you won't believe this

Sat Mar 1 18:52:22 UTC 2008

Dear Everyone,

   I think the challenge of bringing knowledge to the public and the applied
domain belongs to everyone---- no one is exempt.   A good standard is
medicine: the level of public knowledge about the details of medicine
(cholesterol, diabetes 2) vastly exceeds public knowledge of basic
linguistic effects ( long-distance rules,

quantification,  anaphora).  Our obligation is to communicate what we know,
what we do not know, the scope of the questions,

and the role of personal (parental) judgement.  In medicine, we hear of
"side-effects" and "risk percentages", and some information on

which parts of medicine are advanced and which are still rather
primitive.  There
is also growing knowledge of  what should be

personal discretion (you decide whether a risky operation should be
done).  (Yesterday
I spoke to a diabetes expert whose son has diabetes---unlike some parents,
he does not stop his child from going to birthday parties because cake and
ice cream are served---those are primarily personal decisions and not
medical ones. How strenuously you push a child who is behind in reading is
largely a parental decision. In retrospect I think we pushed

my daughter, now in law school, a bit too hard when she had trouble reading,
though her continuing absolute inability to spell suggests a deep difference
is still present.)

    The value and problems with the LENA system can only be seen if we
understand the full challenge of acquisition.

Knowing vocabulary diversity and turn-taking is relevant, but parents must
see just how small a part of the whole system

it is.  No one would say that recognizing colors is a real test of
vision.  There
is depth perception, astigmatism, etc.  The

problem lies in parents thinking that a 1/100 piece of information is a
guide to everything.  Nice to know colors, but it

is a small corner of the whole story.   Here is where we must collectively
not be guilty of false advertising. I know a lot more about the syntax end
of things than other dimensions, so my word should perhaps be respected in
one sphere, but not as a guide to

them all.

         We still lack basic insights into the acquisition path, but parents
should be able to get a sense of what it is.     Parents can understand
it----I just gave a very successful  lecture (I was worried it might not be
well-received)  to 80 young parents at the Wellesley Women's Forum and they
were all eager to ask their children "who bought what"  (and try some  other
simple explorations ).  I find that parents absorb easily various things
that produce furrowed brows in psychologists who think grammar is somehow
"too hard".      How can we communicate the basic challenge of learning
language in intuitive and lively ways.  (I have taken a stab at this in my
book "The Prism of Grammar", but this needs to be done from many more
perspectives.    By the way,  writing simply is not just a talent, but a
hardwork skill ---I rewrote the book entirely three times).

     1)  How can we communicate how complex the achievement of learning
language is?  A real evaluation

of a child's syntax would require 1000 questions—more than a brief test can
undertake.    All tests are therefore crude measures.

Those two sentences can tell parents a lot.  What is mssing?

We need to know when children grasp ellipsis: "I want some", but

not *I want every.  We need to know just when they can handle backwards
anaphora "Near him, Bill keeps a bottle", we

need to know when children know you answer the first and last wh-, but not
the middle "how": "You all have blocks. Who knows how to build what?" or
parasitic gaps, also found in nursery school: " what can you carry __without
dropping__", etc.  There are good indications

that there are separate systems underlying different parts of syntax, so
they might separately fail.

       The same challenge exists in phonology and pragmatics.   Phonology
involves all kinds of connections that are fairly well

understood, and many that are not, like intonation.   Pragmatics involves
turn-taking, but also sophisticated implicatures, whose acquisition study is
still in its infancy.    In the DELV test, which Harry Seymour, Jill
deVilliers and I (with

huge help from others) developed,  we just scratch the surface of these
questions, but in most tests these questions are not addressed at all.
Instead there is a bias toward vocabulary and mastery of inflection, which
is really a misweighting of the core questions.  It is as if you tested
athletic ability only my measuring how fast people can run.  It is relevant
and useful because it is measureable, but (as any coach knows) hardly the
essence of basketball, etc.

These are things which parents can grasp----just like we grasp the fact that
Alzheimer's research is in its infancy.

    2) We need to communicate, in light of the larger questions, what we do
know about vocabulary acquisiton, learning

of inflection, and how it is affected by dialect knowledge.    We do not all
agree about all of these issues.  This can be communicated

too.  Again, disagreements in medicine are not in principle hidden from the
public (though some no doubt are).   Those who are experts in these
subdomains should  speak out about their view of, for instance, vocabulary
development as it varies across acquisition, and also different dialects

and cultures.

How should this be done?  I think a blog is a good idea.  And I think it
might start as a kind of wikipedia of communication disorders.

One might ask experts in various smaller domains to provide summaries, to
which others might add commentary, and then these are made

known to magazines which in turn could publish excerpts and provide leads
(the NYT reports of the political blogosphere).    From there

efforts to author articles might emerge.   I, like Kathy, am not a technie,
but I wonder if this kind of an effort could be attached to the

wonderful work that Brian has done in building the CHILDES community.

I am glad that this discussion is taking place.

Tom Roeper

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu> wrote:

> Marnie, Keith, et al.
>     I think that the likelihood of tenure review committees deciding to
> give credit for publications in magazines like Parenting is close to zero.
>  Of course, there is no such thing as bad publicity and no reason not to
> engage in such outreach, when possible.  And there is nothing wrong with
> setting up blogs and such.  But, in the end, we are researchers and so we
> really ought to treat these issues as researchable topics.  Of course, that
> means we need funding.  It seems that the Canadians have figured out how to
> do this.   If you remember, the discussion of Baby Signs last Fall
> eventually came upon a truly definitive review of the topic from Johnston,
> Durieux-Smith, & Bloom.  If you would like to review that article, the link
> is http://www.cllrnet.ca/news/inthenews/104  That article itself didn't
> get through to Parenting, but it is certainly composed in a way that should
> allow the message to get through.
>   Apparently, this research was sponsored through a Canadian Center of
> Excellence grant that funded the Canadian Language and Literacy Research
> Network.  Wisely, this center decided to initiate a competition for reviews
> of this type.
>    Clearly such a review and evaluation is now needed on LENA.  It could
> easily come up with results that surprise all of us.  In any case, I love
> this model of the way in which researchers can make a substantive
> contribution to the understanding of products targeted to parents and still
> end up with a grant award and a good journal publication.  I wonder who
> could support this type of work in the States.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
>
> http://www.cllrnet.ca/news/inthenews/104
> On Mar 1, 2008, at 1:27 PM, Marnie Arkenberg wrote:
>
>
> On LENA: Basically we all feel there needs to be some kind of
> dissemination of our research, not just to the scientific community but to
> the general public as well. As mundane as it may sound, as a paranoid new
> parent I read information from online parenting sources and parenting
> magazines--places that are quick and easy to access. It's rare for me to see
> a name of a researcher from our community, much less something written by
> us. If we want to make statements to the public about the issues and
> research we think important for parents to know, we need to be proactive
> about writing articles suited for that venue. We've set the stage for this
> not to happen--at last glance, at least at my institution, magazine
> publications didn't count much towards tenure. We can blame journalists if
> we want, but we certainly play a role.
>
>
> >
>

-- 
Tom Roeper
Dept of Lingiustics
UMass South College
Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
413 256 0390

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