Why are some languages often confused for others? FAQ wanted

By -
Seán Roberts, Lars Yencken and I have just published a paper on confusion of languages with data from The Great Language Game. Alongside, we also created a new game: LingQuest!

The Great Language Game is quite simple, players hear a short audio clip of people speaking and then they have to guess what language it is that they heard from some given alternatives. Very often people guess correctly, in our study we found that 70% of the time people guess correctly. But, what about those other times? What's happening there? What languages are players confusing for which?

In this paper, we explore this question and test some different ideas for what it may be that is going on. The paper is getting some media coverage, and I thought we'd answer some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). So, please post your questions to us and we'll answer them!

Cheese pic of me listening to sounds with a Great Language Game-t-shirt that Lars sent me
One thing that I'm really happy about with this paper, and that has nothing to do with the actual content, is that it was based on sharing and collaboration. I contacted Lars, the creator of the game, out of the blue and asked him if he couldn't release some more stats on players behaviour on the site. He, not knowing anything about me really, sent over the raw data and encouraged me to do research on it. I then mentioned it to Seán in casual conversation at the MPI-Nijmegen and the ball started rolling. And here we are! Sharing is caring and great research comes of it.

Now, let's see what questions you all have for us!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Global Tree of Languages

By -
Image
I was a reviewer for the Evolution of Language (Evolang) conference for the first time this year, a tedious-sounding task that turned out to be hilarious.  The conference attracts some bizarre manuscripts on the origins of language, one particularly imaginative one I wanted to devote a blogpost to, but regretfully cannot because of reviewer confidentiality. Also in my inbox to review was the most exciting paper about language that I’d ever seen.  I recommended acceptance obviously, even though it was only tangentially related to the theme of the conference, and it was accepted as a poster and published in the conference proceedings (available here ).  The paper was by Gerhard Jäger and Søren Wichmann, about constructing a world family tree of languages using a database of basic vocabulary, the ASJP database .  Claims about how language families may be related are nothing new but are normally statistically uninformed (such as work by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Gr...
Read more

Language family maps

By -
Image
Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments. This blog has featured posts on maps before, by  Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by  Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data...
Read more

My ELAN workflow for segmenting and transcription

By -
Image
Hello everyone, Hedvig here. I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis, hence the lack of writing here. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up after submission, there's a lot of drafts lying on blogger waiting for completion. If you really, really miss me in particular, you could listen to my ramble at Talk the Talk - a weekly show about linguistics. Now that the shameless plug and excuses are done with, let's get down and talk about: THE TRANSCRIPTION CHALLENGE! In this blog post, I will focus on a part of this challenge¹ - the workflow for segmenting and transcribing  audio material. This is a rough guide, if it turns out people appreciate something like this I'll re-write it more thoroughly. This is a bit sloppily written in places, but trust me - if I do this "properly" right now I will lose days of work time that I should be spending on my thesis... so, I'll only do it if people really want it - and I might wait a while until I do. Sor...
Read more