analysis: unhappiness

[Ted Gibson]

Dear Dick:

Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes.  I don't understand what is  
confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming.  All we are  
saying is that if you have some testable claim involving a general  
hypothesis about a language, then you need to get quantitative data  
from unbiased sources to evaluate that claim.   If you are interested  
in English past tense morphology, then depending on the claims that  
you might want to investigate, there are lots of ways to get relevant  
quantitative evidence.  Corpus data will probably be useful.  For very  
low frequency words, you can run experiments to test behavior with  
respect to such words.

Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example.  You  
can run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out what  
people think the past tense is.  If you then found that 20/50 people  
responded "bidded" and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot of useful  
information.  As you suggest in your discussion, this result wouldn't  
answer the question of how past tense is stored in each individual.   
This result would be ambiguous among several possible explanations.   
One possibility is that the probability distribution that is being  
discovered reflects different dialects, such that 2/5 of the  
population has one past tense, and 3/5 has another.  Another  
possibility is that each person has a similar probability distribution  
in their heads, such that 2/5 of the time I respond one way, and 3/5  
of the time I respond another.  Further experiments would be necessary  
to answer between these and other possible theories (e.g., with  
repeated trials from the same person, carefully planned so that the  
participants don't notice that they are being asked multiple times).   
Without the quantitative evidence in the first place, there is no way  
to answer these kinds of questions.

Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a baseline  
in an experiment involving the less frequent ones.  So, yes, it would  
useful to gather quantitative evidence in such a case also, as  
baselines with respect to the more interesting cases for theories.

The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language that  
you wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is true across  
the speakers of the language), then you need quantitative evidence  
from multiple individuals, using an unbiased data collection method,  
to evaluate such a claim.  The point about Mechanical Turk is that it  
is really *easy* to do this now, at least for languages like English.

Best wishes,

Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko

On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:

> Dear Ted,
> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying  
> that I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is  
> "went" without first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
>
> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native  
> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic  
> behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain  
> it to ourselves in terms of a language system (language 'in here', I- 
> language)? So every judgement we make is based on thousands or  
> millions of observed exemplars, and reflects a unique experience of  
> E-language filtered through a unique I-language.
>
> Given that view of language development, I don't see how  
> quantitative data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as  
> the past tense of BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I  
> bidded" or "I bid"? My judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50  
> people to oblige on Mechanical Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded"  
> and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the correct answer is  
> "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement? I agree  
> you could record my speech and find how often I use each  
> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's a  
> rare word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even  
> there. What would solve the problem of subjectivity, of course,  
> would be a machine for probing the bit of my mind (or even brain)  
> that holds BID and its details; but I suspect that even that  
> wouldn't move us much further forward than my original "don't know".  
> (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative sociolinguistics, so  
> I do accept that quantitative data are relevant to linguistic  
> analysis in some areas, where the I-language phenomenon is frequent  
> enough to produce usable data.)
>
> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental  
> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or  
> individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's  
> the same throughout the social sciences. But what's special about  
> linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture (e.g.  
> details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so the  
> differences between individuals really matter. I don't see that  
> we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on,  
> so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate  
> reports of individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science,  
> but I don't see how it can get better.
>
> Dick
>
> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>
> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
>> Dear Dan, Dick:
>>
>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
>> response to Dick Hudson.
>>
>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
>> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
>>
>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a  
>> dependent
>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't  
>> think
>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
>> participants.
>>
>> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips’
>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
>> researchers.
>>
>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use  
>> of
>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
>> (2010): “It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were  
>> required
>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access” (Culicover
>> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be  
>> slowed
>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
>> true: the field’s progress is probably slowed by not doing
>> quantitative research.
>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary  
>> paper
>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before  
>> the
>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That’s over
>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available – as is often the
>> case in any field of science – the empirical pattern can be used as a
>> basis for further theorizing.
>>
>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
>> exists a marketplace interface – Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk – which
>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost  
>> of
>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
>>
>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
>> are very important.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Ted Gibson
>>
>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
>> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
>> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
>>
>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson &  
>> Fedorenko
>> 2010 TICS.pdf
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> Dick,
>>>
>>> You raise an important issue here about methodology. I believe that
>>> intuitions are a fine way to generate hypotheses and even to test
>>> them - to a degree. But while it might not have been feasible for
>>> Huddleston, Pullum, and the other contributors to the Cambridge
>>> Grammar to conduct experiments on every point of the grammar,
>>> experiments could have only made the grammar better. The use of
>>> intuitions, corpora, and standard psycholinguistic experimentation
>>> (indeed, Standard Social Science Methodology) is vital for taking  
>>> the
>>> field forward and for providing the best support for different
>>> analyses. Ted Gibson and Ev Fedorenko have written a very useful new
>>> paper on this, showing serious shortcomings with intuitions as the
>>> sole source of evidence, in their paper: "The need for quantitative
>>> methods in syntax and semantics research".
>>>
>>> Carson Schutze and Wayne Cowart, among others, have also written
>>> convincingly on this.
>>>
>>> It is one reason that a team from Stanford, MIT (Brain and Cognitive
>>> Science), and researchers from Brazil are beginning a third round of
>>> experimental work among the Pirahas, since my own work on the syntax
>>> was, like almost every other field researcher's, based on native
>>> speaker intuitions and corpora.
>>>
>>> The discussion of methodologies reminds me of the initial reactions
>>> to Greenberg's work on classifying the languages of the Americas.  
>>> His
>>> methods were strongly (and justifiably) criticized. However, I  
>>> always
>>> thought that his methods were a great way of generating hypotheses,
>>> so long as they were ultimately put to the test of standard
>>> historical linguistics methods. And the same seems true for use of
>>> native-speaker intuitions.
>>>
>>> -- Dan
>>
>>
>>
>>>> We linguists can add a further layer of explanation to the
>>>> judgements, but some judgements do seem to be more reliable than
>>>> others. And if we have to wait for psycholinguistic evidence for
>>>> every detailed analysis we make, our whole discipline will
>>>> immediately grind to a halt. Like it or not, native speaker
>>>> judgements are what put us linguists ahead of the rest in handling
>>>> fine detail. Imagine writing the Cambridge Grammar of the English
>>>> Language (or the OED) without using native speaker judgements.
>>>>
>>>> Best wishes, Dick Hudson
>>
>>
>>