Native wails

Skrik « Mellom turrfisken og veden 2 months, 3 weeks ago on Wordpress

[…] er ikkje den fyrste som har blogga om dette, men til liks med Mark Liberman på Language Log la også eg fort merke til figurane som viser eit «Typical French Cry» og eit «Typical German […]

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A Little Science about Language and Babies « 500 Words on Words 2 months, 3 weeks ago on Wordpress

[…] just in case you're still curious, here's a fairly in-depth analysis of that same study from the Language Log blog at University of […]

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Leonardo Boiko 2 months, 4 weeks ago on Wordpress

That’s quite a bit of peer review you guys got going here. Somewhere, sometime, the researchers will read this thread, and I kind of feel bad for them…

[(myl) You shouldn't feel bad for them. They've found suggestive evidence for a really interesting phenomenon. Precisely because the phenomenon is so interesting (i.e. so unexpected against the background of certain widely-shared assumptions , and at the same time so well aligned with various alternative competing assumptions), their evidence deserves to be examined critically, and I expect that it will be, and not just here.

If the finding holds up under scrutiny and under replication, then it's a really important one, and the paper will be widely cited for a long time, along with the research that it engenders. If the effect vanishes under scrutiny and replication, then the paper will mostly be forgotten. And perhaps the most likely outcome is something in between, where perhaps the effect would replicate but in a more complicated way or to a smaller degree.

I can't pretend to know how it will turn out. But the study's authors should be commended for trying an interesting experiment and for reporting the results in a clear way.] ... See all content Hide content

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diesel828 3 months ago on Reddit

I was going to say... there's no reason your comment should have been downvoted, but maybe it was downvoted by a journalist, an ignorant reader or a total moron. Sometimes, one can be all three things.

The problem with journalism when the content involves science is that the writers and editors do not do enough fact-checking. Hell, when I first heard about this story it already struck me as off or improbable or incomplete. But with the pressure to get stories and articles out to keep news fresh, a lot of important details are skipped. As if that isn't bad enough, most readers take it on good authority that if it's published everywhere, it must be true. ... See all content Hide content

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pokebud 3 months ago on Reddit

I'm pretty sure that was the plot of Baby Geniuses

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mdflores 3 months ago on Twitter

"Journalistic statements involving generic plurals are almost never true" Corrections on babies crying in native tongue http://bit.ly/3CIZPu

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shrik_shrek 3 months ago on Twitter

interesting facts on baby cries.. did u know this b4 Nic :) !! http://icio.us/ftquo4

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wubomei 3 months ago on Twitter

Language Logs looks at the science behind this "tiny babies cry in different languages" "news" http://bit.ly/1k71ae

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dshupp 3 months ago on Twitter

@shassinger takedown of baby language article from language log http://bit.ly/1k71ae

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Crying Babies [The Frontal Cortex] » iThinkEducation.net! 3 months ago on Wordpress

[…] Important qualifications from the always lucid Language Log: This is a really interesting and suggestive study, which needs to be replicated to be entirely […]

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j_llisterri 3 months ago on Twitter

@annallis Comentari a "Native wails": http://bit.ly/2U02aY

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annallis 3 months ago on Twitter

Els nadons ploren en diferents idiomes? Això sembla dir un estudi... http://tinyurl.com/yhrlygy

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sccarlson 3 months ago on Twitter

LanguageLog: "journalistic statements involving generic plurals are almost never true" http://bit.ly/1k71ae

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D.O. 3 months ago on Wordpress

I am a bit surprised that the authors use units (s) for the normalized time. Makes no sense. They definitely should publish the original data at least if they are not planning to do more analysis on it. Then the authors quite naturally have dibs. If NIH grant was used in the process, publishing original data is almost a requirement, if I understand it correctly. Otherwise, the effect is large (not merely statistically significant) and if some "Occam's broom" was in use, well, we shall see. ... See all content Hide content

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sciencemedia 3 months ago on Twitter

Language Log » Native wails: http://url4.eu/hwzy

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hackerlinks 3 months ago on Twitter

Language Log - Native wails http://j.mp/1Z6cH3

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Ellen 3 months ago on Wordpress

The first headline listed, "Newborns cry in their native language", at least has the merit of being so obviously false as to make it clear that it's not anywhere close to literally true.

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Terry Collmann 3 months ago on Wordpress

"Do you hope to improve the accuracy of science journalism by making glib, snide, overbroad statements about journalists that are the mirror image of the glib, overbroad conclusions you accuse journalists of drawing from studies like this?"

Yes, I think he does.

But given the pressures on journalists to produce stories that grab attention, rather than reflect accurately what is being said, I'd give you much longer than 10 to 1 against him succeeding.

(Oh, and I'm a journalist …)

[(myl) And it doesn't help that scientific PR often encourages the "stories that grab attention".

I recognize that there are many excellent science journalists, and that science stories are often written by journalists on other beats. But my main goal in writing posts like this, aside from finding a way to tell a story about a scientific paper that's in the news, is to encourage readers to adopt a suitably skeptical attitude when they encounter generic statements about groups.] ... See all content Hide content

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seth edenbaum 3 months ago on Wordpress

"Do you hope to improve the accuracy of science journalism by making glib, snide, overbroad statements about journalists that are the mirror image of the glib, overbroad conclusions you accuse journalists of drawing from studies like this?"

Ah… the pull of narrative. Pleasure and pattern.

Giving meaning to the world.

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Don Monroe 3 months ago on Wordpress

Since they have the data, it seems to me that they should do the whole analysis over, blinded. The opportunity for biased data selection could create the whole effect, not just enhance it.

[(myl) I should say that I don't know for sure that they didn't do the selection and annotation "blind", just that they don't say anything one way or the other about the issue, and that usually means that blind techniques weren't used.] ... See all content Hide content

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thomas_dockery 3 months ago on Twitter

Rule of thumb: when newspaper headlines contain generic plurals, they're generally wrong: http://bit.ly/1k71ae

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hackerlinks 3 months ago on Twitter

Language Log - Native wails http://j.mp/1Z6cH3

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Benjamin Zimmer 3 months ago on Wordpress

More on this from John Wells here.

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Daniel Ezra Johnson 3 months ago on Wordpress

30 babies in each group isn't bad, but how can we discuss the statistical results without separating between-baby and within-baby variation? Put another way, are their reported p-values way too low? Unless each country's babies are quite similar, I suspect so. I may keep making the same point, but I think it's a good one. More at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~johnson4/johnson_panel.pdf.

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Mark P 3 months ago on Wordpress

Again and again your discussions show a point that journalists don't, won't or can't understand: experiments don't yield facts, they yield experimental results. Of course it doesn't help when the researchers forget it or overanalyze the results for the sake of a satisfying conclusion.

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Chris 3 months ago on Wordpress

This technique of cherry-picking atypical "typical" values for rhetorical effect is

I would have completed this sentence "intellectually dishonest". Contrasting that with the way you completed it is a rather sad comment on scientific publishing, especially if this piece has already passed peer review without any of the reviewers finding this worthy of comment.

Your methodological concerns seem fairly major, too. I wonder why they didn't occur to the experimenters? ... See all content Hide content

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interests 3 months ago on Twitter

Language Log: Native wails http://bit.ly/4pUmgB

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