Louder Than Words - Book Review Part 3: Ch 5-7

I've finished the next chunk of Ben Bergen's embodied cognitive linguistics book Louder Than Words, putting me just about 2/3rds of the way through. I'll be putting together a single, overview review that is more linear that these interim posts, but I want to share a few thoughts before then.

• This middle section of the book has finally gotten more deep into the weeds of cognitive linguistics  and is more satisfying to me than the earlier, more intro stuff.
• He does a nice job of making the case that constructions like "She Verbed the box to her friend" can add semantics beyond what the verb adds. Good for him. I like a good construction.
•  He tends to go on and on describing one experimental paradigm after another, factory-like. Even for a methodology geek like myself, I found it a bit tiresome. It's easy to lose the big picture.
• He cites a very tightly connected set of researchers. They all agree with each other and pat each other on the back. The Chomskyeans are famous for this. It is not a lead I recommend following  Bergen never really addresses serious critics. He does play the devil's advocate game, but only as a segue into his next presentation of 16 experimental methodologies, one after another (occasionally he give us a crudely drawn picture or Excel graph).
• Chapter 7 switches gears a bit because he begins to discuss ways in which highly specialized experiences might affect cognitive processes. Do hockey players process input differently than non-hockey players because of their hockey experience? He presents data suggesting that they do (though he's quick to point out that this is all very preliminary). This struck me as laying the groundwork for the inevitable neo-Whorfian, linguistic relativism argument that language affects thought. I have blogged about this myself, with some constructive skepticism. Bergen has worked with Lera Boroditsky, the queen of neo-Whorfianism, so it's easy to predict that he was gonna get around to that sooner or later.

My main critique is that Bergen has set himself up for an audience nightmare. Who is he writing for? Sometimes he writes for me, a person with advanced cognitive linguistics training who loves experimental methodologies. At other times, he's talking to my 90 year old grandmother. Every now and again, he whispers an aside to 1980s pop culture aficionados. The problem is, that none of us are satisfied. I grant that this topic is inherently difficult to write for because it blends detailed scientific methodology with freaky, unexpected mental behaviors. But that is Bergen's challenge. He asked for it.

Louder Than Words - Book Review Part 2: Ch 2-4

I've finished chapter 4 of Ben Bergen's new embodied cognitive linguistics book Louder Than Words, which puts me about 1/3 of the way through (my Part 1 review here). For now, I'm just going to publish the highlights of my margin notes. This will likely be disjointed and out of context for anyone not also reading the book. I intend to write up a single review once done, but for now, I'm just doing a data dump. Here goes:

Chapter 2: Keep Your Mind on The Ball

• I realize now that I am simply not the intended audience for this book. This is intended to occupy the space filled by Pinker, Oliver Sacks, and Malcolm Gladwell. It is pop intellectual intended for the lay audience, not someone with formal education in cognitive linguistics. Fair enough, There's nothing wrong with that. I simply must resign myself to be constantly disappointing at the lack of detail. My problem, not Bergen's.
• Starts with lesson of athletes who learned that visualization techniques helped their physical techniques. Concludes that "when we're visualizing, our brain is doing the same thing it would in actual practice." He wisely backs off this bold claim as the chapter goes along, but his point is that we use the same brain regions to visual physical actions as we would if we actually performed the action.
• My first objection is that this kind of intentional visualization is not equivalent to automatic thinking. He addresses this briefly later, but most of the experiments he reviews do in fact require some kind of intentional thinking/doing. I mentioned in my Part 1 review that he fails to use the terms "salience" or "attention", two very important word to cognitive scientists.
• He dances around the notion of table-top objects without using the term. Perhaps too in-the-weeds philosophy for this kind of book.
• The Perky effect = the boiling frog effect?
• Little complaint: too many figures (most) are first mentioned on pages on which they do not occur, making me turn the page constantly to see what's being referenced. Plus, far too many typos. Basic Books needs to hire a Basic Copywriter.
• Big Complaint: he's gotten lost in the woods of cog sci without making any obvious embodiment claims. Can Bergen give a simple explanation of the difference between "mental simulation" and "embodied mental simulation"? If yes, he forgot to include it in this chapter.
• He writes about people thinking about an act like making a fist (page 44) and activating parts of the brain for actually making a fist. What about thinking about actions you've never performed before, like some wild yoga pose? Just thinking out loud... but not thinking out louder than words...

Chapter 3: Meaning and the Mind's Eye

• Starts chapter saying humans are critically dependent on visual information and says we even encode this fact in our language with sayings like "you see what I mean?" and "the argument was clear." Okay, I get that this is a law book and he's trying to help the average Joe understand the basic point, but as a linguist I object to this on at least three grounds: 1) It's misleading. He cherry picks a couple of examples as if a grand pattern they make. But it's quite easy to come up with counter examples, like the now well known phrase popularized by The Wire "you feel me?" or "do you get it?"; 2) At best, these are English examples. Bergen's point is decidedly not bound by any one language. Does this pattern hold in other languages? Can we have some discussion of this? 3) These kinds of phrases are what linguists call "evidentials" and there is a long tradition of studying them cross-linguistically. Bergen makes no mention of this.
• Bergen wants us to believe that being able to infer and reason given linguistic input is uniquely a feature of language itself. I find this a bit overstated.
• The second half of this chapter really gets good, for me. It's mostly a review of the work of Rolf Zwaan and his students about how humans imagine the orientation of objects is influenced by our embodied interaction with them. This, to me, is the heart of the embodied cognition argument and this is the best reading so far. Bergen does a great job reviewing Zwaan's many clever but nuanced experiments. Most of my notes are detailed methodology questions I want to ask Zwaan about how he actually performed his experiments. Good stuff, but very in-the-weeds.

Chapter 4: Over the Top

• It is taking all of my discipline to forgive Bergen for not only naming this chapter after a Sylvester Stallone movie, but of referencing the same movie throughout the chapter. Ohhhh Ben. It's okay to let that part of your childhood die.
• Unlike Ben, I'll spare you the Stallone fanzine reminiscence, and make the simple point that a physical act described solely in language fires up our brains using the same areas we would use if we actually performed the action.
• Here, Bergen's rhetoric about language leaves me frustrated. He wants us to be filled the wonder and power of language. I'm not. Language is an amazing cognitive function, but it ain't magic and I don't think we're doing anyone any good by adding smoke and mirrors to the cognitive linguistics discussion.
• Bergen uses this as a stepping off point to talk about mirror neurons. While I've been casually reading* about mirror neurons for several years, I ain't no neuroscientist. I do recall some actual neuro-bloggers complaining about overstatement about mirror neurons though. It will take some time to dig up the references.
• Overall, this is a juicy chapter will lots of experimental paradigms to drool over, if that's you kind of thing (it's my kind of thing).
• One complaint though: this chapter does a great job of convincing me that there are priming effects with respect to actions and visualization. It does little to convince me there is some special "embodied simulation" effect. Priming is a well known phenomenon that seems to have explanatory value for much of the effects he discusses. i'm still waiting for that Ah Ha! moment that makes his argument all come together. But I'm a patient man, and this really is interesting stuff.
• Just a head sup, after reading the discussion of "affordances", I can't help but want to recommend that Bergen read Pustejovsky #intheweeds.

*Hey, if Chewie can fly casually, then I can read casually.

Louder Than Words - Book Review Part 1

I have begun reading Ben Bergen's new cognitive linguistics book "Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning". From the book description:

In Louder than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen draws together a decade’s worth of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to offer a new theory of how our minds make meaning...Through whimsical examples and ingenious experiments, Bergen leads us on a virtual tour of the new science of embodied cognition.

Let me note that the book description falsely suggests that this is Ben's theory; rather, as Ben rightly points out, embodied cognition is a research program dating back 40+ years. This book is Ben's attempt to survey the evidence for it. If this sounds like an update of Lakoff's 1990 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, you will be forgiven for making that connection as Bergen is Lakoff's student turned professor. Bergen is Luke to Lakoff's Obi-Wan, as it were.

I am basically sympathetic to embodied cognitive science as I was trained in cognitive linguistics at SUNY Buffalo by a host of Berkeley linguistics alumni including Len Talmy, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Robert Van Valin (as well as non-Berkeley cognitive linguists such as David Zubin and less directly Jürgen Bohnemeyer).

However, while I have a lot of Berkeley blood in me, I am a skeptic by nature (see my various critiques of Borodistky and the Neo-Whorfians here). I never became a devotee of RRG as Van might have wanted. I never became a devotee of strong lexalism as JP might have wanted. I am naturally inclined to decline the kool-aid, regardless of who is offering.

I hope this will make me a good close reader of Ben's book.

So far I have only read Lakoff's short introduction and Bergen's chapter one "The Polar Bear's Nose". I'll make this first entry short.

First, introductions to academic work are difficult. You have to explain background assumptions to non-experts in a way that doesn't turn off the experts who read it. I remember having this experience while reading a colleague's intro chapter to her dissertation on the psycholinguistic processing of certain kinds of morphemes and she had a line at the opening something like "morphemes are the smallest meaningful unit..." and I kind of giggled at such a basic Ling 101 claim in a dissertation on psycholinguistics. But you have to have that kind of sentence just to prove your own basic level competence.

Such was my response to Ben's intro. It was basic stuff that any grad student in linguistics or cognitive science has been through a hundred time ad nauseam , but it has to be stated up front for the *others*.

I don't have anything major to say about the intro, but here are some things I've tweeted or noted in margins that bear adding:

• Okay, this is trashy, but it bears stating. When I first read the title "Louder Than Words", my first thought was Brian Griffin's book "Faster Than The Speed of Love" from Family Guy.
• Ugh! Overstatement. Reaction time and eye tracking are not "fine measures" that "peer inside the mind". They are useful, but they are the stone knives and bearskins of scientific tools. We use them because we don't have anything better ... yet. claims these tools have provided results that are "revolutionary" (p 5) - pure hyperbole. 
• "Meaning is something that you do almost entirely in your mind." Bergen (p. 6). Dear Ben .. hmmm.... what's the non-almost part?
• I think Bergen is guilty of constructing a straw man version of the Mentalese argument for symbolic reasoning. Bergen suggests that symbolic reasoning is incompatible with non-literal reference, variation, and creativity. False.
• He hasn't explicitly mentioned "theory of mind" yet, but he's danced around it repeatedly. He clearly believes that humans alone possess the capacity to theorize about the mental states of others and that is the basis of language as our key cognitive advantage.
• I don't like his rhetoric about the power of words. he makes them sound like knives you can stab people with ("A few words can change our religion. Words affect who we are" p 3). First, I think this is classic overstatement. I don not think words are knives. If serious academics write like this, how can we reasonably differentiate ourselves from those idiot Neuro-linguistic programming morons who write things like "Neuro-Linguistic Programming describes the fundamental dynamics between mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how their interplay affects our body and behavior (programming)." We can hardly complain about charlatans like these if our own best and brightest cognitive linguistics write almost identical sentences.
• His treatment of "traditional theories of meaning" (p 6) is standard, and completely misses its utterly Western bias. I don't think the Chinese tradition of analyzing meaning looks anything like this.
• His claims that we all have our own meaning of words like "dog" based on our experiences and memories (p 12) will likely be not born out by evidence ... by I'm open minded.
• The embodied simulation hypothesis that states we imagine ourselves performing an act in order to understand it sounds a lot like the the motor theory of speech perception, which has been around a while. The recent work on mirror neurons may prove valuable for both lines of research.

Okay, good enough for now. On to chapter 2 "Keep Your Mind n the Ball".

knowing your own mind...

How well do you understand your own biases? Is there a way to objectively identify your own biases, without the convoluted mess that is your own conscious meta-thinking?

Why yes, yes there is. Harvard has graciously posted online more than a dozen Implicit Association Tasks. This is a well respected, and kinda freaky, reaction time test that pairs symbols (often words, but can be pictures too) and tests how closely you associate them. It's a subtle and clever test and basically, unbeatable (you can try to *fake* your responses all you want, they'll catch you because of methodological design ... hint .. you can't go too slow).

I recommend everyone giving it a try, if only to get a taste off empirical cognitive science methods.

Vision Affects Language Processing

Does watching a leaf fall help you process the sentence the leaf is falling down? Apparently, no, it hurts. It slows you down. Cognitive Daily reviews research supporting this conclusion. Money quote:

...people take longer to process sentences that match the movement of an animation than they do to process sentences that don't match it. Kaschak's team reasons that we must be using the same region of the brain to process the motion itself as we do to process the language describing that motion.

Analogy as the Core of Cognition

Here is a YouTube of a February 6, 2009 Stanford University Presidential Lecture by Douglas Hofstadter, one of the most interesting cognitive science/artificial intelligence thinkers of our lifetime:

In this Presidential Lecture, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter examines the role and contributions of analogy in cognition, using a variety of analogies to illustrate his points.