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<h2>Does BBC News cause "technology isolation syndrome"?</h2><br /><p>On 15 December 2006, Nate Anderson posted a piece on the online journal <a href="http://arstechnica.com/">Ars <br /> Technica</a> entitled <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061215-8431.html?tag=nl.e777">"Are <br /> iPods shrinking the British vocabulary?"</a> In it, Anderson reports on <br /> research by Lancaster University linguistics professor Tony McEnery. According <br /> to the Ars Technica report:</p><br /><blockquote>McEnery found that one-third of most teenage speech was made up of only 20 <br /> common words like "yeah," "no," and "but." This <br /> is problematic for teenagers seeking jobs in the corporate world, where at least <br /> some level of professionalism is required when communicating with others.<br><br /><br>The report finds that "technology isolation syndrome" is part of <br /> the problem. Teenagers spend increasing amounts of time immersed in television, <br /> video games, and music from their iPods-activities where they listen rather <br /> than speak. As a result, they don't get much practice at communicating clearly <br /> with others, and they aren't exposed to a wide vocabulary.</blockquote><br /><br /> <p>This appears, on first blush, to be very striking news. Are iPods, <br />television, and video games destroying young Briton's ability to communicate? <br />Are teenagers' vocabularies shrinking?</p> <br /><p>Probably not.</p><br /><p>A striking aspect of the Ars Technica report is that it does not link to <a href="http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/tony/tony.htm">McEnery's <br /> work at Lancaster University</a>. Instead, it refers to a similarly alarmist <br /> report from <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6173441.stm">BBC <br /> News</a>.</p><br /><p>The unnamed reporters from the BBC appear to have interviewed Professor McEnery, <br /> and to have consulted a <a href="http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/info/lunews.nsf/r/47f2">press <br /> release from Lancaster University</a>. According to the BBC report, teens have <br /> an average vocabulary of about 12,600 words, compared to about 21,400 words <br /> for young adults aged 25-34. Of particular interest to the BBC reporters is <br /> this claim attributed to McEnery: "[The words 'no' and 'but'] occur in <br /> the sequence 'but no' or 'no but' almost twice as frequently in teenage speech <br /> as it does in young adult or middle aged speech."</p><br /><p>These collocations are of interest since they are used to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFg8pxxvRjc">parody <br /> British teen speech</a> in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moEyOhZ7B44">television <br /> program "Little Britain"</a>. The BBC reporters can thus provide 'scientific <br /> proof' that the parody reflects reality. They quote linguist McEnery as saying,"When <br /> things are funny it is because they ring true with people."</p><br /><p>What, then, should we make of the claims presented by Ars Technica and the <br /> BBC? Let me take what I see to be three central claims, each in turn.</p><br /><p>1. <i>One third of most teenage speech is made up of twenty common words.</i> <br /> <br><br /> This claim is probably true. If so, however, it is utterly unremarkable. As <br /> early as 1935, George Kingsley Zipf noted that the most frequent word types <br /> in a natural language account for the majority of word tokens. (In corpus linguistics, <br /> <i>type</i> refers to the general category - say, every instance of the word <br /> <i>the</i> - while <i>token</i> refers to one instance of the type.) Zipf's <br /> law states that the most frequent word will occur twice as often as the second <br /> most frequent, which will occur twice as often as the fourth most frequent, <br /> and so on. It is not surprising, then, that a small number of word types accounts <br /> for most of the tokens produced.</p><br /><p>In fact, in collections of English speech and writing such as the <a href="http://icame.uib.no/brown/bcm.html">Brown <br /> Corpus</a> or the <a href="http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/">British National Corpus</a> <br /> the top twenty words usually account for about a third of all words in the corpus, <br /> depending, among other things, on how you define "word".</p><br /><p>Linguists <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003921.html">Mark</a> <br /> <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003976.html">Liberman</a>, <br /> <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003922.html">Geoff <br /> Pullum</a>, and <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003914.html">Arnold <br /> Zwicky</a> have recently written quite a lot about the treatment of this non-story <br /> by the BBC in their blog, <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/">Language <br /> Log</a>, including a <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003926.html">response <br /> from Tony McEnery</a>. I'll say no more about it here.</p><br /><p>2. <i>Teens have an average vocabulary of 12,600 words, compared to 21,400 <br /> words for adults.</i> <br><br /> This is a very difficult question to address given the difficulty of defining <br /> <i>vocabulary</i> and <i>words</i>. What does it mean to have an item in one's <br /> vocabulary? Does recognizing it in context (called <i>passive vocabulary</i>) <br /> count? Or must one be able to speak or write it (called <i>active vocabulary</i>)? <br /> The <i>Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language</i> (Crystal 1995) refers <br /> to an apparently unpublished study in which three subjects, an office secretary, <br /> a business woman, and a university lecturer, estimated their active and passive <br /> vocabularies by marking the number of headwords in an unspecified dictionary <br /> that they recognized and used. The three subjects had estimated active vocabularies <br /> of 31,500, 63,000, and 56,250 words, and passive vocabularies of 38,300, 73,350, <br /> and 76,250 words each. It seems clear that McEnery's methods must have differed <br /> from that used in this study. </p><br /><p>It may seem easy enough simply to count the number of words each subject uses <br /> or recognizes. However, this assumes that words are discretely defined, which <br /> is not the case. A single lexeme (the minimal unit of a lexicon) may have multiple <br /> forms. The lexeme GO, for instance, has the forms <i>go</i>, <i>goes</i>, <i>gone</i>, <br /> and <i>went</i>. Does this count as one word, or four?</p><br /><p>It's not clear how McEnery defined these issues for the purpose of his research. <br /> The press release from Lancaster University describing McEnery's study, though, <br /> provides a very sensible analysis of the reported difference in vocabulary sizes. <br /> According to the statement, "The research clearly demonstrated that teenagers <br /> are still developing their oral communication skills, underlining the need to <br /> ensure that they are given appropriate support by schools in doing so." <br /> In other words, those who are currently undertaking secondary education know <br /> less than those who have completed high school or even college. This seems utterly <br /> commonsensical, though it will probably attract fewer readers than claims that <br /> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/5402896.stm">contemporary <br /> young people</a> are <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1938314,00.html">failing <br /> to live up to</a> the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3946009.stm">standards <br /> achieved by their elders</a>.</p><br /><p>3. <i>"Technology isolation syndrome," caused by over-use of television, <br /> video games, and iPods, is part of the problem.</i><br><br /> This is the issue that first got linguistic anthropologists - or at least, some <br /> contributors to this blog - interested in the claims. <a href="http://enkerli.wordpress.com/">Alexandre <br /> Ekerli</a> suggested that the Ars Technica piece presented a reductionist form <br /> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism">linguistic <br /> determinism</a>. Ekerli noted that coverage of the study seemed to reiterate <br /> tired 'kids these days' discourses without using the study "as an opportunity <br /> to see the actual connections between technological developments, social changes, <br /> and language change." It seems that press coverage not only played up the <br /> technology angle - it introduced it.</p><br /><p>As with other elements of this story, "technology isolation syndrome" <br /> appears to originate not from any academic study, but from the 12 December BBC <br /> piece. The Lancaster University press release makes no mention of the supposed <br /> syndrome, and it is not mentioned in any academic studies I can find. A <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22technology%2Bisolation%2Bsyndrome%22&btnG=Google%2BSearch">Google <br /> search</a> for "technology isolation syndrome" finds fewer than 400 <br /> references, all apparently variants of the BBC piece.</p><br /><p>None of these reports is very close to descriptions of the study by <a href="http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/info/lunews.nsf/r/47f2">Lancaster <br /> University News</a> or Tony McEnery. (The research itself was carried out for <br /> a private sponsor and is confidential.) In fact, it appears that only one source, <br /> the BBC, had any direct contact with McEnery or his research. The other sources, <br /> mostly technology-related blogs, relied on the BBC report. That report contains <br /> several quotes from McEnery, which reflect a desire to improve the teaching <br /> of speech in British schools. </p><br /><p>As the story has moved to technology-blogs, this focus on the teaching of spoken <br /> English has largely disappeared. Instead, one off-hand comment gets all the <br /> press: "This trend, known as technology isolation syndrome, could lead <br /> to problems in the classroom and then later in life."</p><br /><p>Nowhere does McEnery mention television, video games, or iPods. The original <br /> study was, however, based on a corpus of speech (10,000,000 words) plus writing <br /> in blogs (100,000 words). This may be the slim foundation on which the edifice <br /> of "technology isolation" reporting rests.</p><br /><p>According to <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003926.html">McEnery</a>, <br /> "[The] work itself was widely misrepresented in the press. I wrote a study <br /> looking at difference and, predictably, the press translated that into a discourse <br /> of deficiency." He directs interested parties to the Lancaster press release, <br /> which he says is "something closer to the spirit of the original report."</p><br /><p>According to that <a href="http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/info/lunews.nsf/r/47f2">press <br /> release</a>:</p><br /><blockquote>New research by Professor Tony McEnery of the Department of Linguistics and <br /> English Language argues that it is important that we remember that teenagers <br /> are still developing their linguistic skills not merely in reading and writing, <br /> but also in oral communication. Schools need to focus on the development of <br /> speaking skills just as much as they need to focus upon the development of reading <br /> and writing.<br><br /> ...<br><br /> Professor McEnery's research looked at the communication skills of 200 teenagers <br /> with an examination of 10,000,000 words of transcribed, naturally occurring <br /> speech from across the UK collated in a language database as well as 100,000 <br /> words of data gathered from blogs written by teenagers. The research clearly <br /> demonstrated that teenagers are still developing their oral communication skills, <br /> underlining the need to ensure that they are given appropriate support by schools <br /> in doing so.</blockquote><br /><p>This is sensible enough, with no trace of linguistic determinism, techno-phobia, <br /> or the fall of British society. On the other hand, it probably won't sell much <br /> advertising.</p><br /><p><font size="2">Crystal, D. 1995. <i>The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English <br /> language</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br><br /> Zipf, G.K. 1935. <i>The psycho-biology of language; an introduction to dynamic <br /> philology</i>. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.</font></p> <br /><br />--<br><font color="gray" size="2">Posted by Leila Monaghan to <a href="http://linganth.blogspot.com/2006/12/teenage-language-by-chad-nilep.html">Linguistic Anthropology</a> at 12/29/2006 03:10:00 PM</font></body></html>