Photo at right:
“Graffiti artists or writers sometimes select nicknames or tags, to reflect some personal qualities, but often a tag is chosen for how the word sounds when spoken aloud or how the letters sit with each other when written.”
Decoding Language and Information
Grafitti photo by Morgan Mansour
Insight into language - how we learn it, how it’s structured and encoded, and how we use it to form identity and maintain relationships - is key to understanding the human animal. Information, the sharing of it and the misunderstanding of it, is the root of all progress and the source of many conflicts.
In SBS, we study language at many levels: from the microanalysis of language, which has many applied uses, such as helping children with speech delays; to the interpersonal level, such as how language can be used to break up a marriage; to the societal level, such as how language is used to create group identity.
A UA anthropologist interviewed middle school and high school girls about their perceptions of the perfect body. “Fat talk” is a routine through which girls ritually lament their own bodily flaws. The researcher found that the girls talk about dieting far more than they do it, and that “fat talk” is a form of ritualistic speech used by girls as a call for support and a marker of group affiliation.
In an ethnographic study of the linguistic behavior of Latina girls involved in gangs, a UA anthropologist examined how national identity affects language choice and how these choices can have very concrete repercussions on educational opportunities. In the Southern California high schools the anthropologist studies, girls self-segregate themselves as sureñas or norteñas according to their migration histories. Aside from establishing their differences through clothing, hairstyles and musical preferences, language choice distinguishes the two groups. The sureñas speak Spanish, and the norteñas favor English. Once students are labeled as limited English proficiency speakers, they are perpetually tracked into vocational programs as opposed to college preparatory classes.
A UA anthropologist has studied how poor black male favela (‘shantytown’) youth in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, embrace slang as part of a linguistic style that challenges social and linguistic conventions. The struggle over meaning among slang speakers is not merely linguistic: What words come to mean and how they may be employed in discourse are fundamentally struggles over who is permitted to determine meaning and regulate appropriate ways of speaking. Members of the white middle class respond to this challenge by further stigmatizing slang speakers as criminals and outlaws who do not deserve basic rights.
Many languages, such as Spanish and Russian, have noun gender systems. At what age do children determine the gender categories of words in language? To answer that question, a UA psychologist familiarized English-learning 17-month-olds for two minutes with Russian masculine and feminine words paired with two different gender inflections each. Crucially, they withheld some word-inflection pairs and presented them at test, along with some ungrammatical pairs (e.g., a masculine word with feminine gender inflection). Infants were able to distinguish the grammatical word-inflection pairs from the ungrammatical ones, suggesting that they were able to learn something about the gender system of a new language in just two minutes.
UA linguists have discovered that the property that all sentences have subjects follows from a general mathematical property of the hierarchical structure of sentences, which is related to the “golden mean,” or Fibonacci sequence.
Video superimposed over an ultrasound image of the speaker's mouth/tongue from the Arizona Phonological Imaging Laboratory.
UA linguists have discovered that a strange phenomenon of vowel lengthening and diphthongization of vowels before certain sounds like n, r, and l in Irish is due to the fact that these sounds are pronounced with a high-fronted tongue position in the language.
UA linguists have made a strange discovery about the form of English words. Using sophisticated experimental techniques, they discovered that speakers of English “prefer” words that begin with lots of consonants (e.g., a nonsense form like sphrick is better than forms like blick or fick.) This result conflicts with the way languages work generally; whereby, languages “prefer” words with fewer consonants on the left than words with more. The result provides new insight into the way speakers process the words and sounds of their language.
A UA psychologist has discovered that people learning a second language may learn more effectively if they are presented with words that differ in meaning. For example, the set “cat, bowl, chair, apple” would be learned better and faster than “apple, banana, pear, orange.” This stands in sharp contrast to conventional methods of teaching new words.
UA psychologists developed a new experimental method for evaluating “tip-of-the-tongue” states in language production failures. Tip-of-the-tongue states occur when a person feels that they know something despite being unable to presently recall it. The experimental method used to study this phenomenon allows functional MRI to measure what areas of the brain are critical for the self-monitoring of memory.
These images are a visual representation of a word using acoustic analysis.
A UA communication professor has found that young adults who have more positive communication with their grandparents also have better attitudes about aging.
A UA communication professor has examined how couples talk about their marriage and how that talk is associated with successful outcomes. He found that people who are rated as “expansive” as they talk about their relationship (i.e., they have a lot to say), who express fondness for their partner, and who “glorify the struggle“ (i.e., acknowledging hard times, but framing them in a way that suggests the struggle made their marriage stronger) were more likely to remain together in the future and were more likely to become happier with their relationship over time.
UA sociologists have discovered that people feel worse when every aspect of an exchange they are involved in is negotiated (as in a formal contract), than they do when they interact sequentially (I give something, then you give something, then I give something).
Latin American Studies researchers have been investigating the use of the internet, telephones and phone cards by Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The research has emphasized the development of eMexico, a Mexican government program to make the internet accessible. The program provides migration, health, email and educational services. The internet has become a major mechanism for Mexican entrepreneurs to market goods, and a means of communication between family and community members.
A Near Eastern Studies professor has co-authored a textbook that offers a bold approach to teaching the Persian language, combining a communicative approach, a cultural approach, and an extensive use of the spoken language with some of the older techniques, such as repetition drills.
Digital technologies are changing disciplinary scholarly communication and the institutions that serve them, such as libraries, archives and museums. The Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (dList) was established by the School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS) in 2002 as a test bed for investigating new scholarly communication behaviors and technologies, such as self-archiving and open access. Today, dLIST is also well-known internationally as a subject-based, open-access archive for research papers and a commons-based digital library for fundamental texts.
A SIRLS professor is developing a theory to clarify the values that individuals and organizations bring to the decisions they make about information and information technologies.
A SIRLS professor is analyzing how the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) organizes knowledge about the “New Economy.” Among the findings: By combining data about proprietary and open-source software production into a single category, NAICS render invisible specific data about the open-source software industry, an increasingly important New Economy activity.
The linguistics department has created a master’s degree in human language technology, giving people the skills to work with language on the internet. Information and internet technology is about the collection and transmission of information and the analysis and use of information with computation tools. When you conduct a web search, a large part of the technology involves extracting information from text.
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