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How language gives your brain a break
- mziel 11y ago> That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible. YMMV, but for German (I'm not a native speaker, although fluent) you can't figure out the meaning of the sentence until the very end. The authors' even acknowledge this: >German, which has some notoriously indirect sentence constructions, is far less optimized, according to the analysis. >And the researchers also discovered that “head-final” languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Turkish, where the head word comes last, show less length minimization than is typical. German, Japanese, Turkish seem like quite a big chunk of languages (population-wise), so I wonder if initial statements are not too English-specific.
- ocb 11y ago"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." - Mark Twain
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- davidw 11y agoYeah, after reading a bit, I started searching for 'German' to see what they said about it. I'm completely in agreement with Mark Twain's assessment of that language. From the article: "among languages. Italian appears to be highly optimized for short sentences" - oddly, though, a lot of more 'literary' Italian tends to long, florid phrases that I would consider run-ons in English. "Rhetoric" has been a thing there for thousands of years, after all, after they borrowed it from the Greeks.
- qubex 11y agoAs an Anglo-Italian bilingual speaker, I also wish to add that (compared to my only other native reference, English) Italian is almost maddeningly facile on ambiguity all the way to ample latitude for double-entendres. Personally, I find that emotions are best notated in Italian, but sound thinking requires a hard-nosed tool such as English.
- mziel 11y agoSomething, something, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis :)
- kaybe 11y agoTangentially, there are studies that state that the information rate (information per time) is about the same in all languages, and languages with lower information density per word are spoken slower.
- mziel 11y agoCan you provide links? Greatly appreciated!
- kaybe 11y agoE.g. here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433.3226&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433... (a lot of articles provide summaries, eg http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/) They cite three others: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Locke5/publication/5561615_Cost_and_complexity_selection_for_speech_and_language/links/09e415100f89672b74000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Locke5/publication/... http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng/2000/PDF/UninvitedGuest.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng/2000/PDF/UninvitedGue... I can't find access to the third one without digging since it's published in conference proceedings from 1961, but there's a talk with access (wow!): http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/history/snds/Karlgren.mp3 http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/history/snds/Karlgren.... Further citation-following yields more books I cannot get a hold of (see the citations in the papers if you want to digg).
- rndn 11y agoGödel, Escher, Bach has a great paragraph on this in the context of recursive structures and processes (i.e. things that can be modeled with stacks, i.e. push and pop operations): Recursion in Language (p. 138): Our mental stacking power is perhaps slightly stronger in language. The grammatical structure of all languages involves setting up quite elaborate push-down stacks, though, to be sure, the difficulty of understanding a sentence increases sharply with the number of pushes onto the stack. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which Droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience out-of-order popping from the stack onto which the professor's verbs been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender. But in normal ken German, such deep stacks almost never occur-in fact, native speaker of German often unconsciously violate certain conventions which force verb to go to the end, in order to avoid the mental effort of keeping track of the stack. Every language has constructions which involve stacks, though usually of a less spectacular nature than German. But there are always of rephrasing sentences so that the depth of stacking is minimal. Here is an example of such a (grammatical) beast: Der Mechaniker, auf den wir wegen dem Unfall, den wir, bevor wir die Stadt, die im Norden liegt, erreichen konnten, hatten, gewartet haben, ist endlich angekommen. This can’t really be translated to English: The mechanist, for whom because of the accident, which, before the city, which lies in the North, we could reach, we had, we have waited for, has finally arrived.
- agumonkey 11y agoFunny I've never `which` in programming languages, it's kinda like a short lambda or an anaphoric binder.
- to3m 11y agoThe mechanic the accident affected is well known in the city he was late to. The people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing songs about it, in fact. The tourist guide calls them the songs the people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing. The buildings the money the tourists the songs the people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing attracts spend paid for are also a big draw.
- mherrmann 11y agoOne thing I find interesting about the example in the article: (1) John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen. (2) John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out. Yes, (1) is easier to parse (and I prefer it) but (2) is less ambiguous: (1) could equally well mean that John threw the trash out while he was sitting in the kitchen. I also find the title of the post a little confusing. I thought the article would be about how learning languages helps your brain recover.
- jobu 11y agoThat's similar to what I was thinking, but I've learned to question my natural writing style after realizing that most people find it confusing. And yes the article seems to be more about language patterns that give your brain a break than language in general.
- almightysmudge 11y agoWouldn't there be a comma if he was sitting in the kitchen? Isn't there an old adage as well, "don't end a sentence with a preposition"? edit: Apparently that's an old wives tale, the preposition one.
- networked 11y agoIn case you were wondering about the origins of this idea: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004454.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004454.h....
- beagle3 11y agoThe adage I'm familiar with is "A preposition is something you shouldn't end a sentence with". It goes hand in hand with "If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is".
- jessaustin 11y agoThat's the kind of grammar prescription up with which we will not put.
- kazinator 11y agoDependency distance is why it is good to have programming language constructs like for (init; test; increment) body-statement and their ilk. Though the evaluation is out of order, (test, body-statement then increment), certain related things are kept together. It also explains why infix notations (and 2D math notation) are effective: they physically clump semantically near things. Postfix notations with no parentheses are absolutely the worst; you don't know what goes with what at a glance: 1 2 + 3 4 + 5 6 + * 7 8 / - * If my eyes land on, say, the inner * , it's not immediately clear what the left operand is. Prefix with parenthesization lets us fold and indent the darn thing for a 2D visualization: (* (+ 1 2) (- (* (+ 3 4) (+ 5 6)) (/ 7 8))) ^__ orig. distance__^ The (- ...) expression jumps down and gets indented. Thus it is visually lined up with its sibling, and near the connecting operator: (* (+ 1 2) (- (* (+ 3 4) (+ 5 6)) (/ 7 8))) We recursively apply this: (* (+ 1 2) (- (* (+ 3 4) (+ 5 6)) (/ 7 8))) (* (+ 1 2) (- (* <--- ... reduced distance, and visual alignment (/ <---
- jonsen 11y agoPrefix (with fixed number of arguments) need no parentheses * + 1 2 - * + 3 4 + 5 6 / 7 8 Postfix can be indented similarly 1 2 + 3 4 + 5 6 + * 7 8 / - * Or parentheses less infix 1+2 * 3+4 * 5+6 - 7/8
- UhUhUhUh 11y agoEffort carries meaning. It shifts focus around and introduces exquisite nuances or even a sub-text (i.e. what if John has mixed feelings about his current girlfriend?) It boosts thinking. It works visually as well with, for example, what R. Barthes called "punctum."
- tmalsburg2 11y agoThe way the study is presented makes the reasoning sound somewhat circular: Language A is optimal because the dependencies are short. The dependencies are short because that's optimal. Not sure what we learn from that. I also find statements like "language A is more optimized than language B" questionable because (i) it's not clear how to measure optimality and (ii) there are no good reasons to assume that some languages evolve to be flawed, the pressure to perform well is just too high. Anyway, I suppose that these are just problems of the dumbed down press release. Looking forward to see the actual paper.
- jxramos 11y agoI think the criterion for optimization came about from this line... “If there is a large amount of time between one word and another related word, that means you have to hold one of those words in memory, and that can be hard to do.” They're basically saying you can pop things off your mental stack more readily with smaller DLM languages.
- tmalsburg2 11y agoJust had a look at the paper. They indeed assume that long dependencies are hard and that languages therefore tend to optimize for short dependencies. They also argue that some languages (like German) may have longer dependencies because other aspects of their grammar make it easier to process those dependencies than would be the case in short-dependency languages like English. This suggests that languages that are more optimized for dependency length may be less optimized with respect to some other aspect of processing. Languages may thus make different tradeoffs with respect to the various sources of processing difficulty. This means that German may have seemed hard to Mark Twain not because it is intrinsically harder but simply because it makes different tradeoffs than English.
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- ThePhysicist 11y agoThe concept of dependency distance is actually equally useful in programming languages. For example, instead of writing if condition: #...a lot of code... value = process() return value else: #...return error information (e.g. in a web app) return error_information I always try to write something like this instead if not condition: return error_information #...a lot of code... value = process() return value This make reading and understanding the code much easier since things that belong together are close together. This seems trivial but there is a lot of code that is written like the first block and therefore harder to understand. Sometimes, small things can make a large difference. That said, I am probably a bit over-sensitive to this kind of problem as a German, since we also have the habit of holding back the vital information in a sentence until the very last word.
- ppod 11y agoThere are a lot of interesting resonances between theoretical linguistics and programming language theory. An obvious one is Subject Verb Object order: dog.bite(man) or bite(dog, man) Another one is the Liskov substitution principle and hyponym substitution. Or polymorphism and word sense disambiguation. There's also a scope thing with co-reference resolution and global variables.
- jxramos 11y agoI had refactored a fella's script the other day that made extensive use of the precondition tucked wayyyyy at the bottom in a else clause. It wasn't the cleanest explanation I provided him about why its better to tuck preconditions at the top so the failure and exit is immediately apprehended next to the conditional rather than way at the bottom. I also cited reason of unnecessary indentation but the connection you make here makes great sense and could have aided me in the explanation at the time. Good thinking.
- vog 11y agoThis fits quite well in the large advice (expressed e.g. by Martin Fowler) that a function should not contain deeply nested if/then/else constructs, but a flat series of "if" statements each finishing with a "return" statement. And if this is impossible, break the function into smaller functions such that each of them is composed like that. This advice is especially helpful when coding complex conditionals in business logic. (but small enough so you don't need/want a generic rules engine and rules DSL for that.)
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- tmalsburg2 11y agoLink to the (paywalled) paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/28/1502134112.abstract?sid=39bcf418-68c6-474c-a21a-a6ceec737679 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/28/1502134112.abst... Abstract: Explaining the variation between human languages and the constraints on that variation is a core goal of linguistics. In the last 20 y, it has been claimed that many striking universals of cross-linguistic variation follow from a hypothetical principle that dependency length—the distance between syntactically related words in a sentence—is minimized. Various models of human sentence production and comprehension predict that long dependencies are difficult or inefficient to process; minimizing dependency length thus enables effective communication without incurring processing difficulty. However, despite widespread application of this idea in theoretical, empirical, and practical work, there is not yet large-scale evidence that dependency length is actually minimized in real utterances across many languages; previous work has focused either on a small number of languages or on limited kinds of data about each language. Here, using parsed corpora of 37 diverse languages, we show that overall dependency lengths for all languages are shorter than conservative random baselines. The results strongly suggest that dependency length minimization is a universal quantitative property of human languages and support explanations of linguistic variation in terms of general properties of human information processing.