Tomayto Tomahto

Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has studied the mind through a myriad of lenses, including language. Throughout Steve's career, he’s published books and articles on topics such as language acquisition, rationality, human nature, trends of global violence, writing and style, and language structure. He went from academic, to public intellectual—in 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world today. And inevitably, the algorithms suggested I listen to his speeches.

As a younger linguist, I spent many an hour watching Youtube videos of Steve Pinker. Through his speeches, informational videos, interviews, and TedTalks, I learned how to use language as a means to learn about humanity and cognition. I began to see language as a product of evolution and culture and society: language exists because of human existence, but also in light of human proclivities, as a tool to advance our relationships and inventions. So naturally I spiraled into jittery nervousness when he responded to my email. But as it turns out, Steve is a really nice guy. He’s brilliant, he’s famous, he’s certainly well-read, but no amount of accolades, I’ve come to realize, can darken Steve’s blinding elucidations or his ability to educate any individual, regardless of their background. This is the genius of Steve Pinker: he’s able to educate the general public about all sorts of topics without diluting the significance or complexity of his message. It was an honor to interview him not only because of his impact, but because of his passion for interdisciplinary theories and inquiry. 

After explaining the trajectory of his career, Steve talks about his research on language and language acquisition, including his work on pragmatics and their social and political implications—why do humans say things like “wanna come up for Netflix and chill?”? If language is an evolutionary adaptation, how can we use that insight to better understand the evolving purpose of language? What makes language so essential to the human experience? And what’s Steve working on right now? 

Steve's Website

What our language habits reveal

Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century

Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain 

The natural history of song

The 4th law of behavioral genetics

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

Although Cory Shain (currently at MIT, soon to be at Stanford) studies language, therefore making him a “linguist,” his research could easily be classified as belonging to a number of other disciplines. To understand the computations responsible for language processing, he engages heavily with computer science. To study the functional organization and architecture of language in the brain, he uses methods of neuroscience. To round out the complexities of his research, he pulls from the theories and insights of cognitive science and psychology. Thus, Cory Shain actively questions the boundaries between language and other parts of human communication and cognition by remaining curious about how language works, not just what language is. 

In this episode we first dig into the section of his research that’s dedicated to understanding the problem of difficulty in language processing. What mediates the difficulty of processing cost: a sentence's predictability or its frequency? 

Then, we come to a truly awe-some question: how and why do we define what counts as language? Is language solely the processes that a specific network or cortex carries out? Can language encompass our intuitions into what someone else might be thinking? Why is there a common assumption that a language-specific network exists, and how does such an assumption influence our understanding of both the brain and of language?

No matter your previous understanding of language processing, the language network, or theory of mind, you will finish this episode having learnt something new about language, the brain, dependency locality, the importance of similar results across studies with varied methods, or perhaps the overlap between industry and academia.

Cory Shain's publications:

• No evidence of TOM reasoning in human language network
• Word frequency and predictability dissociate in naturalistic reading
• Robust Effects of Working Memory Demand duringNaturalistic Language Comprehension in Language-SelectiveCortex

Eve Federenko

Language and thought are not the same thing: evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients

Broca-Wernicke Theories: A Historical Perspective

Rebecca Saxes

Ben Deen

I've heard it said that the best way to concretize a friendship is to interview your friend on a podcast. So that's what this episode is: a conversation between myself and my brilliant friend, Joseph Rager. Despite studying both Linguistics and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard during undergrad, Joseph is now pursuing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. How does his knowledge of linguistic methods and theory inform his analysis of literature and poetry? If literature is truly language, how do we study it scientifically? How can literature represent our spoken language, with all its indexicalities and quirks? Joseph and I discuss all these questions and more.

We talk about his thesis, which investigated the role of Spanglish and code switching in poetry and poetic analysis. We dive into the politics of aestheticizing of sound, of translanguaging, of linguistics itself; this episode is a reminder that language can and has been used as a means of exploitation and colonization. We express wonder and even frustration at the many barriers to education, the existence of genre, the way that language mediates our world, our conception of self, and our identity presentation. We inevitably gab about literary theory (Derrida! Barthes! Structuralism!), his favorite books, and the "brutal" world of academia—all this encapsulated in an episode that could be mistaken for a conversation between two people on a cross country flight at 3am (which, by the way, we've had).

In all teary-eyed-ness, I would like to thank Joseph for being so thoughtful, so intelligent, so kind. He's brought so much joy into my life and he will soon light up yours. I believe we can all learn from his experience and example: literature is fun, and it can be inaccessible, but at the end of the day, anything can be analyzed as a literary object. And it is the methods that matter, not the content of what you read. So start analyzing and questioning, and you might end up in academia. Which can't be such a bad place to be if people like Joseph are in it, right?

Unspeakable Sentences by Ann Banfield

Tato Laviera

Nicolás Guillén

Negra, Si Tú Supieras: song based on works of Guillén, heard throughout episode

It’s rare to meet your academic inspiration incarnate, and even rarer to take a class with them, so I was enthralled, overjoyed, and sweating my pores out when I got the chance to take Professor Nicole Holliday’s Language and Society class. This past semester, I witnessed all that Professor Holliday brings to linguistics: superb teaching, endless energy and enthusiasm, an insatiable love of learning, and innovative research methods. Her experiments seek truth and action: from politicians, to ASR, to digital voice assistants, to biracial individuals, she studies prosody and suprasegmentals, aiming to answer one question: what does it mean to sound black? Throughout this episode, Professor Holliday and I discuss the impact of her research and findings; we talk about how AI can discriminate and reinforce linguistic bias against people of marginalized identities. We parse apart theories of dialect evolution and the development of African American English, and we examine the intersections between different subfields of linguistics. Finally, Professor Holliday explains how studying language will help you make sense of the world, humans, and human invention. This is an episode for sociolinguistic nerds, avid, prospective, or otherwise. 

Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Pomona College, is a recipient of the LSA's Early Career Award. Check out the links below. . .

Professor Holliday's Website

Professor Holliday's Google Scholar

Professor Holliday's Twitter

Joey Stanley, BYU

Rachel Weisler: U of Oregon

Rob Podesva: Phonation type as a stylistic variable: the use of falsetto in constructing a persona

John Rickford

What can the bilingual brain accomplish more efficiently than the monolingual brain? Megan Zirnstein, a cognitive science professor at Pomona College, researches bilingual cognition, a topic of particular interest throughout this episode. In addition to discussing Professor Zirnstein's research, we talk about the field of cognitive science and bilingualism research: where it's headed, where it came from, and why it's such a multidisciplinary and slightly amorphous corner of academia. And of course, in a move that will surprise no one, we talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic determinism, linguistic relativity, and the causal relationship between the emotional resonance of a language and decision making. Key topics and concepts mentioned in this episode include: psycholinguistic literature (eg, Alan Green's adaptive control hypothesis), Lera Boroditsky, the eugenicist history of bilingualism research, ways to confront and address bias in research methods, and the fundamental differences between cognitive scientists and linguistics. Check out the links below to watch Lera Boroditsky, read Prof Z's research, and much more!

Prof Z's research:

Literature/TedTalks mentioned throughout episode:

We did it, Joe: Tomayto Tomahto has been in existence for over a year. That's one year, 12 episodes, and way too many instances of editing audio into the wee hours of the morning. But it's all been worth it.

In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Donna Jo Napoli from Swarthmore College—an absolute legend in the field of linguistics. She's an author, a mathematician, a linguist, a teacher, a dancer, and she's so, so passionate about the power of language. We talk about the intersection between math and linguistics, how biomechanics effect the lexicon of sign languages, the physical and mental properties of articulatory ease, the various social meanings of prosody, automatic processing in relation to linguistic judgments, and the joys of studying language scientifically. We touch on the difference between quantitative and qualitative linguistic studies, Donna Jo's reverence for teaching, and most importantly, how studying linguistics "frees your brain." Because it does. It will. Donna Jo's wikipedia page, articles, TedTalk, teaching profile, personal website, and more are linked below.

REACTIVE EFFORT AS A FACTOR THAT SHAPES SIGN LANGUAGE LEXICONS
Production, perception, and communicative goals of American newscaster speech

Spotlight Interview with Linguistic Society of America

Professor Napoli: Swarthmore profile

TedTalk

List of all Publications

Personal website

Wikipedia Page

What if I told you that it was ChatGPT, not I, who wrote each and every one of these scintillating episode descriptions? Well, you'd probably laugh uncontrollably at my hilarious joke. Robots can't use the word "scintillating" correctly—or can they? Whether we like it or not, linguistically conscious AI are becoming more and more prevalent. In light of the decline in actual writing, I thought it would be prudent to interview the brilliant, funny, talented computer scientist and computational linguist, Ellie Pavlick. In addition to teaching at Brown University, Professor Pavlick is a research scientist at Google AI. We talk about natural language processing, pre-trained models, the importance of training models to both understand language form (syntax) and language meaning (semantics), and all that's still unknown about the role of language in neural nets. Noam Chomsky gets a shoutout (how could he not?), as does ChatGPT, prejudice in pre-trained models, and a few different philosophical thoughts on how teaching and writing and learning will evolve in the wake of excellent natural language processing models. Curious about Ellie Pavlick's research? Check out the links below. Questions, comments, or suggestions for the podcast? Email [email protected]  

Ellie Pavlick's teaching profile 

Google Research Profile 

Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models 

What Do Models of Natural Language "Understanding" Actually Understand 

AND does not mean OR: Using Formal Languages to Study Language Models’ Representations 

Colorless green ideas...

This is a truly interdisciplinary episode. Pressor Susan Blum (Notre Dame) is an anthropologist, a cultural, linguistical,  anthropologist. We talk about the intersections between linguistics, politics, legislation, food, semiotics, literary theory, pedagogy, as well as such icons as Saussure and CS Pierce. In other other words, this is a truly teleological episode, one that will teach you why and how linguistics applies to other disciplines and to the world around us. Listen, go read Professor Blum's books and articles, and then check out some of the resources below! 

Courtney Cazden

Elise Berman 

The Early Catastrophe by Hart and Risley

The Semiotic Perspectives of Peirce and Saussure: A Brief Comparative Study

Twenty Years after “Meaningful Differences,” It's Time to Reframe the “Deficit” Debate about the Importance of Children's Early Language Experience

 What is Semiotics? Ferdinand de Saussure’s Linguistic Revolution

Peirce’s Theory of Signs

Selling the Language Gap  

Chinese language and social justice

Tasty Talk, Expressive Food: An Introduction to The Semiotics of Food-and-Language

Ladies an gentleman...the director of Brown's Language and Thought Lab: Professor Roman Feiman!! Have you ever wondered about the intersection between psychology and linguistics? Well, wonder no more. Listen to this episode and learn about everything from psycholinguistics, to child language acquisition, to language and thought; semantics and pragmatics; descriptions vs. grammar when mapping words to the world; philosophy of the mind; marketing techniques enhanced by an understanding of linguistics; and language as an abstract object, as the most fascinating thing to ever exist. All that, plus an excellent defense for why to study linguistics in the first place. If you're looking to learn from a genius with a PhD, I recommend this episode. If you're interested in learning about interdisciplinary research and findings, I also recommend this episode. Really, this episode is for anyone who values curiosity. In the end, there are very few tidy answers to the colossal questions Professor Feiman asks everyday, or to the slightly less colossal questions I asked him. But that's the point. Check out the links below...

Roman Feiman's Research Profile

Mapping Words to the World: Adults Prioritize Grammar, but Children Prioritize Descriptions

Reference and Definite Descriptions (Keith Donnellan)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Professor Toni Cook is a genius. That's why I'm taking her Intro to Linguistics class at Pomona College. In this episode, Prof Cook and I tackle a lot: language as a tool for social control, the importance of understanding historical linguistics, intensive vs diminutive verb reduplication, various prestigious characteristics of dialects, linguistic colonial legacies, the relationship between world-view and language, and feminist semantics. Will you be bored? No. But you will learn a lot. You will guffaw. You might even tear up. If all goes according to plan, you'll stop, drop, and become a linguist. While you're at it, go ahead and investigate the research and publications of Prof Cook...

Prosodic evidence for syntactic phrasing in Zulu 

The inclusion of prefixal material in Zulu reduplication 

Adjectival Reduplication in Zulu 

Questions? Confessions? Email [email protected]