261: Red Big Balloon (featuring Damián Blasi)

We love red big balloons — or are they big red balloons?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, you know. But how do we know what the right way is? And what else does your brain know that you don’t know it knows?

Linguist Daniel Midgley blows your mind on this episode of Talk the Talk.

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Promo

Promo with Kylie Sturgess, 20 Sep 2016: Adjectives

Full interview

Interview with Damián Blasi (complete)

Daniel speaks with Damián Blasi of the Max Planck Institute about the significance of his work in associations between sound and meaning, and the difficulty of getting one’s meaning across in the media. Is science reporting hopelessly broken? How can researchers help? And in what way did the research team contribute to the bad reporting surrounding this paper?

Cutting Room Floor

Cutting Room Floor 261: Red Big Balloon

While Ben’s away, Daniel and Kylie wonder what their upcoming Camp Doogs appearance has in store. Ben just wants to know about the pronunciation.

Daniel tests the language acumen of Kylie and Ben with more adjective puzzles, and Ben wonders where English falls on the word-order-strictness continuum.

Then it’s politics ahoy, as the team contemplates Hanson, Trump, and the whole basket of deplorables.

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Show notes

Telegraph: Humans may speak a universal language, say scientists
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/12/humans-may-speak-a-universal-language-say-scientists/

LA Times: In world’s languages, scientists discover shared links between sound and meaning
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-languages-sound-meaning-20160912-snap-story.html

ABC: Linguistic study proves more than 6,000 languages use similar sounds for common words (formerly Linguists discover humans have ‘universal language’)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-13/linguists-discover-humans-have-%27universal-language%27/7841134

Cornell Chronicle: A nose by any other name would sound the same, study finds
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/09/nose-any-other-name-would-sound-same-study-finds

Max Planck Institute: Sound of words is no coincidence
https://www.mpg.de/10731041/language-sound-meaning-coincidence

“R” Is for Red: Common Words Share Similar Sounds in Many Languages
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/r-is-for-red-common-words-share-similar-sounds-in-many-languages/

Actual paper: Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages (paywall)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/09/06/1605782113