The academic profession has taken quite a bit of heat of late. Just don’t do your PhD, one regretful graduate advises. The jobs aren’t there, says The Washington Post. Don’t be a disposable academic, the Economist tells us. Meanwhile, thanks to sequestration, already dismal grant funding rates at agencies like the National Institutes of Health are even lower. It is not, in short, a promising time to begin an academic career.

But one group of unheralded young scholars has it even harder: non-native English speakers. They’ve entered a profession that is increasingly reliant on publishing, teaching, and even thinking in English. The trend is exacerbated in the sciences. According to a review by linguist Ranier Enrique Hamel, the percentage of scientific publications written in English skyrocketed from 36 percent in 1880 to 64 percent a century later. In the natural sciences, numbers are even higher: 75 percent of publications were written in English in 1980; by 1996 it was 91 percent. It is unlikely that the trend has reversed itself. Top-ranked journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell are still every bit as English as their titles would suggest. Science, it seems, requires a lingua franca, and English is currently it.

I asked five young scientists, born elsewhere but now living in the United States, whether they thought being a non-native English speaker had affected their careers. The pages I received in response can be boiled down to, well, yes.

Zhenghan Qi, a postdoc at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, tells me that “absolutely, non-native status is the most difficult barrier” she must overcome in order to make it as a researcher—a barrier that affects nearly every aspect of her research. As a result of being a slower reader in English than in her native Mandarin, she feels guilty for not having read, and therefore learned, more about her chosen field.

Speed is a common concern. A doctoral student from Korea, whom I will call S, explains that it takes her far more time to read, write, and prepare materials than it would take a native speaker. The result? “Sleep deprivation.”

Insecurity reigns. Frank Kanayet, a graduating PhD and native speaker of Spanish, is sometimes afflicted with “an uncomfortable feeling of inadequacy” when he speaks to students or colleagues. Qi is hyperconscious of every error she makes while speaking. Before presenting their research, M—a recent PhD from Turkey—and S memorize their slides and talking points. Says M, “I don’t want to be spontaneous.”

Both Qi and Kanayet mention that playful or figurative language gives them the most trouble: sarcasm, humor, metaphor. “Writing is a nightmare,” agrees M. “Not getting the words out, but polishing to make it cool. I think it is not a coincidence that my favorite section is Methods—no room for creativity!” (Anecdotally, in some fields like engineering, English itself seems to be changing in response to the influx of non-native researchers, with journals adopting an overall more formulaic style.)

Another quirk to master: arguments themselves are constructed differently in English than in other languages. “In Spanish, it is much more typical to talk around the topic and only get to the point by the end of the text, whereas in English there is a bigger pressure to put the topic right up front and then make the arguments after the fact,” says Kanayet. S notes something similar: “English writing is extremely deductive—you put the topic sentence at the beginning and your supporting evidence follows. … In East Asia the order is opposite. You need to read the whole thing” before the thesis is revealed.

Finally, and most disturbingly, conducting research solely in a non-native language can leave scientists—even ones who are by all accounts smart and successful—feeling as though their very thoughts are at risk. Says S, “you start ‘thinking’ in English. All terms are in English and you talk about your research in English. If your English is still not fluent enough, it means that you don’t have great tools to think.” Qi worries she is gradually losing her “vocabulary” for creative expression. It’s not that she fears not knowing how to express herself in English; it’s that she fears not being able to express herself—snappily, thoughtfully, eloquently—at all.

Only one of the scientists I contacted—Joachim Vandekerckhove, a native of Belgium and an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine—argues that the language barrier has not personally affected him. He even offers an upside to his non-native status: “access to a tiny but possibly relevant literature” that has never been translated into English.

But Vandekerckhove is the first to attribute his success to his fluency. “I doubt I would be where I am now if I struggled with English,” he says. It was a dislike or fear of English that discouraged some of his former classmates from pursuing their master’s degrees.

Indeed, I am learning, scientific instruction is increasingly occurring only in English—even when instructors and students share a common, different tongue. What, I wonder, is lost when an entire language is cut off from the scientific process?

I ask this from a position of astonishing privilege. As a psycholinguist I know a lot about languages. But despite my five years of Spanish, I remain firmly in the monolingual camp—the right monolingual camp, as luck would have it. Would I have had the ability or the gumption to pursue a doctorate in psycholinguistics—against the much-ballyhooed odds—had the language of instruction been Spanish? Mandarin?

How to put this? Probably not.

You are at the edge of a steep cliff. Look down, if you can stand it, at the thumbnail ripples of the sea far below you. Now imagine yourself at the bottom of that cliff, lolling lazily in a boat, staring up at where you once stood.

Does the cliff seem taller from the top looking down, or from the bottom looking up? It is, of course, the same height no matter your reference point, but according to Russell Jackson at the University of Idaho and Lawrence Cormack at the University of Texas, Austin, it doesn’t appear that way.

The two have made a compelling case for what they call “evolved navigation theory” or E.N.T. All else being equal, the theory has it, we prefer short paths to longer ones. This preference comes into play as we navigate our terrain. If our goal is to reach the other side of a mountain or forest, a route that takes us there faster—thereby exposing us as little as possible to predators or to the elements—is a no-brainer. Natural selection has since capitalized on this preference: instead of perceiving distances accurately, we’ve actually evolved to perceive unsafe routes to be longer—less tempting—than safer ones.

How might this theory play out? In our scenario, the cliff is deemed taller from above than below—empirical studies suggest by as much as 30 percent—because descending is more dangerous than ascending. When we climb up a surface, we are generally in control. But all bets are off for the gravity-propelled trip down.

Now put yourself back on the edge of the steep cliff. This time, however, you are facing inward, focusing your eyes on a white line about a dozen feet in front of you. Walk to the white line and about face. From which perspective—the edge looking in or inward looking out—does the distance between line and abyss appear longer?

This one is trickier. My intuition screams that, if natural selection had an ounce of common sense, we’d have evolved to underestimate the distance between ourselves and the edge of a cliff we are actively peering over: better safe than sorry! But E.N.T. predicts (accurately, according to new research) the opposite. Compared to the reverse path to safety, the route toward the cliff’s edge appears longer. After all, according to the theory, were the reverse to be true the cliff’s edge would beckon to us like a siren.

I’m not sure what to make of E.N.T., despite its elegance and ability to explain (and even predict) visual phenomena. Why the skepticism? We can never know for certain whether natural selection is indeed what shaped us to unconsciously overestimate unsafe routes. There is always an alternative explanation. What if the threats we perceive in unsafe routes simply fluster us to the point of measuring them inaccurately?

But I’ll be the first to admit that my skepticism might be misplaced. In an email, researcher Russell Jackson identified a fatal flaw with this particular alternative explanation: mere inaccuracy should produce both overestimates and underestimates. “However,” he writes, “we find systematic overestimates and not underestimates.” And even had he not found fault, he makes another fair point: “Skepticism of any explanation because the explanation utilizes evolution by natural selection is ignorant and short-sighted.” That is, just because evolutionary explanations have a reputation for being ad-hoc Just So stories, they should nonetheless be evaluated on their own terms. After all, writes Jackson, “natural selection provides more accurate insights about the biological world than any other idea in the history of humanity.”

To be fair, I often don’t mind them. When the local boutique gym’s WOD includes HIIT and the instructions “AMRAP,” I saunter by that temple of sweat and steam in blithe ignorance. You, fancy gym, are an intricate world I need never understand. But then my bank or my utility company or my insurance agent contacts me with an acronym-studded entreaty and—now forced to decode a series of unfamiliar letter strings, lest something dire happen to my loan or electric bill—my serenity vanishes.

Acronyms have their place. “Both in bureaucracy and in technology, there are lots of precisely-defined entities and concepts for which there are no single English words,” writes Language Log’s Mark Liberman, who contends that acronyms are the most practical way of referencing such entities, so long as care is taken to properly introduce unfamiliar ones.

But I find it curious just how often such care is not taken. (Or if the communicative effort is long and arduous, retaken; I have read books in which an acronym will appear 90 pages after it was introduced.) I wonder: might our tendency to treat familiar acronyms like regular words be to blame?

When a community—be it the local gym, the American Accounting Association, or the United States of America—replaces an unwieldy phrase with an acronym, it does so for the ease of its membership. Who wants to waste time advertising a “workout of the day” featuring a “high-intensity internal training session” with “as many reps as possible” when WODs and HIITs and AMRAPs will suffice? But does this process succeed so completely that, for people in the know, the acronym gradually transitions from being a stand-in for an entity to being a legitimate word for that entity—often the word for that entity?

Both behavioral and neurological studies confirm that we at least superficially treat familiar acronyms—but not unfamiliar ones—much the same as other words. In the most thorough of these investigations, psychologist Morton Ann Gernsbacher finds that both an acronym’s literal meaning (that FBI stands for the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and its conceptual meaning (that FBI is a criminal justice and intelligence agency) are processed when we encounter them. At first the literal meaning is more activated in memory. But over the next second or so the pattern seems to reverse, and the conceptual meaning—the acronym’s word-like quality—comes into its own. And it is easy to imagine that, over much longer periods of time, the more familiar an acronym becomes, the more—and the earlier—we rely on its word-like quality. (Sometimes the transformation is completed: anyone remember when scuba stood for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus?)

We’re generally excellent at tracking information about who knows what—information known to linguists as common ground. We don’t explain the strange holiday known as “Thanksgiving” to our American friends; neither do we expect our coworkers to know our brother’s birthday. But maybe we let befuddling acronyms slip into our communications because they’re not a fact about a thing so much as the way we’ve encoded the thing itself. (Question for another day: might we on some level want the insider status acronyms confer upon us?)

It is in everyone’s best interests to avoid (or explain) unfamiliar acronyms. But, at least for unedited communication over email or the phone, is this realistic? Would doing so be the equivalent of asking someone to avoid using adjectives, or words that begin with the letter p?

A baby hears the chair in the presence of a chair and attempts to map language onto the world. But, as most famously illustrated by philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, what in the world is the chair? Is it an armrest? A cushion? The elongated, chair-shaped shadow on the wall? Given the complexity of our environments, how are such mappings ever successful?

Language-acquisition researchers have given this question plenty of attention. Some argue that infants are born ready to map labels to entire objects, rather than parts or features of objects. Others suggest that encountering words many times, in many contexts (a phenomenon I describe here), helps infants home in on correct mappings. But the reverse question is less often raised: Which word should be mapped to said object? Speech to children rarely consists of isolated words, with nouns often pairing with articles. So is the chair called chair or the?

Ruling out the would be trivial if infants had some way of knowing which words are so-called function words. (Instead of describing concepts, function words—which also include prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions—describe grammatical relationships between concepts; hence their meanings map only uneasily onto objects in the world.)

Function words do sound somewhat different from other words—they tend to be very short and unstressed—so infants could theoretically use this characteristic to discount the words as potential object labels.

An even more promising avenue is frequency. Function words are among the most common in languages. A growing body of research—including a study published this year by Harvard University’s Jean-Rémy Hochmann—indeed suggests that infants may resist labeling objects with very common syllables.

In Hochmann’s study, 17-month-olds listened to a stream of artificial speech consisting of syllables, some of which occurred frequently and the rest infrequently. After two minutes of this, the babies then heard a nonsense word composed of a high-frequency syllable (vo, for instance) and a low-frequency one (mu). Vomu vomu vomu: the infants heard this word over and over again. All the while, a strange-looking 3D object rotated slowly on a monitor. (One such object looked not unlike a plus sign made of balloons; another resembled the torso of the Michelin man.) Before long, the infants had learned to associate vomu with the object.

But say vomu wasn’t a single word at all. Say it was an article like the, followed or preceded by a noun like chair. Would babies, if given evidence of this, prefer to treat the low-frequency mu as the object label over the high-frequency vo?

To test this, Hochmann created two new nonsense words, one containing the high-frequency syllable and the other containing the low-frequency one (e.g., gimu and vona). The words were played for the babies in the presence of two 3D objects, one of which they’d seen earlier. The infants better preferred the familiar object when it was paired with gimu than vona, suggesting that they considered mu—the lower frequency syllable—the superior object label.  (A follow-up study found a similar effect even when the lower frequency syllable occurred at the beginning of the training word, the equivalent of chair the.)

From where might this tendency arise? Perhaps infants become overly familiarized to the high-frequency syllables and simply tune them out, much as we do the humming of lights or the whooshing of cars down a busy street. Or perhaps these familiar syllables serve as mental bookends of sorts, allowing the babies to distinctly perceive and remember where other words—potential object labels—begin and end. Or perhaps by 17 months, children have already formed the grammatical category “function words” in their language, learned that function words tend to be common, and now expect all highly frequent syllables to be function words. To know for sure, we’ll have to go younger. Open question: Do babies younger by half—old enough to understand language to be referential, but still in the earliest stages of recognizing function words—also refrain from searching the world for the’s?

I first became acquainted with the phenomenon during my year-and-a-half stint in a child development lab: hearing parents would sign while speaking to their hearing children, and their children would sign back. I originally attributed the curious habit to the presence of disabled family members in the home. But as I have since come to understand, these people were engaging in baby sign.

Infants can produce recognizable gestures earlier than they can produce recognizable speech. And indeed, from a young age, gestures are a critical component of the communication arsenal, complete with their own developmental trajectory, one that begins with pointing and ends with references to things unseen. So why not put that natural affinity for gesture to good use?

Such is the logic behind courses in baby sign, where parents learn gestures—sometimes borrowed from sign language, sometimes not—for simple words like milk and more. The gestures are then taught to infants, who, in lieu of throwing tantrums to acquire more milk, can go about the process with some dignity, making for happier babies, happier parents, and stronger baby-parent bonds.

Baby sign also, it’s been argued, makes for smarter babies, or at least more linguistically advanced ones. There’s something about gesture, some believe, that prepares children for language learning. One telling piece of evidence: bilingual children learning both a spoken language and a sign language have been shown to hit language milestones in their spoken language earlier than monolingual children learning only that spoken language.

This is all the more striking because bilingual babies have it tough. They have to learn two labels for milk, two labels for more, and two ways of structuring milk and more before they can master the art of more milk. Whatever advantages these bilingual babies may experience later in life—and they may well be legion—bilingual babies often fall ever-so-slightly behind monolingual babies when it comes to reaching milestones for a given language, in part because the bilinguals, on average, hear less of it.

Given that bilinguals who both sign and speak seem to have an advantage, however, many parents consider a course in baby sign a prudent investment. But is it? In the latest issue of Child Development, researchers Elizabeth Kirk, Neil Howlett, Karen Pine, and Ben Fletcher report results from the largest, best-controlled study of baby sign yet.

The researchers recruited 80 mothers with eight-month-old infants, whom they promptly (and randomly) split into four groups of 20. The first group was instructed to use a set of 20 words as often as possible, accompanying each word with its equivalent sign in British Sign Language. The second group was instructed similarly, only instead of borrowing from British Sign Language, they paired words with symbolic gestures—things like extending your arms (for airplane) or pulling on an imaginary shoe (for shoe). In the third group, parents were simply asked to speak the words often. The final group served as a control and was not given the word set.

Periodically, over the course of the next year, researchers visited the families. They discovered that children in the two gesture conditions had indeed learned several of the gestures. But importantly there were no group differences in how often children produced the related spoken words. Indeed, there were no group differences in any of the measures of language development the researchers examined: whatever satisfaction baby sign brought mother and child in the short term, it appeared to do absolutely nothing for the child’s long-term language development. (Researchers did however note upticks in a few measures of maternal responsiveness, suggesting a modest benefit to the mother, if not to her child.)

Why the null result? The researchers admit that their sample—high socioeconomic status (SES) infants—may have already been “beyond the threshold of improvement.” In other words, children who are read to, engaged with, simply spoken to often and at length just don’t need whatever benefits gesture training might provide.

The researchers did not set out to recruit high-SES families. But as they point out, the highly educated, motivated parents likely to enroll in academic research studies are the same parents likely to enroll in baby sign classes. Alas, for the families who might actually benefit from baby sign, the classes likely aren’t on their radar.

How quickly does language comprehension happen? Do we allow words and structures to accumulate like snowflakes on a porch swing, scooping them up at a sentence’s end to take stock of what we’ve got? Or does sense-making never stop? Do we perhaps update our understanding mid-sentence, mid-phrase, mid-word, mid-syll—? After decades of research, psycholinguists can say with some definitiveness that we understand language as we perceive it: incrementally as a striptease, its message laid bare a word, or fraction of a word, at a time.

Sometimes, however, language comprehension appears to happen in reverse. Take a sentence like The *eel was on the table, with the asterisk signifying a cough, a burst of white noise, a feline caterwaul—anything, really, that prevents us from hearing that phoneme, or sound. We will never perceive the phoneme as missing; our minds will replace it seamlessly. Because the sentence continues was on the table, we’ll mentally replace the missing phoneme with an m to form meal. But had the sentence continued was on the axle, we’d have plugged in a w to form wheel. We process language almost as quickly as it unfolds, yet we can use new information to restore a missing phoneme four words back and then continue on, oblivious to the hiccup.

At other times language comprehension seems to anticipate the future. In a famous study, Gerry Altmann and Yuki Kamide showed participants a cartoon scene of a boy surrounded by a cake and some toys. It is a truth semi-universally acknowledged that people, whenever possible, look at what they’re thinking about, so as participants listened to sentences, their eye-movements to various pictures in the scene were recorded and measured. Participants who heard The boy will move the cake shifted their eyes to the cake at the beginning of the word cake. But when move was replaced with eat, eyes shifted to the cake much earlier. A verb’s meaning, then, seemingly allows us to predict what words we’ll hear next, or at least to ignore the ones we probably won’t.

Of course, it’s one thing to hear eat and predict cake while staring at five objects, only one of which is edible. It’s quite another to predict future words that refer to things not in our immediate environment. But how to test whether a participant is predicting that, say, the word kite will appear at the end of a sentence like The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly a ______ ? If you ask the participant directly what she thinks will come next, her prediction is no longer spontaneous. If you investigate how she responds to the word kite, well, she’s definitely thinking kite—now.

So Katherine DeLong, Thomas Urbach, and Marta Kutas measured the brain’s N400 waveform in response to sentences like the one about the kite. The N400 is a neural signature of meaning construction that kicks in between 200 and 500 milliseconds after we’re presented with a word, a picture, a symbol, or an otherwise “meaningful” stimulus; its amplitude is understood to increase in response to more incongruous, or less predictable, input.

Instead of measuring N400 responses to the highly predictable word kite, however, researchers measured responses to the article—a or an—presented before the predictable word. Critically, the researchers manipulated this article so that it either matched the predicted noun or a less predicted noun, e.g., The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly an airplane.  They found that the amplitude of N400 responses to the article increased as the predictability of the following noun decreased—strong evidence that, by the time participants encountered fly, they fully expected a kite to follow. Recent research by Jakub Szewczyk and Herbert Schriefers suggests that we spontaneously predict more than single words: we generate predictions for classes of words, such as animate versus inanimate nouns.

And yet, exciting as these findings are, they have obvious limits. The problem, readers, is that much of the time—outside of carefully constructed, highly constrained contexts—the probability of correctly predicting the next word is quite low, sometimes essentially zero. How often we really bother, then, may well depend on the consequences for predicting wrong.

Once the province of computer science, CAPTCHAs—the misshapen digit strings we must decipher and retype on certain websites, thus proving we’re human and not a machine—have finally entered the quaint world of psycholinguistics.

CAPTCHAs, the creation of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his then-PhD advisor Manuel Blum, have an oddly arresting backstory. The scientists designed the automated puzzles to separate the people from the spambots: a reverse Turing test of sorts. (Indeed, CAPTCHA stands for  “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”) Despite the occasional hiccup—is that circle a number or a letter?—CAPTCHAs seem to work pretty well.

So well, in fact, we now have reCAPTCHA, which rather ingeniously coerces humans into digitizing old books. Computers usually have little problem detecting and digitizing printed words. But many older books contain passages with faded, uneven, smudged, or otherwise not easily discernable text. With reCAPTCHA, however, instead of web visitors deciphering a single set of squiggles, visitors solve two. The computer already knows the solution to the first, which is used to assay the all-important human-or-bot question. But the second CAPTCHA is a genuine mystery—a portion of an indecipherable old text—so the solutions provided by real human beings are offered as digital translations. In this way, von Ahn and his colleagues reported, digitization is outsourced to you and me, with a level of accuracy rivaling that of paid translators. As of 2008, we’d digitized more than 440 million words of text.

So how do CAPTCHAs  (and reCAPTCHAs) work? We already have a pretty good idea why spambots have trouble. As a trio of Newcastle University computer scientists put it not long ago (in a 2011 article available here), “Computers perform better than humans in recognizing individual characters, even under severe distortion. However, locating individual characters in the right order (i.e. segmentation) is in general a computationally expensive and combinatorially hard problem for computers.” In other words, it isn’t determining what the distorted letters are that flummoxes the spambots—it’s figuring out how the letters are positioned, where one begins and another ends.

But why are humans so good at solving CAPTCHAs? Decades of research explain how we identify letters, including how we do so in “noisy” or less than idyllic reading environments. But the new study appears to be the first (or nearly so) to specifically investigate how we decipher CAPTCHAs. Psychologists Thomas Hannagan, Maria Ktori, Myriam Chanceaux, and Jonathan Grainger wondered: Do we rely on fast, automatic processes—processes honed over years of reading letters—or slower, more deliberate ones, such as guess-and-check or processes of elimination? So the researchers tested our ability to glean information from a CAPTCHA when it was presented very quickly.

Their experiment used a masked priming task, which exploits the fact that, when we process a word twice over a relatively short period of time, we’re faster on the second go-around—it has already been “primed.”

Figure from Hannagan et al., 2012, PLOS ONE

Participants first saw an indecipherable mask (or jumble) on a computer screen. The mask was immediately followed by a prime word, either printed in lowercase letters or scribbled in CAPTCHA form. The prime appeared for just 50 milliseconds—a fifth of how long it takes to read a word under even the best circumstances. Finally, the target appeared, printed in all capital letters. The target was either the same real word that had been presented earlier (either in text or CAPTCHA form), a different real word, or letters that did not spell an English word at all (“TOBLE”). Participants were asked to decide quickly whether the target was a real word. If their responses to the target were faster when it had been preceded by a matching CAPTCHA than a mismatching CAPTCHA, this would suggest that participants had learned something about the CAPTCHA ‘s solution in just a twentieth of a second.

This is indeed what the researchers found: CAPTCHAs prime their text equivalents better than they prime unrelated words. Note, however, that when target words were preceded by regularly printed matching words, responses to the target were even faster. So slower, more conscious processes may also have a role. Still, the researchers attribute our superior CAPTCHA abilities at least partly to the “tolerance” we’ve built over the years for reading altered, rotated, and otherwise transformed text. This raises an obvious empirical question: Are second-grade teachers the best CAPTCHA solvers of all?

We tend to speak of the Internet as if it were a person—a needy, arresting, generous, pigheaded person. The exact phrase “the Internet hates” gets nearly two million hits (often followed by Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Anne Hathaway, and rich people), while “the Internet loves” garners nearly a million (often followed by cats). We say that the Internet can be angry, scared, and confused. It is freaking out, but also, on occasion, nice.

Of course, not everybody refers to the Internet as if it were a demanding relative, but the tendency, fairly common in my circles, makes sense in a way. Because so few of the people we encounter online are actually real to us, we associate photos and videos and blog posts as much with the medium as the messenger.

Perhaps we can be forgiven the confusion. A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by E. J. Masicampo and Nalini Ambady (available on Ambady’s webpage) noted some surprising similarities between the Internet—that great aggregator of precocity and inanity—and the individual human mind.

The researchers—using Google Trends, which tallies up how often particular search terms are used over time, thus gauging the Internet’s interest in a subject—investigated responses to two different types of current events. Incidental events refer to unpredictable, one-shot occurrences: food recalls, celebrity deaths, the naming of Nobel Prize winners. Goal-directed events, by contrast, are things anticipated over time that have a resolution: a government election or planning for a holiday meal.

Masicampo and Ambady found that the use of search terms for incidental events (e.g., “Al Gore” after he was awarded a Nobel Prize, or “Farrah Fawcett” after the actress’s death) shot up quickly, peaked, and then gradually declined. A few weeks later, the searches were still higher than they’d been before the triggering event. Searches for goal-directed events, however, increased steadily over time, peaking right around Easter, say, or election day, before plummeting quickly. A few weeks later, searches for those terms were lower than they’d been initially.

These patterns are interesting, the researchers argue, because they mirror how an individual experiences these events. After exposure to a stimulus, we confront a long, slow “forgetting curve” whereby the stimulus becomes less and less accessible to us. (Consider how faintly you recall a trigonometry lesson two months post-test—or how long the details of this post will stay sharp in your memory.) But the accessibility of goal-related information, such as an upcoming job interview or beach vacation, builds as the goal approaches. And once the goal has been met, and we have little need to dwell upon it, we don’t.

I suspect that nothing I’ve written thus far has shocked you. Of course we stop obsessing over the beach-readiness of our bodies once we return to our everyday lives, and of course we collectively lose interest in an election after the votes have been counted. So is it really interesting that, as the researchers put it, the “subtle psychological features of an event can therefore determine how large populations will regard it over time?”

It interests me. Psychologists still understand more about the behaviors of individuals than those of groups—particularly groups of individuals, each acting of his own accord. This study offers a way in. Additionally, I find this example of self-similarity—where a phenomenon resembles itself on multiple scales—elegant. The natural and human worlds are filled with fractals and near-fractals, patterns that are self-similar or nearly so: the jagged path of lightening, the flow of blood through our veins, even the transmission of information over the Internet don’t look all that different whether the scale is inches or yards, seconds or minutes, one network or dozens. Should such patterns not be found in the way we—individually and collectively—engage with our world?

The human brain and language go to together like toothpicks and cocktail wieners. The only question is which came first: Were our brains customized for language or did language adapt to our brains?

The ’90s was the era of the language instinct. Indeed, Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct overtook bestseller lists and inspired a whole generation of psycholinguists, including me. “Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture,” Pinker wrote. Bats use Doppler sonar to hunt insects, birds read constellations to navigate, and humans have a “biological adaptation to communicate information.” We must have helpful biases encoded in our genes: What else could explain the fact that the most complicated skill most humans will ever master is acquired by age four?

But during the last decade, the pendulum of scientific thought has begun its inevitable swing in the other direction. These days, general cognitive mechanisms, not language-specific ones, are all the rage. We humans are really smart. We’re fantastic at recognizing patterns in our environments—patterns that may have nothing to do with language. Who says that the same abilities that allow us to play the violin aren’t also sufficient for learning subject-verb agreement? Perhaps speech isn’t genetically privileged so much as babies are just really motivated to learn to communicate.

If the brain did evolve for language, how did it do so? An idea favored by some scholars is that better communicators may also have been more reproductively successful. Gradually, as the prevalence of these smooth talkers’ offspring increased in the population, the concentration of genes favorable to linguistic communication may have increased as well.

But two recent articles, one published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences and a 2012 follow-up in PLOS ONE (freely available), rebut this approach. Researchers Nick Chater, Morten Christiansen, and their colleagues mathematically modeled the relationship between genetic variants or “alleles” and linguistic “principles”—abstract features that vary across languages, such as how tense is marked, or whether we should home in on word order to find structure in words.

In their model, people or “agents” are composed of genes, languages are composed of principles, and each principle has a corresponding genetic variant. It is the job of agents to guess all of a language’s principles. These principles are binary—a language either has a given feature or it doesn’t—and corresponding alleles can cause agents to be biased in favor of or against guessing that feature. Or, the agent could exhibit no bias at all.

Then the best communicators—agents whose alleles make it easiest for them to correctly guess the right principles, that is—couple and reproduce. Their offspring are composed of alleles selected randomly from their parents. Again and again this happens, with the fastest language-learners coupling each time. Over the course of many generations, the gene pool thickens with helpful alleles until—voila!—the overwhelming number of these alleles are helpful and learners guesses are so uncannily accurate as to seem instinctual.

Makes sense, no? But now consider that languages change. (And in the real world they do—quickly.) If the language’s principles switch often, many of those helpfully biased alleles are suddenly not so helpful at all. For fast-changing languages, the model finds, neutral alleles win out: they alone provide agents with the needed flexibility to learn the language in whatever form it currently exists.

In another set of simulations, researchers divide the population of agents in half—simulating for instance a geographic split in which one tribe takes the high road and another the low. The language then continues to mutate separately for each of the populations (and each population’s genetic make-up changes differentially in response). Researchers wondered: How different would the two “geographically separated” groups be, both in terms of genes and linguistic principles?

Again they find that when the language is programmed to hardly mutate at all, the genes have a chance to adapt to the new language. The two populations become genetically distinct, their alleles heavily biased toward the idiosyncrasies of their local language—precisely what we don’t see in the real world, where a Chinese infant raised in America will face little trouble learning English. But sure enough when the language is programmed to change quickly, neutral alleles are again favored.

So what does this all mean? We can quibble with the specifics of the model—the idea that there is a one-to-one correspondence between genes and linguistic features is obviously laughable, and there’s an argument to be made that weaker genetic biases might underlie regional variation while still allowing everyone to learn all languages—but it remains an interesting argument: maybe our brains couldn’t have evolved to handle language’s more arbitrary properties, because languages never stay the same and, as far as we know, they never have. What goes unspoken here is that the simulations seem to suggest that truly universal properties—such as language’s hierarchical nature—could have been encoded in our brains.

1. One of the above is a kiki, the other a bouba. Which shape is which?

2.  Consider two cups—or, if you’re feeling unimaginative, bring out real ones. Fill one cup with carbonated water, the other with tap water. Drink. Now match each cup of water to one of the shapes.

3. Now consider three samples of chocolate. One is milk chocolate, and the other two are dark—70 percent and 90 percent cocoa. Nibble. Again, assign each to a shape.

Chances are good you matched the word bouba to the rounded shape on the left and kiki to the spiked one on the right. Dubbed the “bouba-kiki effect” by folks who presumably enjoy appearing foolish at departmental functions, the phenomenon is well known to linguists. Across multiple studies, with participants from different cultures, boubas (and other words formed with the so-called “rounded” vowels in boo or bow) are linked to smooth, curvaceous objects, while kikis (and similar words) are associated with jagged angles and objects sharp to the touch.

The phenomenon starts young: toddlers also experience the “bouba-kiki” effect. Recently a study by New York University researchers Ozge Ozturk, Madelaine Krehm, and Athena Vouloumanos demonstrated that four-month-olds—we’re talking about babies who haven’t yet attached meanings to simple words like banana—already show more interest in stimuli that aren’t consistent with adults’ sound-shape correspondences (e.g., when kiki is paired with a curvy shape) than in stimuli that are.

Data from questions two and three, albeit sparser, suggest that Western taste-buds link carbonated water, as well as very dark chocolate, with angular shapes. But here the story gets complicated: Namibia’s Himba people—who are semi-nomadic, without written language, and in possession of “one of the most remote cultures from Western (or Eastern) cultural influence remaining,” according to a new study by Andrew Bremner of Goldsmiths and his colleagues—behave quite differently.

As you can see, while the Himba show the tried-and-true, infant-proof “bouba-kiki” effect, they don’t appear to assign carbonation to one shape over the other. And while the Himba matched chocolate samples to shapes with a consistency we would not expect by chance, they did so in the opposite direction of Westerners.

Some associations between senses in different modalities—words and shapes, even digits and colors—are either innate or involve aspects of the world so universal and obvious that, by very young ages, everybody everywhere reaches the same conclusions about them.

But for others we’re left guessing. Is it San Pellegrino’s star-shaped logo that’s responsible for the link between pointy shape and fizzy water? Or perhaps the sourness of the carbonation—its sharpness, if you will? Or does this relationship dwell in a verbal realm, with words like “sparkling” and “spiked” serving as mediator between taste and shape? (Let’s leave for another day the chicken-egg question of how these words came to have the meanings they do.)

We like to think that our thoughts are our own. But the “bouba-kiki” effect and its brethren remind us that even our innermost frivolities—the individual tastes and intuitions we enjoy exercising when we search for the right paint color for the kitchen or brainstorm band names or decide on a brand of orange juice—may not be that individual at all. (We’ve all encountered parents who tried so hard to find the perfect not-weird-but-unique baby name only to find, come preschool, that their son is one of seven Sebastians.) We’re left, instead, with a startling uncertainty about where our own quirks end and those of others—within our culture or outside it—begin.

In 1892 Mary Whiton Calkins, a professor at Wellesley College, along with her experimental psychology class, canvassed the campus for a population that still intrigues us today: synesthetes. Synesthetes experience vivid impressions in one domain in response to stimuli in another, automatically perceiving the color yellow, for instance, upon seeing the letter y, attributing strong personalities to the names of weekdays, or imagining a distinct squiggle each time middle C is struck on the piano. Of the 525 people Calkins and her students queried, about 15 percent experienced some synesthesia.

More recent, stringent estimates put the proportion of synesthetes—whose associations are distinct, stable, automatic, and variable from one individual to the next—at around one in 20. (Even this proportion surprised me: apparently America may well have more synesthetes than it has farmers.)

Language researcher Karen Chenausky has described her experience growing up with synesthesia as “kind of like figuring out that you have a belly-button”: one first notices the synesthetic perceptions, then becomes obsessed with them, and finally moves on with one’s life. But my favorite descriptions of the phenomena come from Calkins’ early report. “T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures,” explains one of her participants. “Colors do not look right,” writes another, “unless a word is spelled right. For instance, I spelled permanent, the other day, with two a’s, and it did not look pale enough.” And from another participant: “For numbers, I entertain either a like or a dislike; for instance, 11, 13 and 17 are especially disliked, I suppose because they are prime. My feeling for 11 is almost one of pity.”

Why some people experience synesthesia while others do not remains something of a mystery, though genetics appear to play a role. As for understanding how individual synesthetes arrive at the pairings they do—why an a is perceived as red, for instance, and not blue—a recent study suggests a humdrum possibility.

A few years ago, Stanford researchers Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer published data demonstrating that one synesthete’s specific “grapheme-color” pairings (where graphemes refer to letters and digits) could be traced back to a set of colored Fisher Price refrigerator magnets from the participant’s childhood. Their data suggested that, at least sometimes, synesthetic pairs are learned not from intangible properties of graphemes, words, colors, or the mind, but from commonplace objects in the environment. The data tantalized, but didn’t convince: as I’ve written about in the past, psychologists tend to be a stodgy bunch when it comes to case studies.

But then other synesthetes, recognizing themselves in the study, contacted the researchers, and a second, larger study—published earlier this year—was born. In total, the researchers were able to round up 10 additional participants who seemed likely to have learned their grapheme-color associations from the Fisher Price set. (Indeed, all but one could recall owning the set as a child.)

Witthoft and Winawer first verified that the additional participants in fact met their criteria for experiencing synesthesia—crucially, they had to demonstrate pairings that were reliably more stable over multiple tests than non-synesthetics merely pretending to have synesthesia would be capable of. When researchers compared these participants’ pairings to the set of magnets, the match—particularly for the letters—was obvious: even the participant whose pairings deviated most from the magnets achieved a degree of similarity that would occur by chance less than one time in a billion. (Calkins—who favored a theory of “ordinary associations, probably of childhood” back in 1893—would have been quite pleased.)

Note that researchers are not arguing that the participants’ synesthesia was caused by the Fisher Price magnets, or that all synesthetic associations are a product of childhood environments. The synesthesia literature still abounds with patterns that nobody can really explain. “Depending on the survey, 33% to 40% of synesthetes have reported that the letter A is red, and 40% to 50% have said that Y is yellow,” Witthoft and Winawer write of earlier research. And indeed, when participants in the current study did deviate from the set of magnets, their deviations tended to match these often-reported patterns, suggesting multiple influences at work.

Odder still, the researchers note that these same patterns are actually “alignable with choices made by nonsynesthetes”—that is, we all to some extent intuit some of these relationships between colors and letters or words and shapes, just not to the same degree that synesthetes do.

With enough effort—and enough cleverness—we ought to be able to reason about even our most unreasonable thoughts. From the beginning, this was the bargain we psychologists struck. When psychology first announced itself as a full-fledged science, its earliest practitioners rigorously considered the “distribution of taste sensitivity over the tongue” and the “sensation of muscular contraction,” logging dozens, even hundreds of self-observations in the hopes of distilling mental experiences into their most basic elements.

These days, research happens in reverse: instead of designing experiments to elicit thoughts, we first hypothesize about the nature of the thoughts and then design experiments to see if we’re right. Thanks to the small matter of falsifiability, the current method has proven more fruitful; we can now know when the mind plays tricks.

But this won’t be the way—or at least the only way—we make sense of our minds forever. As neuroscience becomes increasingly sophisticated, psychologists, too, will have to begin speaking the language of chemicals and synapses and circuitry. Here’s something I don’t think people outside the field realize: at the moment most cognitive psychologists go about their work as though neuroscience doesn’t exist. Sure, we occasionally speak of theories being “consistent with” our current understanding of neuroscience. Yes, we all have colleagues who scan brains or map sea slug neuroanatomy. But do we really engage? Does it affect our research agenda? Do we invite these colleagues out for drinks? We do not. But eventually we—like those who take comfort in Just-So stories about human nature—will have to reckon with important, provocative theories about mental states that will never feel in the least intuitive, or even understandable.

We’re not there yet. Frankly, we’re not even close. As Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University recently put it, “[the brain’s] 100 billion neurons each connect to 1000 other neurons and they signal each other constantly through the mediation of dozens of augmenting or inhibiting neurotransmitters. The miracle is not that things sometimes go wrong, but rather that they so often go right.” Tellingly, neuroscience still turns to psychology as its interpreter: there are “neural signatures” of understandable behaviors, and “patterns of activity” associated with understandable behaviors, but the “neural signatures” and the “patterns of activity” themselves are still mysterious.

Perhaps psychology will always have the role of interpreter; perhaps—though I doubt it very much—there will be a day when this is psychology’s only role. I think we will know in my lifetime: already the masts can be seen on the horizon. Already memories can be discussed not as dreams or diaries or even encoded representations but as neural events that mirror previous neural events. A young man has learned to operate a mechanical arm with his thoughts. A decision made by one rodent has entered the mind of another. These things—more than outrageous, they’re unthinkable.

But then the participants completed additional tasks. Some were just intended as fillers—to fill time, that is, between more critical elements of the study. But in one task, participants watched as pictures flashed on a computer screen. They were instructed to look for instances in which two identical pictures appeared consecutively. Ignore, they were told, any words you may see superimposed on these pictures; focus only on the pictures.

Finally participants again attempted to recall the words they’d studied. This time, the results were different. Some of the words on the original test list had been superimposed on the pictures, and when it came to recalling these words, older adults did about as well as young adults. Why? The older adults, but not the college students, got a memory boost from the superimposed words—the words they’d been instructed to ignore. That is, the ease with which they were distracted allowed them to recall more words.

Now, I hesitate to pick on this study, because I don’t think it is bad. I would even go so far as to call its results interesting and its design elegant. It’s the strained rhetorical spin that gets to me. Older adults, did you know that harnessing your inner distractibility could do wonders for your ability to remember (distracting) information? Think about that!

But it is just this irksome spin that makes the study such fodder for the popular press. Indeed, had the researchers not spun it this way, the press (and, alas, I include bloggers like myself) might have done so for them. Why read “Social Connections Evoke a Variety of Strong Emotions” when you can read “What Makes Us Happy Can Make Us Sad“? Why click on “Intelligence No Cure-all for Cognitive Bias” when you can go to “Why Smart People Are Stupid”?

We love our counterintuitive findings. And for fields such as psychology, they’re almost a necessity. If new conclusions already gel with our beliefs, goes the common refrain, why was precious taxpayer money ever wasted on the study in the first place? (I find the prospect of a society populated by commenters on most social science articles chilling.) Never mind that because our beliefs are not immune to prevailing worldviews, what we find intuitive has almost certainly been shaped by the past observations of—you guessed it—social scientists. And never mind that despite the ease with which new findings morph into old news, many established psychological phenomena still aren’t intuitive.

The counterintuitive has its place. But our love affair comes at a cost. It leaves little room in the public consciousness for social scientific work that is incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions—those fragile social and mental habitats upon which decisions turn. In other words, it leaves little room for most of social science.

Human language combines sounds to form words, which combine to create meaningful utterances. But not all combinations are equally acceptable. Brqqwmxd, for instance, both looks and sounds (or at least looks like it would sound) like a terrible English word: were we to coin a new word for, say, the lightness we feel in our legs after taking off skis, brqqwmxd is the last word we’d choose. Or, to put it less grammatically, brqqwmxd is we’d last the choose word.

But do nonhuman animals have grammar? Grammar dictates how linguistic elements can be combined. Grammatical rules bring structure—hierarchy—to a language. And no doubt about it, hierarchical structure can be found in the songs and calls of plenty of other species. Take the long mating songs of male humpback whales, which have been shown to be composed of repetitive “phrases” embedded inside longer, repetitive “themes.”

Or consider Bengalese finches, which in a recent study were conditioned to ignore the individual songs of other finches after listening to them hundreds of times. When the birds were then played versions of those songs in which elements had been scrambled by the experimenters, one—but not the rest—of the scrambled songs elicited strong responses from nearly all of the finches. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that this version had violated the rules of birdsong, which in turn suggests that birdsong has rules and that finches are capable of learning them. (The researchers cleverly supported their interpretation in a subsequent study that exposed long-suffering finches to an artificial language composed of syllable strings; these finches, too, were later able to distinguish between novel strings that followed the rules of the artificial language and novel strings that did not.)

But what is missing—what human language has and the communicative attempts of other species, no matter how valiant, do not—is combinatorial rules at the level of meaning. That is, in human language, it’s not just sounds that combine systematically; meanings themselves combine to create more complex meanings. Finch combines with long-suffering and the suffix –s to produce long-suffering finches, a phrase whose meaning is not only derived from—but, thanks to syntax, surpasses—the sum of the meanings of its parts. No incontrovertible evidence exists, however, that when two nonhuman animal calls are conjoined, the meaning of the new sequence similarly builds on the meanings of its components.

One possible exception comes from research on wild male Campbell’s monkeys in the Ivory Coast. According to researchers, these monkeys have six distinct calls. Four of the six are short, one-element calls, two of which serve as alarm calls for specific predators: hok for crowned eagles, and krak for leopards. But two additional calls are created when monkeys append a single, invariant sound to the end of each—hok-oo and krak-oo. Unlike hok and krak calls, which are given only in very specific situations, hok-oo and krak-oo are given under a wide range of circumstances. (Specifically, the researchers report that hok-oo calls “are given to a range of disturbances within the canopy, including eagles, the presence of neighboring groups and, on a few occasions, to a flying squirrel,” while krak-oo calls are even more generic and “can be given to almost any disturbance”.)

The researchers argue that this invariant addition –oo is “functionally equivalent to suffixation in human language.” In other words, just as adding an –s to the end of a noun changes its meaning in a predictable way (by pluralizing it), adding –oo to a species-specific alarm calls also changes its meaning in a predictable way—perhaps by generalizing it.

Suffixation? Holy finches, that’s grammar! But alas not everyone is convinced. Linguist James Hurford argues in his book The Origin of Grammar, for instance, that –oo may not serve a grammatical function at all. Instead, hok-oo and krak-oo may simply be basic units of meaning in their own right. With such small monkey vocabularies—and the calls in question used in such a wide range of contexts—it will probably prove impossible to tell the difference. In the future, we’ll have to turn to other members of the animal kingdom to determine whether reports of grammatical animal calls have been greatly exaggerated.

Consider the phrase ye olde. (And yes, it is most definitely a phrase. One does not encounter ye perpetual or ye longstanding; always ye sticks to olde like a barnacle to a whale.)

In conversation, ye olde is nearly always used facetiously, to hyperbolize (“Why don’t you just pick up ye olde musket?”) or to gently mock (“The whole family’s coming over for ye olde Christmas this year”). But the phrase also holds appeal for business owners. There are apparently few limits to the sorts of goods and services that can be modified with ye olde.

On one end of the spectrum fall stores like Ye Olde Computer Shoppe and Ye Olde UFO Shoppe, which achieve a degree of irony to which only Alanis Morissette could aspire.

Then come the likes of Ye Olde Tavern, Ye Olde Ice Cream Shoppe, Ye Ole Clean’ry, and Ye Olde Candle Cubbard, where the wares have little to do with antiquity, but ye olde functions as a theme, conjuring up the aesthetic of, say, the English pub of our imagination. (Period props included.)

Then there are the lovers of puns, the businesses plying in old-fashioned products, styles, or ideas. Searching desperately for a name catchier than Antiques Store or Place to Go for Family Portraits If You Want Them to Look Older Than They Are, these establishments turn to ye olde with gratitude.

Finally come the Ye Olde Mills and Farms and Manor Houses of the world, the places that actually do have claims to historical significance. Here ye olde seems devoid of irony; indeed, such institutions would probably not mind if the public believed their ye olde designation had come about organically, seven centuries ago, over a cauldron of pottage. (Note that not all businesses fit neatly along this spectrum. I am still flummoxed by what to make of Ye Olde Records.)

Alas, what makes this all so interesting is that ye olde could never have come about organically. Oh, the silent e in olde is authentic enough—pre-dictionary times were rife with idiosyncratic spellings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ald, alde, auld, eald, eld, oold, oolde, and yold would also have been reasonable contenders. And I suppose we could come up with a plausible reason why medieval shopkeepers would have wanted to advertise the advanced ages of their wares.

But ye is where it all falls apart. I’d always assumed ye to be the now-defunct second-person pronoun. Ye Olde shops, then, were charming throwbacks to small village life, where a smithy or cobbler could confidently say that his shop was your shop because it was the only shop in town. I’d thought wrong. (And as a pronoun scholar, I really ought to have known better: the pronoun ye had a nominative case, and as such wouldn’t denote possession as an adjective.  In other words, ye may have shopped there, but it wasn’t ye shop.)

During Chaucerian times, the OED explains, there were two ways of representing the sounds we now write as th: th and þ. The latter—called “thorn”—was often restricted to pronouns, or to determiners like the. But over time, perhaps due in part to difficulty printing the form, it morphed into something approximating a y. It’s this ye—historically pronounced as and used interchangeably with the—whose vestiges still appear in ye olde.

Clearly, there’s a joke here, but what is it? Is it a joke on historic manors with ahistoric names? On ironic names, out-ironicized by a fallacy? On all of us who unknowingly mispronounce ye olde when knowingly poking fun? Or perhaps it’s the fact that the phrase, in all its faux-historic glory, actually has a century and a half of history itself. From an online comment thread in 2002: Franky, ye olde fogie, I guess it’s time to wheel you right into that retirement center. And from article published in 1852: We shall … show … the character of ‘the old fogy’, or ‘ye olde fogie’, as he at present exists.