Human Subject Research

I recently had some dealings with the UMBC Institutional Review Board. All university research involving human participants and animal subjects is placed under review by this board to ensure some level of security in privacy, safely, and general well formed research methodology. We can, essentially, blame behavioral scientists that couldn't control themselves or their research (e.g. The Stanford Prison Experiment). During this review, I came across a recent undertaking by an MIT Media Lab professor, Deb Roy. A New Scientist article, Watch language grow in the 'Baby Brother' house, details the addition of audio and video recording devices to Professor Roy's home placed to capture the linguistic growth and development of his son.

Back during my time in the UMass Linguistic department, Tom Roeper gave me several notebooks full of observations made when his children were younger to transcribe. I'm hoping that more researchers take advantage of new technologies and share the collected data. Now, who is going to be the first to do what Deb Roy is doing but in a bilingual environment?

Without Numbers

Pirahã, a language spoken in Brazil by peoples number in the hundreds, lacks quantification and subordinate clauses. Daniel Everett, a Manchester researcher, has studied Piraha extensively and even supplies a sample of Pirahã sung speech and a gloss of a "Killing the Panther" story.

"Pirahã is a member of the Mura language family. It has been traditionally referred to as Mura-Pirahã but this obscures the distinction between the Mura language family and the Mura and Pirahã languages. The Mura language family includes Pirahã as well as the extinct dialects of Bohurá, Yaháhi, Mura and Torá. It has been suggested that the Mura family is member of the Macro-Chibcha phylum but there is insufficient evidence to support this view. Pirahã is the only language spoken in the region of the Maici. It has no external affiliates and is in danger of becoming extinct as well. Numerous attempts have been made to learn and document this language since first contact with the Pirahã in the 1850's. Most efforts were inadequate or relatively unsuccessful as the language is extremely difficult and unusual. The Everetts have devoted the most time, collected the most data and been the most successful at learning the language and providing linguistic analyses for several interesting features of Pirahã." (link)

In 2004, Peter Gordon of Columbia University published an article in Science, Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia, and recently brought linguistic relativity back into the mainstream media with recent coverage in a Spiegel article about Pirahã. Daniel Casasanto counters with a letter to Science with two main points: Gordon's work lacked a control, baseline performance group and Gordon demonstration fails to support the causality claim. Another letter provides additional criticism.