes for which there are not counterexamples.

So it seems we want to believe that there are necessary and sufficient conditions that apply to all members in a category, when in practice, as Wittgenstein has pointed out,  there aren’t. I think this worth remembering when we’re teaching. Students may be looking for clear cut meaning boundaries which don’t exist in practice. Maybe some little puzzles along the lines of the one above might help them with that?

I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that the word rankings varied across cultures. So American respondents thought a robin was the birdiest-bird, but when other researchers replicated the experiments in the UK, it was sparrows. We can expect those category boundaries to shift a bit across borders and cultures. No surprises there, I guess.

A very big thank you to everyone who took part in the poll. I’d love to hear any more thoughts on this, so please put them in the comments. I’m going to put the answers from the Eleanor Rosch research there too – click the red ‘Comments’ link at the bottom of this post to check them out.

The other thing I should explain is that we have a new addition to our family. His name is Carter and he is the mut in picture 3. His vocabulary is tiny compared to Chaser’s but he attracts a surprising number of  ‘What a wonderful dog!’ comments on walks when he’s not misbehaving – which he does all too often. I’ve been putting it down to Americans being more liberal with compliments (they’re commonly used as an invitation to talk here) but you’ve just helped explain it to me. It’s not that he’s a wonderful dog so much as a wonderful example of the prototype of  ‘dog’. Ha!

Sources:

Rosch, E. Cognitive representation of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1975, 104, 192-233

Rosch, E & Mervis C. Family resemblances: studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 1975, 7, 573-605

When we need some help at work, who do we turn to? Well, someone competent who knows their stuff. I mean, we’d make sure to avoid the idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about, surely?
Wrong! It seems we’re much more likely to base our decision on how likable they are. There was a great bit of business research about it published in the Harvard Business Review about 5 years ago that you can read here. It found that given a choice between someone who knows a lot but is unpleasant and someone who doesn’t know much but is a delight, we generally pick the lovable fool over the competent jerk.

So there it is – empirical evidence that ‘we like to do business with people we like’. Useful stuff for us to bear in mind  in our business English classrooms perhaps…

Forensic linguistics is a sexy field. If you’re trying to work out who sent a text message or ransom note, or made an obscene phone call or bomb threat, or if there’s doubt about whether the deceased really wrote that suicide note, these folks will look at the language and help you figure it out.

Here’s a 10 minute extract from a lecture by one of the world’s top forensic linguists, Professor Malcolm Coulthard.

(If you get hooked, a full version of the lecture -it lasts an hour- can be seen here at Aston University’s website)

There’s a popular detective show called ‘Bones’ on US TV about a forensic anthropologist who looks at human remains to work out whodunit. And in another called ‘Lie to Me’, the hero uses facial recognition to figure it out. Surely linguistics is a much more interesting and credible science?

Somewhere waiting to happen, there’s a hit TV series with a linguistic detective as our hero/heroine. They would need to be an engaging character though, and they’d probably need to interestingly flawed in some way. But how might a linguist be flawed? Any thoughts on what they could be like? Does anyone fancy writing it?