Friday April 16, 2010

By Friday, I was mostly almost adjusted to the time difference. I had slept in a bit some days, which helped: I wasn’t sleeping well at night for various reasons, so I was tired to the point that even if I was physically present at the opening lecture, I wouldn’t really be there. But I made it by at least the second lecture every day and I caught many of the first ones. As usual at conferences, they scheduled invited speakers for the first couple of slots to reward the people who manage to get out of bed; also as usual, some of the invited speakers were excellent and well worth getting up for but others sort of vaguely summarized some well known material, weren’t very exciting, etc, and you can’t always guess ahead of time which will be which.

I saw a bunch presentations about neat experiments on how human subjects deal with artificial languages. The general idea is that you construct an artificial language and a task that requires it, and give the subjects enough freedom to modify the language as the task continues. For example, one task was to learn and recall a set of nonsense words. The experimenters presented it as a memory game to the subjects, but really they were chaining the recollections: Each subject was given the previous one’s recalled words to memorize. In accordance with linguistic predictions, they tended to add regularities, like repeated letter sequences.

Another experiment required subjects to play a trading game using an ‘alien language’ over a chat room interface. It was really about how social divisions from along with differences in language use. Several of subjects were able to determine whether the person they were chatting with was their teammate through unintended quirks in their use of the language or through pre-planned handshakes developed in the first couple of rounds. It was really neat.

The conference dinner was Friday night, and it was honestly something of a let-down. They charged €60 (approximately $80) for a meal that turned out to be a buffet, with okay food, nothing outstanding, the beer & wine that are normal at European meals (beer is cheaper than water here), but no dessert, and not enough tables and chairs. Everyone agreed it was a disappointment. On the plus side, it was back in the chapel-looking room at the Domkerk where the opening lecture was, which was a treat, but no one ever played the pipe organ there, which would have been a nice touch. And how can you have a conference dinner in the Netherlands and not serve Dutch apple pie!? Now, in the past, when I’ve gone to a conference and skipped the dinner (usually on account of price) I’ve almost always been sorry. This time, I think I could have skipped it.

On the bright side, I happened to sit next to Ann Senghas, one of the researchers working on Nicaraguan sign language. This is an amazing situation, where a bunch of deaf children were brought together at a school and assembled their individual improvised ‘home sign’ systems into a coherent signed language, all spontaneously. It’s the sign equivalent to how a spoken pidgin develops into a full creole. (In contrast, I’m pretty sure that American sign language was sort of engineered.) The story of how NSL developed has been one of the most interesting topics in linguistics of the past several decades. They’ve studied how signers developed a convention for using the space around them to introduce and refer to characters in discourse, sort of like very flexible spatial pronouns. She mentioned during dinner that older speakers would sign “rolling down” by twirling their fingers and passing their hand down an imagined slope at the same time, but younger speakers separate the sign into separate ‘rolling’ and ‘down’ gestures, so the meaning is getting split up into independent components, and the signs are becoming more symbolic rather than iconic. And all of these changes are taking place right in front of researchers who get to see language dynamics in action in real time.