Trevis Rothwell's weblog

I just finished reading Paul Bloom’s How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. A reader of this book might expect to come away being able to answer the question, “how do children learn the meanings of words?” but in the final chapter, Dr. Bloom states that nobody knows how children learn the meanings of words! What, then, can we hope to gain by reading this book?

In claiming that nobody knows how children learn the meanings of words, the author is affirming what the previous ten chapters implied: this is complicated stuff, and state of the art research is just scratching the surface. The book covers a variety of subtopics related to word learning, including how children learn nouns, and pronouns, and numbers, and how they differentiate between naming things and naming representations of things, and how their words and their thoughts interrelate. But since what is known of these topics is still in its infancy, with much room for debate, rather than pontificating unsubstantiated opinions as facts, the author spends most of the book summarizing results from years of experimental linguistic research.

The first chapter kicks things off with some fun, considering how children learn what exactly the word “rabbit” refers to. If a child sees a grey rabbit running through the yard, and an adult points to it and says, “Rabbit!”, does the child understand that the word “rabbit” refers to a kind of animal? Or does the child believe that the word refers to that one particular animal (perhaps it is named “Rabbit”)? Or does the word refer only to grey rabbits, but not brown ones? Or to all mammals in general? Or to only the ears of the rabbit? Or to the tail? Or to “all and sundry undetached parts of rabbits”? Such questioning can carry us down the path of the ridiculous, but they are fair questions if we want to understand how words are learned.

My favorite excerpt from the book has nothing at all to do with linguistics, but was mentioned in passing as it pertains to cognition in general:

Adults are often oblivious to dramatic changes across a visual scene, even for objects that are the direct focus of attention, a phenomenon known as change blindness. In one striking demonstration of this, an experimenter started a conversation with a pedestrian and then, during a distraction, was surreptitiously replaced by a different experimenter. Only about half of the pedestrians noticed the change (Simons & Levin, 1998).

We also see a good rebuttal to the ever-popular Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, including a parody (originally published by Gregory Murphy) showcasing circular reasoning in the hypothesis:

Whorfian: Eskimos are greatly influenced by their language in their perception of snow. For example, they have N words for snow [N varies widely; see Pullum, 1991], whereas English only has one, snow. Having all these different words makes them think of snow very differently than, say, Americans do.

Skeptic: How do you know they think of snow differently?

Whorfian: Look at all the words they have for it! N of them!

Never content to assume a research experiment—even his own—has led to the one true answer, Dr. Bloom compares and contrasts the various experiments, pointing out both inadequacies and strengths, gently prodding the reader toward what he believes are the most plausible conclusions. As such, loaded with references to original research papers, the book serves beautifully as an introductory survey of word learning literature, and would be good for novice researchers in the field to jump-start their reading.

The book is relatively light on linguistic jargon, and should be accessible to readers without a background in linguistics, though some sections are more dense with terminology than others.

There are a number of pictures and graphs, but the book should be perfectly readable in electronic format. It is, however, presently only available in paperback.

I just finished reading Nothing to Envy, a compelling saga that weaves North Korean history together with accounts of the lives of a handful of individuals growing up in, first admiring but eventually leaving, what they came to regard as a repressive society.

North Korean culture is described as a sort of communistic monarchy: everything the citizens needed in life was to be regulated or supplied by the government, and further, everything was to be grown, built, or developed entirely within North Korea. To conduct business yourself? Illegal. To import goods from other countries? Illegal. But just so long as the government made available everything that you needed, why should you bother buying or selling independently?

The people greatly esteemed their nation’s leader Kim Il-sung and his claims to provide for all of their needs, though they had little choice. Government staff and citizen volunteers kept a close watch on the people, to ensure that they never said or did anything that opposed the official government-mandated way of life. There were even monitor guards to ensure that every home properly maintained a government-supplied portrait of Kim Il-sung, and that every citizen was wearing their Kim Il-sung lapel pin.

Televisions were rare, and physically modified by the government to pick up only North Korean broadcasts. School books rewrote history to paint the nation in a light more favorable than reality, and other nations in a light less favorable than reality. With all goods being produced strictly in-house, a wide variety of items that were commonplace elsewhere, including writing paper, pencils, books, and shoes, were scarce. Bibles were forbidden, as was Christianity: Kim Il-sung himself became a god-like figure to the people.

The government’s attempt to provide for the people worked reasonably well for several decades, until in the 1990s a growing famine reduced the government’s ability to provide food. Along with the food went most of the money, although people were still required to show up at their (now unpaid) jobs. Electricity became unreliable and inconsistently available. Sewage treatment broke down. Water became scarce. As the famine progressed, with people of all ages suffering from (and eventually dying from) severe malnutrition, North Koreans eventually came to ignore the government rules against producing their own food and conducting their own business, and slowly began to fend for themselves. The abject failure of communism led to people finding their way into their own free-market economy.

Life in North Korea improved, largely due to the homegrown free market economy and leaders grudgingly allowing foreign aid to replenish the almost non-existent food supply, but after several years of increase the government decided that things had to be brought back into order. They squelched the new free market in favor of returning to the strong socialistic lifestyle of years past, clamping down on individual business and reasserting the authority of the government to be the provider for its citizens.

The book explains this history through exemplary life stories of several people, including a teenage girl who grows up to become a schoolteacher, extolling the greatness of North Korea to her students until she doesn’t believe it herself anymore; a university student who gets his hands on American books and South Korean television broadcasts, persuading him against North Korean society; a medical doctor who grows weary of trying to save lives in a land where government regulations result in intense malnutrition affecting nearly the entire population; a mother who loses her husband and her son to the famine, and turns to illegal black market entrepreneurship selling cookies to make ends meet for herself and her daughters.

As these people lived through both the relative success of classical North Korean communism, and its absolute failure, they realized that their homeland wasn’t everything the government propaganda made it out to be. Bit by bit they came to believe that life in the surrounding nations of China and especially South Korea would be much more to their liking, and fought against social norms and government guards to relocate, often at great personal and/or financial expense.

A reader might assume that, upon fleeing North Korea, such defectors would be universally happy to be free, never to return. Many defectors, though, maintained confidence in the fundamental ideals of North Korean government, and hoped that the government would open up enough to allow them to return with impunity, to help rebuild their broken home.

Based on the popular news media, it’s easy for outsiders to depersonalize North Korea as a mysterious place totally unlike anything we may be familiar with. Reading this book provides an in-depth look at how people there actually live, showing very recognizable hopes, dreams, and desires.

Clinging to my library of pulverized trees, I read the paperback edition, but this book has very few photographs and would be plenty readable in electronic edition as well.

I just finished reading Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, the story of a Virginia writer and shepherd who explores Scotland in search of adopting a border collie suitable for helping him work his sheep farm back home.

One of the things that impressed me the most in reading this book was the vivid description of life as a shepherd. I had never imagined shepherding as being a very mentally demanding occupation, but here we learn of a shepherd who by the age of twelve could recognize each of the family farm’s one thousand sheep individually, and recall their attributes such as medical history and grazing preferences.

While the accounts of shepherds was fascinating, this is mainly a book about border collies, and their stories are at least as fascinating: a border collie who successfully rounded up a flock of frightened sheep in the darkness of night; a border collie who could gracefully drive sheep down from precarious mountain peaks; a border collie so determined to obey his master’s commands that after being told to “stay”, to the horror of his master who neglected to signal otherwise, he stayed put without taking a step while being trampled to death by a herd of cattle.

We also gain insight into the close relationship that can develop between shepherds and their border collies: an expert sheep dog who, after being sold to another shepherd after several years with his first, refused to herd sheep in any sensible way for his new master; the shepherd’s complete inability to tend to the sheep without his dog; a shepherd who, upon learning that his beloved border collie is about to pass on, spends the night with it, outside, in the snow, wrapping the dog in his own coat until morning.

This book paints border collies as absolutely magnificent creatures; if not the most beautiful, then surely the most faithful of all dogs. But the book concludes with a warning that border collies can be difficult to deal with as pets. If you already have a border collie, reading this book will give you a greater appreciation for your companion; if not, it would be inadvisable to run out and adopt a border collie just because of the stories in the book, as taking care of a border collie can be more intense than many other breeds of dog.

(Thankfully, I had already adopted a border collie before reading the book!)

There are a few photographs, but the book is mostly straight text, and would be perfectly readable on a Kindle or an iPad, if the publisher sold an electronic edition, which they don’t. You can buy a printed copy at Amazon.