Život je nekad siv, nekad žut...

I hate:

1. Parking at Berkeley Bowl.
2. Putting gas into my car.
3. Driving in Bay area traffic

http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/prepare/future/

I always thought that people buying dry food and water because they were afraid of terrorists were... taking a little too many precautions. Now, after looking at New Orleans, I am thinking of the same to prepare for a possible Bay area earthquake. You can't evacuate for a quake.

I am reading Vygotsky's "Thought and Language" ("Мышление и речь", Лев Выготский). Here's a quote:


Wallon suggested that there is a period when a child views a word as an attribute of, rather than as a substitute for, an object... The data on children's language (supported by anthropological data) strongly suggest that for a long time to a child the word is a property, rather than the symbol of an object...

The idea is so simple, and very intuitive. I just wonder how come I didn't know about it before?

The next obvious question is how we perceive objects and their properties. Do we learn "object perception" or something like that? Is some of it pre-wired? A lot of it has to do with vision, of course, and as far as I understand, much of the vision system is innate. However, are the higher vision processes that compose whole object experiences also innate? Or are they learned? References appreciated.

I was reading an excellent excerpt from a book by Terence W. Deacon, "The Symbolic Species". It's the reading my students have to do for the cog sci class I am starting to teach next week, and so I thought it would be good for me to read it, too :-) The chapter (#4) has a lot of different stuff, including child learning and neural nets, which I found very enlightening.

Other than that, there was a mention of the fact that complete bilinguals have two different centers in the brain for the two languages they speak. I don't know how many centers I have; the only thing I know for sure is which languages interfere with each other in my mind, and which do not. English never interferes with anything. Neither does Russian (there is one exception). Only the languages that I do not speak on a daily basis mix with each other. Thus, when trying to remember Spanish after a year of Arabic, Arabic words were trying to get into the Spanish sentences. Spanish and German mix much less after I lived in Germany (but, I mean, it's not really possible that at the beginning I had one center for Spanish and German, and then they started separating, or is it?).

One weird exception to all this is Serbian. While it does not mix with English or anything else, it has a tendency to insert words into my Russian sentences. I can only explain it with the fact that Russian and Serbian are so similar; they must build on the same base in my head. You know, some people told me stories that sometimes they start speaking Russian to an English speaker without realizing it, or vice versa, or inserting Russian words into English sentences - and it's never happened to me. But I do insert Serbian words into Russian sentences or vice versa (more common Serbian words into Russian sentences) without paying any attention to it. There are two categories of words here: one is interjections, or very common phrases such as "you know" or "well". I insert them and only later realize that it was Serbian, not Russian. Words in the other category are words that my parents have to tell me don't exist in Russian. It's quite amusing - it could be a perfectly good Russian word, and most likely that root is used in Russian, too, just with a different prefix. And my parents go "Zhenya, that's not a word of the Russian language".

Another interesting thing is which levels of language are the same for all languages and which are different. These are just things I noticed myself doing. Phonology is different for every language, and I have to consciously switch from one system to the other. Have you noticed how difficult it is sometimes to say a Russian word with Russian pronounciation in the middle of an English sentence? It's like stumbling over something while walking. I find that with Russian and Serbian, too (since the systems are similar, but not quite). I think most people living in a country, other than their country of origin (depends on when they came there, of course) have noticed this, too: when nervous, or overly emotional, my long-forgotten Russian accent comes up in a foreign language. My mother-in-law, when too emotional, starts speaking in the Dalmatian dialect (it's all [i] instead of [e]), while usually she speaks in the Belgrade dialect; it's really cool.

For intonation, it's not too clear to me. I know that my Russian intonation has been greatly affected by my English (that's the first thing that goes after a week in Moscow), but my Serbian intonation is very Serbian (maybe because Filip's Serbian intonation didn't change, I don't know). Word access seems to be just on the "most frequently used" basis. It really drives me crazy sometimes when I can't remember the right word in the right language.

One of the Republican Party's major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires. Democrats are still effective on bread-and-butter issues like health care, but they come across in much of America as arrogant and out of touch the moment the discussion shifts to values.

"On values, they are really noncompetitive in the heartland," noted Mike Johanns, a Republican who is governor of Nebraska. "This kind of elitist, Eastern approach to the party is just devastating in the Midwest and Western states. It's very difficult for senatorial, Congressional and even local candidates to survive." (emphasis mine)

I agree - arrogance was generally the Democratic sentiment in LJ today.

Saw people wearing T-shirts with slogans on campus:

- "Smile, it confuses people"
- "Time is an invention"
- "My home is in my head"

At first I wanted to write in Russian, but then I realized it was going to be 10 times slower (because all the terminology is much more accessible in English in my brain).

Usually, at least here in the States, phonology, syntax and semantics are considered to be the most important branches of linguistics, the core of it. These three are thought to be the fundamentals, since they describe the main components of language: the actual sounds that we use to produce language, how we structure our speech, and the meaning we put into it.

Although I agree that these subjects are very important for the study of linguistics, I think that two different disciplines should be considered as the core of linguistics: sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Language is intricately connected with thought, in fact, in my opinion, one is not possible without the other, hence cognitive linguistics. Language is inherently social, thus sociolinguistics.

I suppose the three current core branches, phonology, syntax and semantics, have to do with outer manifestations of language, and the two new proposed core disciplines strive to understand why these outer manifestations exist, thus all of them are important.

My interests lie more in cognitive and sociolinguistics, and I think that those two disciplines combined hold keys to many mysteries of language.

Conformity

Psychologists have discovered that even the most independent-minded of us will conform to social pressure when we are with a group of people. In one classic experiment, people were shown a vertical line and asked to find a line of identical length from a selection of three.
You might think that this is an absurdly easy task, and when people perform it by themselves they do very well. However, psychologists have discovered that we are very easily swayed by the opinions of other people when we do this task in a group. In one study, a group of three people was set up, where two of the people were confederates of the experimenter. When the confederates deliberately gave wrong answers, people were often swayed to give the wrong answer also. In fact, 75% of people gave at least one wrong answer, with some people conforming to peer pressure on every occasion.