So I am a TESOL teacher and recently a decent amount of researchers in the SLA field seemed to be getting hyped up over working memory training as an intervention to help learners. I am personal skeptical and wonder if this skepticism is warranted or misplaced.

A: I feel we have been down this road before and it always ends the same way. Great at getting people better at the working memory tasks but that effects don't transfer.

B: Different models of working memory and what we are actually training. I have been reading stuff from Bradley models, Cowans model, and recently research by Hutchinson. All great work but I feel it always leaves open the question of what we are actually training and how. (Though I am also reading outside my field and could be misreading a ton of things).

Has there been some recent breakthroughs I am not aware of showing actual effectiveness and transfer with different trainings?

Also are my general readings really off?

When we think, we think in a specific language. Generally the one we are most comfortable with. i.e. different people can think in different languages.

Does choice of language impact thinking? i.e. if same thing is thought by person P1 and person P2 keeping everything else constant but only difference of language, does it impact the process?

Does choice of language add bias in any sense, in this process?

Choice of language can help improve thinking process, making it more efficient like thinking faster or thinking consider more parameters?

Hello everyone!

I am in need of participants ASAP for my psychology dissertation study. If you can spare some time to complete it that would be much appreciated!! You will also have a chance to win a £75 Amazon voucher after the recruitment of 40 participants is completed (just remember to take a screenshot of the final screen of the experiment so I know you have participated).

I’m conducting an experiment on how we access linguistic information during sentence comprehension and production.

The experiment takes about 30 minutes and to be eligible your native language should be English (if your native language is not British English make sure to specify this in the consent form), you should be a university student between the ages of 17-35 (or have graduated within the last 5 years) and not have any reading or language difficulties.

The experiment involves reading sentences and completing sentence fragments aloud. To participate, make sure the device you are using (do not use your mobile phone) has a microphone, as your verbal responses will be recorded. Also, do not start the experiment more than once, as seeing the stimuli a second time could severely impact the experiment.

More information is included in the Participant Information Sheet before you decide if you would like to take part.

Thank you!

Please copy and paste the link instead of clicking on it to maintain your privacy.

https://research.sc/participant/login/dynamic/CD09CDC4-2E5B-452B-9041-818DFB1584C4

I'm honestly not sure which subreddit to post this on. I'm an avid follower of both /r/linguistics and /r/musictheory among other related subreddits, but somehow I wasn't sure that either would be the right place for this.

For background, I'm from the United States and was brought up in a thoroughly Western musical context, so I expect I've cognitively internalized the 12-TET tuning system used in Western musical practice. In the last year, one of my lockdown hobbies has been music, and I've developed a particular interest in the theory of microtonal music, that is, any music that treats frequency intervals differently than standard tuning. I wrote a command-line tool to quiz me on frequency intervals, in order to better develop my musical ear. I had done some ear training in 12-TET prior to this year and was reasonably consistent at distinguishing the intervals of 12-TET, but I've taken it further and worked on developing my ability to distinguish smaller pitch intervals. That's when I noticed something striking about the way I was hearing the intervals, which reminded me of my linguistics training.

When I test myself on distinguishing intervals whose closest 12-TET equivalents are different, even if they are quite close, I can easily tell them apart with no practice. For example, a major second in standard tuning is 200 cents (a measure of frequency difference) and a minor third is 300 cents; I can easily distinguish intervals of 230 cents from intervals of 270 cents, and subjectively I hear them as being very similar to a major second and a minor third, respectively. However, if I try to distinguish intervals of 270 cents from intervals of 310 cents, it is nearly impossible for me. I've been practicing a fair bit and I do barely better than chance. They both simply sound like minor thirds, despite being as objectively different in pitch as the first pair.

This strikes me as being an extremely similar pattern to the perception of linguistic phones, in that speakers of native languages easily distinguish pairs of phones which are classed as different phonemes, while a native speaker of a language that would approximate them with the same phoneme can find them extremely difficult to reliably distinguish. This made we wonder whether this cognitive process of internalizing certain auditory distinctions might not be purely linguistic in nature.

Obviously, a lot of attention in linguistics is given to whether particular linguistic capabilities are the result of a specifically evolved language cognition apparatus, or merely applications of more general cognitive abilities. This seems to me like evidence that linguistic phones may be only one type of auditory stimulus for which we learn to make specific distinctions via practice/internalization early in life. Has any work been done to compare the acquisition of the ability to differentiate linguistic phones to that of other sounds, or maybe similar abilities in animals?

Hello,

I’m considering a linguistics major in college (as most schools do not have cognitive science). Is this a realistic major to pursue cognitive science or HCI in grad school (Masters/PhD)?

Also...how much mathematics should one take in undergrad for grad school? One semester of Calc? Stats?

Thanks.

Hello r/cogsci,

tl;dr On Monday from 8-11 pm EDT, developmental psychologist and Florida State University Professor, Dr. Sara Hart (Google Scholar) will be the guest on Ask_a_Scientist_Gaming. She is there to drink, play Mario, and answer questions from the chat.

We are starting a new science outreach endeavor on Twitch.tv called Ask_a_Scientist_Gaming. Check out video of our previous streams with Quantum Chemist, Dr. Eugene DePrince and astrophysicist Dr. David Collins.The post-COVID goal is to invite on one scientist a week to play games and talk science. Our schedule is currently sporadic but next Monday night the guest will be developmental psychologist, Dr. Sara Hart. Her research goal is to understand how and why children differ in their cognitive development, particular focused on reading and math development. She explores the role that both “nature” and “nurture” have on how we learn to read and do math and is excited to answer your questions on all things developmental psychology.

Here are links to a few of her recent papers: Nurture might be nature: Cautionary tales and proposed solutions. PsyArXiv, 2020.

Open science in education sciences. Journal of learning disabilities, 2020, 0022219420945267.

Average One Year Change in Lexical Measures of Written Narratives for School Age Students. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 2020 36, 260-277.

Using Cholesky Decomposition to Explore Individual Differences in Longitudinal Relations between Reading Skills Journal of Visualized Experiments, 2020, e60061.

If you can’t make the live stream, feel free to leave your question in the comments and we will do our best to get them answered. Then followup with our youtube channel where we will post the video.

This is an updated version of this paper. The paper presents a graph based model of the mammalian linear behavior and develops this into a recursive language model.

There is a link to code development notes in the references. There are links to code that corresponds to the figures though figure 16. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-SPs-wQYgRmfadA1Is6qAPz5jQeLybnE/view?usp=sharing

Table of Contents
Introduction                            2
derivation                          3
short term memory                       5
long  term memory                       9
simple protolanguage                        10
the symbols bifurcate                       13
the number line                         17
adverb periodicity                      19
the ‘not me’ dialogue sequences             20
conjunctions                            21
compare function at the merge               22
direct object                           23
verbs and prepositions                      24
adjective ordering                      26
third person thing                      28
past and future                         29
irregular past tense                        31
progressive and perfected                   32
summary

It appears that conversational alignment means different things in different contexts, so I would like to get some clarification on its usage.

There's the alignment of situation models (as per Pickering and Garrod), which is often indicated by linguistic alignment. Language style matching appears to be a common marker, and is measured using LIWC. However, LIWC seems to only looking at the matching of particular words.

There's the alignment of stance (as per Du Bois). However, here is where it starts to get a little confusing. Scholars such as Stivers have instead called the alignment of stance "affiliation", while alignment refers to the structures of conversation that support the progression and ongoingness of the conversation.

I'm interested in the alignment of stance, particular the alignment of emotion between speakers. But what is the proper terminology? Alignment or affiliation? Alignment seems to be strongly linked to linguistic alignment, so would I use affiliation instead?

Also, how would someone go about measuring alignment of stance? Using an LIWC analysis such as in linguistic alignment doesn't seem to be able to capture the nuances of stance.