137: Are Trees Real? (with Yngwie Nielsen and Morten Christiansen)

137: Are Trees Real? (with Yngwie Nielsen and Morten Christiansen)

What goes on in our minds when we construct an utterance? Linguists often use syntax trees to represent the structure of sentences, but are they psychologically real? Yngwie Nielsen and Dr Morten Christiansen have found evidence for something else: we can recognise patterns in strings of words, even when they don't form coherent "treelets". They're giving us a walkthrough of their latest work.

Timestamps

00:00 Start
00:31 Introductions: Yngwie and Morten
05:19 Insights into linguistics communication
07:45 What are syntax trees?
09:13 Why linguists love syntax trees
14:15 Treelets vs chunks: Looking beyond hierarchical structure
17:46 Wanna and gonna: Words that cross treelet boundaries
22:43 How to prime someone
28:18 Priming in this experiment: People do recognise chunks
32:26 Are people just filling in the treelet blanks?
35:23 Were they accidentally smuggling in treelets?
38:47 Do we process both treelets and chunks?
42:23 DensiTrees: A way of representing fuzzy networks
44:01 What are we doing mentally when we make an utterance?
47:20 What is language for?
49:29 Grammatical glue: How do we connect chunks?
53:23 Being able to language is bonkers
56:30 Should we be studying language differently?
01:01:09 Wrap-up and goodbyes

Jaksot(100)

136: These Languages Are Anchors (with Mary Walworth)

136: These Languages Are Anchors (with Mary Walworth)

What will happen to the languages of climate refugees? Dr Mary Walworth has been working with the small island community of Nusi in Papua New Guinea, which was recently featured in an episode of Pole ...

25 Huhti 2h 10min

135: Linguistic Illusions (with Dan Parker)

135: Linguistic Illusions (with Dan Parker)

"More people have listened to this episode than you have." Why does this sentence look so right, but feel so wrong? When your grammar says one thing, but your brain says another, you may have found a ...

3 Huhti 2h 8min

134: True Colour (with Kory Stamper)

134: True Colour (with Kory Stamper)

How do you define what blue is? What even IS colour? Turns out, the quest to define colours was happening along with a standardisation crisis and a dictionary crisis at the venerable Merriam-Webster. ...

13 Maalis 2h 21min

133: Why We Talk Funny (with Valerie Fridland)

133: Why We Talk Funny (with Valerie Fridland)

We all have an accent — or several! And we use them to communicate things about us, and highlight aspects of our identity. So what's going on with the accents we hear? Are we losing some accents, or a...

26 Helmi 2h 27min

132: WotY 2025, the Final Word (with Kelly Wright)

132: WotY 2025, the Final Word (with Kelly Wright)

We're talking to Dr Kelly Wright, friend of the show and data czar for the American Dialect Society. They run the biggest and most prestigious Word of the Year event, and she was there when the 2025 W...

17 Helmi 1h 29min

131: Words of the Week of the Year 2025 (live with friends)

131: Words of the Week of the Year 2025 (live with friends)

Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/Mqf05kN-TaI It's Word of the Year season, and we're counting down our Words of the Week of the Year! In the time-honoured tradition, we gathered them all up fr...

20 Joulu 20251h 31min

130: Back to the FTR (with Séan Roberts, Cole Robertson, and Annemarie Verkerk)

130: Back to the FTR (with Séan Roberts, Cole Robertson, and Annemarie Verkerk)

You know the story. The language you speak doesn't determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there's no impact on the way you see or describe the future. Language and perception are...

6 Joulu 20252h 53min

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