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A few quick articles
One on organic food.
One on why being barefoot (or as close as possible to barefoot) is a lot better for your feet than being heavily shod. (Well, duh.)
One on proposed library budget cuts in NYC.
A Place of Neighborhood Vitality May Be in Budget Cutters’ Sights
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Nicholas Pappalardo, a 45-year-old electrician with a serious 5 o’clock shadow, knows every word of the song “Little Red Wagon,” a talent that was on display last Saturday morning at the Elmhurst public library in Queens. As his wife and 3-year-old son, Nicky, sat and sang in the audience for the library’s story hour, Mr. Pappalardo, seated at a table across the room, gazed at his child and crooned along, like a groupie who couldn’t help himself.
Mr. Pappalardo isn’t a regular at story hour, but he’s learned the words from his son, who is. For more than a year, almost every Saturday, Nicky and his mother have made the half-hour walk from their home in Woodside to the Saturday story hour in Elmhurst.
Mr. Pappalardo and his wife, Yuan, both work during the week, leaving their son in the care of Ms. Pappalardo’s Chinese-speaking mother. Since Nicky wouldn’t attend any preschool until age 4, the Saturday library visit isn’t just a fun outing; it constitutes their son’s only group play, his only preschool to date. “My wife, she does it in all weather, just to get him there,” Mr. Pappalardo said. “It’s raining, it’s snowing, she takes him.”
As the 30 or so children at story hour were bouncing, counting ducks and generally calling out answers like game show contestants with a lot on the line, an equivalent number of adults, many of them elderly, were practicing tai chi a floor below.
Turning slowly in circles, moving their arms in arcs, they looked like the slow-motion version of the children at story hour, as if the 45 r.p.m. record upstairs were being played at LP speed. When that class finished, the pace would pick up tempo, in a free ballroom dancing class taught in Chinese.
In another basement room, a man with earphones was listening to English lessons, while a volunteer worked with another English language student at a computer.
For many middle-class New Yorkers, these kinds of pleasures are a big part of what the boom years have brought them: not second homes or personal Pilates instructors or Kelly bags, but urban utopian luxuries like fanciful playgrounds, open-air free movies and library services good enough to make them weekend highlights. All of those services, financed by tax dollars, have the added benefit of throwing people together, and none more effectively than libraries — free, local, with room to roam, they’re like parks with a brain, providing education brilliantly disguised as leisure, ideally on the weekends, when most people have time for it.
Here’s one version of what the end of the boom could look like, among other things: the absence of those 70 or so adults and children crowding the Elmhurst library children’s room on Saturday mornings, a locked door greeting the usual crowd. Among Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts for 2009 — necessitated, he says, by Wall Street woes that don’t appear to be going away soon — is a 5 percent reduction in financing for libraries citywide, with an additional 3 percent on the table.
The cuts would mean the end of six- and seven-day library service at most libraries around the city, quite possibly Elmhurst among them, says James Van Bramer, the director of government and community affairs for the Queens library system.
Why weekends, of all times; why not reduce some weekday hours?
“We get asked that all the time,” Mr. Van Bramer said. It’s for the teenagers, he explained, children just old enough not to have designated care when their parents are working, who spend the hours between 3 and 6 p.m. during the week in the library. “We’re not going to throw those kids out on the street,” Mr. Van Bramer said.
Fair enough; that need sounds urgent, not like a luxury. But as luxuries go, the ones at the Elmhurst library that Saturday seemed worth savoring: a place for a lonely Indian man, a social worker, to socialize on the weekends, now that his wife and children are living in India; a place for two teenage girls to check out romance novels; a place where immigrant parents — Indian, Chinese, Guyanese, Vietnamese — could learn the songs that bind American children.
“A lot of times immigrant parents ask me to print out the lyrics to ‘Eensy Weensy Spider’ or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ ” said Sarah Hinkle, the children’s librarian who led story hour that Saturday. (Ms. Hinkle had all the requisite qualities of one’s most fondly remembered baby sitters: long hair, a fun name and an extensive repertory of silly faces.) “Their children want to sing them at home, and they want to know the words,” she said. Those are mostly parents, she added, who work during the week.
The way other people line up early to get tickets to rock concerts, Elmhurst residents line up early to get into their library on Saturday. It’s not that there’s a shortage of books, or computers, or spaces in the tai chi class. It’s just that there’s a sense of eager anticipation. As one woman waiting outside that breezy Saturday morning put it simply, “I don’t want to miss out.”
An article on language and thought
When Language Can Hold the Answer
By CHRISTINE KENNEALLY
Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.
The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.
Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.
The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, who is now doing postdoctoral research at Cornell, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.
When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.
The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.
In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?
The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.
The traditional subject of the tug of war over language and perception is color. Because languages divide the spectrum differently, researchers have asked whether language affected how people see color. English, for example, distinguishes blue from green. Most other languages do not make that distinction. Is it possible that only English speakers really see those colors as different?
Past investigations have had mixed results. Some experiments suggested that color terms influenced people in the moment of perception. Others suggested that the language effect kicked in only after some basic perception occurred.
The consensus was that different ways to label color probably did not affect the perception of color in any systematic way.
Last year, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues published a study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that language could significantly affect how quickly perceptions of color are categorized. Russian and English speakers were asked look at three blocks of color and say which two were the same.
Russian speakers must distinguish between lighter blues, or goluboy, and darker blues, siniy, while English speakers do not have to, using only “blue” for any shade. If the Russians were shown three blue squares with two goluboy and one siniy, or the other way around, they picked the two matching colors faster than if all three squares were shades from one blue group. English makes no fundamental distinction between shades of blue, and English speakers fared the same no matter the mix of shades.
In two different tests, subjects were asked to perform a nonverbal task at the same time as the color-matching task. When the Russians simultaneously carried out a nonverbal task, they kept their color-matching advantage. But when they had to perform a verbal task at the same time as color-matching, their advantage began to disappear. The slowdown suggested that the speed of their reactions did not result just from a learned difference but that language was actively involved in identifying colors as the test was happening. Two other recent studies also demonstrated an effect of language on color perception and provided a clue as to why previous experimental results have been inconclusive. In The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Paul Kay of the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and colleagues hypothesized that if language is dominant on the left side of the brain, it should affect color perception in the right visual field. (The right visual field is connected to the left side of the brain, and vice versa.)
English-speaking subjects were shown a ring of 12 small squares that were all the same color except an odd one on the left or the right. If the odd square was shown to the right visual field and it was from a completely different color category in English, like a green square compared to the ring of blue squares, then subjects were quick to identify it as different. If the odd square shown to the right visual field was the same basic color as the ring of squares, perhaps just being a different shade of blue, subjects were not as fast to recognize the difference. If the odd square was shown to the left visual field, it didn’t matter if it was a different color or only a different shade.
The extent to which language affected color perception depended on the side of the brain being used.
Dr. Lupyan has also investigated how quickly the effects of language might come into play. In one experiment, he asked students to look at a computer screen that had “2” once and “5” many times in a circle. Over hundreds of trials where the positions of the numbers changed, the students were asked to “find the target” or “find the ‘two.’ ”
Whenever subjects heard the word “two,” they always found the numeral faster. They found the “2” even faster when instructed to “ignore the 5s,” as opposed to “ignore the distracters.” In these cases, Dr. Lupyan suggested, language is “greasing the wheels of perception.”
Language also has a significant role in seeing and remembering where objects are in space. Dr. Dedre Gentner at Northwestern and her colleagues conducted experiments on the spatial reasoning of hearing children and children who “home-sign.”
Home-signers have hearing parents, but they are congenitally deaf and have never been taught a sign language, according to Susan Goldin-Meadow, an expert in homesign. The gestural language they develop is invented solely by themselves. In the past, Dr. Gentner and her colleagues had observed that children who home-sign did not appear to invent gestures for locations spontaneously.
The children were shown two side-by-side boxes. Internally, each box was divided in three. In each space was a card.
During each trial, the experimenter took a card from the first box and showed the child that it had a special star on the back. Replacing it in the first box in the same space, the experimenter asked the child to find where the special card would be in the second box. Essentially, the children were asked to map the position of the target card in the first box to the same position in the second.
The researchers found that children without words for spatial relationships, whether young or home-signers, had much more trouble finding the special card in the second box than older hearing children who had learned the relevant words.
For young hearing children, exposure to spatial language in the experiment strongly influenced the success rate. If the experimenter used spatial terms when speaking to a child, saying, “I’m putting the card in the top” (or “middle” or “bottom”), as opposed to, “I’m putting the card here,” the children were much likelier to find the correct spot in the second box.
The effect lasted not just through the experiment, but until at least two days later, when the children were retested.
“By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”
There is other evidence that a lack of spatial language is not a handicap in solving spatial problems. In 2006, scientists published an experiment that investigated the ability of the Amazonian Munduruku tribe to understand and manipulate geometric relationships for which their language has no words. The Munduruku performed about the same as Americans whose language is rich with spatial terms.
This separation of language and thought is emphasized in a recent book by Steven Pinker, at Harvard University, a skeptic of “neo-whorfianism.” In “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature,” Pinker explores the complicated ways that language and thought relate to each other. He cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways. With numbers, the importance of language evidence is much clearer. It appears that the ability to count is necessary to deal with large, specific numbers. And the only way to count past a certain point is with language.
Elizabet Spaepen, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, examined the ability of home-signing adults in Nicaragua to use numbers. Ms. Spaepen emphasized that although the subjects had never been taught a formal sign language, including counting, they were fully integrated in society. They have jobs and they are paid as much as hearing or signing adults.
Ms. Spaepen asked the home-signers to match an array of objects laid out before them. For example, she placed plastic discs on a table and encouraged the subjects to lay out the same number of discs. If the number was small, as in one, two or three, the home-signers got it right all the time.
If the number was larger, the home-signers got it right just approximately. If Ms. Spaepen laid out four discs, the subjects might lay out five or six. Although they were never quite right, they were never completely wrong. The home-signers would not lay out one or 15 discs in response to four.
Scientists have shown that the understanding of small, specific numbers is a trait with long evolutionary history. Monkeys and other animals can compute the exact number of a small set of objects at a glance without explicitly counting. The ability is called subitization.
Ms. Spaepen suggests that when home-signers correctly use small numbers, they are relying on this innate trait. The count list we learn with most languages (some languages do not have a count list or words for specific numbers greater than three) has enabled humans to build on this heritage, taking the specific and uniform gap between “one” and “two” and “two” and “three,” and extending it out through four and higher, theoretically to infinity.
In another experiment, Dr. Lupyan showed subjects a series of chairs and tables using pictures from the Ikea catalog. Some subjects were asked to press a button indicating that the picture was of a table or a chair. Other subjects pressed a button to make a nonverbal judgment about the pictures, for example, to indicate whether they liked them or not. Dr. Lupyan found that the subjects who used words to label the objects had more trouble remembering whether they’d seen a specific chair before than subjects who had only pressed a button in a nonverbal task.
Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Dr. Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.
An article about an Aramaic-speaking area in Syria
In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives
By ROBERT F. WORTH
MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that existed before the arrival of Islam.
Now Mr. Khoury, 65, gray-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mother.
“It’s disappearing,” he said in Arabic, sitting with his wife on a bed in the mud-and-straw house where he grew up. “A lot of the Aramaic vocabulary I don’t use any more, and I’ve lost it.”
Malula, along with two smaller neighboring villages where Aramaic is also spoken, is still celebrated in Syria as a unique linguistic island. In the Convent of St. Sergius and Bacchus, on a hill above town, young girls recite the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic to tourists, and booklets about the language are on sale at a gift shop in the town center.
But the island has grown smaller over the years, and some local people say they fear it will not last. Once a large population stretching across Syria, Turkey and Iraq, Aramaic-speaking Christians have slowly melted away, some fleeing westward, some converting to Islam.
In recent decades the process has accelerated, with large numbers of Iraqi Christians escaping the violence and chaos of their country.
Yona Sabar, a professor of Semitic languages at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that today, Malula and its neighboring villages, Jabadeen and Bakhaa, represent “the last Mohicans” of Western Aramaic, which was the language Jesus presumably spoke in Palestine two millennia ago.
With its ancient houses clinging picturesquely to a dramatic cleft in the mountains, Malula was once remote from Damascus, the Syrian capital, and local people spent their lives here. But now there are few jobs, and young people tend to move to the city for work, Mr. Khoury said.
Even if they return, they are less likely to speak Aramaic. Buses to Damascus used to leave once or twice a day; now they leave every 15 minutes, and with better roads the journey takes about an hour. Constant exchange with the big city, not to mention television and the Internet, has eroded Malula’s linguistic separateness.
“The young generations have lost interest” in Aramaic, Mr. Khoury said sadly.
His granddaughter, a bright-eyed 17-year-old in blue jeans named Katya, offered a few samples of the language: “Awafih” for hello, “alloy a pelach a feethah” for God be with you. She learned Aramaic mostly at a new language school in Malula, established two years ago to keep the language alive. She knows some songs, too, and has started learning to write the language — something even her grandfather never did.
Mr. Khoury smiles at the words, but recalls how in his own childhood 60 years ago, schoolteachers slapped students who reverted to Aramaic in class, enforcing the government’s “Arabization” policy.
“Now it’s reversed,” he says. Families speak Arabic at home and are more likely to learn Aramaic at the language center, where some foreigners also study.
In the town’s central intersection, a group of young people outside a market seemed to confirm Mr. Khoury’s gloomy view.
“I speak some Aramaic, but I can barely understand it,” said Fathi Mualem, 20.
John Francis, 20, said, “My father wrote a book about it, but I barely speak any.” (Western-sounding names are common among Christians in Syria and Lebanon.)
Malula — Aramaic for “entrance” — derives its name from a legend that evokes the town’s separate religious heritage. St. Takla, a beautiful young woman who had studied with St. Paul, is said to have fled from her home in what is now Turkey after her pagan parents persecuted her for her newfound Christian faith. Arriving in Malula, she found her path blocked by a mountain. She prayed, and the rocks divided in two, a stream flowing out from under her feet.
Today, tourists walk up and down the narrow canyon where the saint is said to have fled, with rose-colored rocks rising 100 feet above a well-trod footpath. Nearby, two dozen nuns live at the Convent of St. Takla, presiding over a small orphanage. (“We teach the children the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic,” said one black-clad nun, “but everything else is in Arabic.”) There is a shrine in the mountainside where St. Takla is said to have lived, with a tree growing horizontally out of it.
But even the town’s Christian identity is fading. Muslims have begun replacing the emigrating Christians, and now Malula — once entirely Christian — is almost half Muslim, residents say.
Malula’s linguistic heritage stirred some interest after the release of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” with its mix of Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew dialogue. Virtually everyone in town seems to have seen the film, but few said they understood it. That was not their fault: it included different dialects of Aramaic, and the actors’ pronunciation made it hard to understand anything, said Mr. Sabar, the Semitic languages professor.
Aramaic has also changed over the centuries, taking on features of Syrian Arabic, Mr. Sabar said.
But most residents of Malula believe that their town’s ancestral language is still the same one Jesus spoke, and will speak again when he returns.
“Our parents and grandparents always spoke to us in this language,” said Suhail Milani, a 50-year-old bus driver with a wizened face. “I hope it will not disappear.”
And one on teaching math
Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices
By KENNETH CHANG
One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)
“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”
Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Though the experiment tested college students, the researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods.
In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system through purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples like combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.
Then the students were tested on a different situation — what they were told was a children’s game — that used the same math. “We told students you can use the knowledge you just acquired to figure out these rules of the game,” Dr. Kaminski said.
The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.
The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.
“They tend to remember the superficial, the two trains passing in the night,” Dr. Kaminski said. “It’s really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information.”
The researchers said they had experimental evidence showing a similar effect with 11-year-old children. The findings run counter to what Dr. Kaminski said was a “pervasive assumption” among math educators that concrete examples help more children better understand math.
But if the Ohio State findings also apply to more basic math lessons, then teaching fractions with slices of pizza or statistics by pulling marbles out of a bag might prove counterproductive. “There are reasons to think it could affect everyone, including young learners,” Dr. Kaminski said.
Dr. Kaminski said even the effectiveness of using blocks and other “manipulatives,” which have become more pervasive in preschool and kindergarten, remained untested. It has not been shown that lessons in which children learn to count by using blocks translate to a better understanding of numbers than a more abstract approach would have achieved.
The Ohio State researchers have begun new experiments with elementary school students.
Other mathematicians called the findings interesting but warned against overgeneralizing. “One size can’t fit all,” said Douglas H. Clements, a professor of learning and instruction at the University of Buffalo. “That’s not denying what these guys have found, whatsoever.”
Some children need manipulatives to learn math basics, Dr. Clements said, but only as a starting point.
“It’s a fascinating article,” said David Bressoud, a professor of mathematics at Macalester College in St. Paul and president-elect of the Mathematical Association of America. “In some respects, it’s not too surprising.”
As for the answer to the math problem at the top of this article, the two trains pass each other at 11 p.m. at the midway point between Stations A and B. Or, using the abstract approach, t = 4.
One on why being barefoot (or as close as possible to barefoot) is a lot better for your feet than being heavily shod. (Well, duh.)
One on proposed library budget cuts in NYC.
A Place of Neighborhood Vitality May Be in Budget Cutters’ Sights
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Nicholas Pappalardo, a 45-year-old electrician with a serious 5 o’clock shadow, knows every word of the song “Little Red Wagon,” a talent that was on display last Saturday morning at the Elmhurst public library in Queens. As his wife and 3-year-old son, Nicky, sat and sang in the audience for the library’s story hour, Mr. Pappalardo, seated at a table across the room, gazed at his child and crooned along, like a groupie who couldn’t help himself.
Mr. Pappalardo isn’t a regular at story hour, but he’s learned the words from his son, who is. For more than a year, almost every Saturday, Nicky and his mother have made the half-hour walk from their home in Woodside to the Saturday story hour in Elmhurst.
Mr. Pappalardo and his wife, Yuan, both work during the week, leaving their son in the care of Ms. Pappalardo’s Chinese-speaking mother. Since Nicky wouldn’t attend any preschool until age 4, the Saturday library visit isn’t just a fun outing; it constitutes their son’s only group play, his only preschool to date. “My wife, she does it in all weather, just to get him there,” Mr. Pappalardo said. “It’s raining, it’s snowing, she takes him.”
As the 30 or so children at story hour were bouncing, counting ducks and generally calling out answers like game show contestants with a lot on the line, an equivalent number of adults, many of them elderly, were practicing tai chi a floor below.
Turning slowly in circles, moving their arms in arcs, they looked like the slow-motion version of the children at story hour, as if the 45 r.p.m. record upstairs were being played at LP speed. When that class finished, the pace would pick up tempo, in a free ballroom dancing class taught in Chinese.
In another basement room, a man with earphones was listening to English lessons, while a volunteer worked with another English language student at a computer.
For many middle-class New Yorkers, these kinds of pleasures are a big part of what the boom years have brought them: not second homes or personal Pilates instructors or Kelly bags, but urban utopian luxuries like fanciful playgrounds, open-air free movies and library services good enough to make them weekend highlights. All of those services, financed by tax dollars, have the added benefit of throwing people together, and none more effectively than libraries — free, local, with room to roam, they’re like parks with a brain, providing education brilliantly disguised as leisure, ideally on the weekends, when most people have time for it.
Here’s one version of what the end of the boom could look like, among other things: the absence of those 70 or so adults and children crowding the Elmhurst library children’s room on Saturday mornings, a locked door greeting the usual crowd. Among Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts for 2009 — necessitated, he says, by Wall Street woes that don’t appear to be going away soon — is a 5 percent reduction in financing for libraries citywide, with an additional 3 percent on the table.
The cuts would mean the end of six- and seven-day library service at most libraries around the city, quite possibly Elmhurst among them, says James Van Bramer, the director of government and community affairs for the Queens library system.
Why weekends, of all times; why not reduce some weekday hours?
“We get asked that all the time,” Mr. Van Bramer said. It’s for the teenagers, he explained, children just old enough not to have designated care when their parents are working, who spend the hours between 3 and 6 p.m. during the week in the library. “We’re not going to throw those kids out on the street,” Mr. Van Bramer said.
Fair enough; that need sounds urgent, not like a luxury. But as luxuries go, the ones at the Elmhurst library that Saturday seemed worth savoring: a place for a lonely Indian man, a social worker, to socialize on the weekends, now that his wife and children are living in India; a place for two teenage girls to check out romance novels; a place where immigrant parents — Indian, Chinese, Guyanese, Vietnamese — could learn the songs that bind American children.
“A lot of times immigrant parents ask me to print out the lyrics to ‘Eensy Weensy Spider’ or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ ” said Sarah Hinkle, the children’s librarian who led story hour that Saturday. (Ms. Hinkle had all the requisite qualities of one’s most fondly remembered baby sitters: long hair, a fun name and an extensive repertory of silly faces.) “Their children want to sing them at home, and they want to know the words,” she said. Those are mostly parents, she added, who work during the week.
The way other people line up early to get tickets to rock concerts, Elmhurst residents line up early to get into their library on Saturday. It’s not that there’s a shortage of books, or computers, or spaces in the tai chi class. It’s just that there’s a sense of eager anticipation. As one woman waiting outside that breezy Saturday morning put it simply, “I don’t want to miss out.”
An article on language and thought
When Language Can Hold the Answer
By CHRISTINE KENNEALLY
Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.
The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.
Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.
The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, who is now doing postdoctoral research at Cornell, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.
When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.
The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.
In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?
The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.
The traditional subject of the tug of war over language and perception is color. Because languages divide the spectrum differently, researchers have asked whether language affected how people see color. English, for example, distinguishes blue from green. Most other languages do not make that distinction. Is it possible that only English speakers really see those colors as different?
Past investigations have had mixed results. Some experiments suggested that color terms influenced people in the moment of perception. Others suggested that the language effect kicked in only after some basic perception occurred.
The consensus was that different ways to label color probably did not affect the perception of color in any systematic way.
Last year, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues published a study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that language could significantly affect how quickly perceptions of color are categorized. Russian and English speakers were asked look at three blocks of color and say which two were the same.
Russian speakers must distinguish between lighter blues, or goluboy, and darker blues, siniy, while English speakers do not have to, using only “blue” for any shade. If the Russians were shown three blue squares with two goluboy and one siniy, or the other way around, they picked the two matching colors faster than if all three squares were shades from one blue group. English makes no fundamental distinction between shades of blue, and English speakers fared the same no matter the mix of shades.
In two different tests, subjects were asked to perform a nonverbal task at the same time as the color-matching task. When the Russians simultaneously carried out a nonverbal task, they kept their color-matching advantage. But when they had to perform a verbal task at the same time as color-matching, their advantage began to disappear. The slowdown suggested that the speed of their reactions did not result just from a learned difference but that language was actively involved in identifying colors as the test was happening. Two other recent studies also demonstrated an effect of language on color perception and provided a clue as to why previous experimental results have been inconclusive. In The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Paul Kay of the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and colleagues hypothesized that if language is dominant on the left side of the brain, it should affect color perception in the right visual field. (The right visual field is connected to the left side of the brain, and vice versa.)
English-speaking subjects were shown a ring of 12 small squares that were all the same color except an odd one on the left or the right. If the odd square was shown to the right visual field and it was from a completely different color category in English, like a green square compared to the ring of blue squares, then subjects were quick to identify it as different. If the odd square shown to the right visual field was the same basic color as the ring of squares, perhaps just being a different shade of blue, subjects were not as fast to recognize the difference. If the odd square was shown to the left visual field, it didn’t matter if it was a different color or only a different shade.
The extent to which language affected color perception depended on the side of the brain being used.
Dr. Lupyan has also investigated how quickly the effects of language might come into play. In one experiment, he asked students to look at a computer screen that had “2” once and “5” many times in a circle. Over hundreds of trials where the positions of the numbers changed, the students were asked to “find the target” or “find the ‘two.’ ”
Whenever subjects heard the word “two,” they always found the numeral faster. They found the “2” even faster when instructed to “ignore the 5s,” as opposed to “ignore the distracters.” In these cases, Dr. Lupyan suggested, language is “greasing the wheels of perception.”
Language also has a significant role in seeing and remembering where objects are in space. Dr. Dedre Gentner at Northwestern and her colleagues conducted experiments on the spatial reasoning of hearing children and children who “home-sign.”
Home-signers have hearing parents, but they are congenitally deaf and have never been taught a sign language, according to Susan Goldin-Meadow, an expert in homesign. The gestural language they develop is invented solely by themselves. In the past, Dr. Gentner and her colleagues had observed that children who home-sign did not appear to invent gestures for locations spontaneously.
The children were shown two side-by-side boxes. Internally, each box was divided in three. In each space was a card.
During each trial, the experimenter took a card from the first box and showed the child that it had a special star on the back. Replacing it in the first box in the same space, the experimenter asked the child to find where the special card would be in the second box. Essentially, the children were asked to map the position of the target card in the first box to the same position in the second.
The researchers found that children without words for spatial relationships, whether young or home-signers, had much more trouble finding the special card in the second box than older hearing children who had learned the relevant words.
For young hearing children, exposure to spatial language in the experiment strongly influenced the success rate. If the experimenter used spatial terms when speaking to a child, saying, “I’m putting the card in the top” (or “middle” or “bottom”), as opposed to, “I’m putting the card here,” the children were much likelier to find the correct spot in the second box.
The effect lasted not just through the experiment, but until at least two days later, when the children were retested.
“By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”
There is other evidence that a lack of spatial language is not a handicap in solving spatial problems. In 2006, scientists published an experiment that investigated the ability of the Amazonian Munduruku tribe to understand and manipulate geometric relationships for which their language has no words. The Munduruku performed about the same as Americans whose language is rich with spatial terms.
This separation of language and thought is emphasized in a recent book by Steven Pinker, at Harvard University, a skeptic of “neo-whorfianism.” In “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature,” Pinker explores the complicated ways that language and thought relate to each other. He cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways. With numbers, the importance of language evidence is much clearer. It appears that the ability to count is necessary to deal with large, specific numbers. And the only way to count past a certain point is with language.
Elizabet Spaepen, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, examined the ability of home-signing adults in Nicaragua to use numbers. Ms. Spaepen emphasized that although the subjects had never been taught a formal sign language, including counting, they were fully integrated in society. They have jobs and they are paid as much as hearing or signing adults.
Ms. Spaepen asked the home-signers to match an array of objects laid out before them. For example, she placed plastic discs on a table and encouraged the subjects to lay out the same number of discs. If the number was small, as in one, two or three, the home-signers got it right all the time.
If the number was larger, the home-signers got it right just approximately. If Ms. Spaepen laid out four discs, the subjects might lay out five or six. Although they were never quite right, they were never completely wrong. The home-signers would not lay out one or 15 discs in response to four.
Scientists have shown that the understanding of small, specific numbers is a trait with long evolutionary history. Monkeys and other animals can compute the exact number of a small set of objects at a glance without explicitly counting. The ability is called subitization.
Ms. Spaepen suggests that when home-signers correctly use small numbers, they are relying on this innate trait. The count list we learn with most languages (some languages do not have a count list or words for specific numbers greater than three) has enabled humans to build on this heritage, taking the specific and uniform gap between “one” and “two” and “two” and “three,” and extending it out through four and higher, theoretically to infinity.
In another experiment, Dr. Lupyan showed subjects a series of chairs and tables using pictures from the Ikea catalog. Some subjects were asked to press a button indicating that the picture was of a table or a chair. Other subjects pressed a button to make a nonverbal judgment about the pictures, for example, to indicate whether they liked them or not. Dr. Lupyan found that the subjects who used words to label the objects had more trouble remembering whether they’d seen a specific chair before than subjects who had only pressed a button in a nonverbal task.
Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Dr. Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.
An article about an Aramaic-speaking area in Syria
In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives
By ROBERT F. WORTH
MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that existed before the arrival of Islam.
Now Mr. Khoury, 65, gray-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mother.
“It’s disappearing,” he said in Arabic, sitting with his wife on a bed in the mud-and-straw house where he grew up. “A lot of the Aramaic vocabulary I don’t use any more, and I’ve lost it.”
Malula, along with two smaller neighboring villages where Aramaic is also spoken, is still celebrated in Syria as a unique linguistic island. In the Convent of St. Sergius and Bacchus, on a hill above town, young girls recite the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic to tourists, and booklets about the language are on sale at a gift shop in the town center.
But the island has grown smaller over the years, and some local people say they fear it will not last. Once a large population stretching across Syria, Turkey and Iraq, Aramaic-speaking Christians have slowly melted away, some fleeing westward, some converting to Islam.
In recent decades the process has accelerated, with large numbers of Iraqi Christians escaping the violence and chaos of their country.
Yona Sabar, a professor of Semitic languages at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that today, Malula and its neighboring villages, Jabadeen and Bakhaa, represent “the last Mohicans” of Western Aramaic, which was the language Jesus presumably spoke in Palestine two millennia ago.
With its ancient houses clinging picturesquely to a dramatic cleft in the mountains, Malula was once remote from Damascus, the Syrian capital, and local people spent their lives here. But now there are few jobs, and young people tend to move to the city for work, Mr. Khoury said.
Even if they return, they are less likely to speak Aramaic. Buses to Damascus used to leave once or twice a day; now they leave every 15 minutes, and with better roads the journey takes about an hour. Constant exchange with the big city, not to mention television and the Internet, has eroded Malula’s linguistic separateness.
“The young generations have lost interest” in Aramaic, Mr. Khoury said sadly.
His granddaughter, a bright-eyed 17-year-old in blue jeans named Katya, offered a few samples of the language: “Awafih” for hello, “alloy a pelach a feethah” for God be with you. She learned Aramaic mostly at a new language school in Malula, established two years ago to keep the language alive. She knows some songs, too, and has started learning to write the language — something even her grandfather never did.
Mr. Khoury smiles at the words, but recalls how in his own childhood 60 years ago, schoolteachers slapped students who reverted to Aramaic in class, enforcing the government’s “Arabization” policy.
“Now it’s reversed,” he says. Families speak Arabic at home and are more likely to learn Aramaic at the language center, where some foreigners also study.
In the town’s central intersection, a group of young people outside a market seemed to confirm Mr. Khoury’s gloomy view.
“I speak some Aramaic, but I can barely understand it,” said Fathi Mualem, 20.
John Francis, 20, said, “My father wrote a book about it, but I barely speak any.” (Western-sounding names are common among Christians in Syria and Lebanon.)
Malula — Aramaic for “entrance” — derives its name from a legend that evokes the town’s separate religious heritage. St. Takla, a beautiful young woman who had studied with St. Paul, is said to have fled from her home in what is now Turkey after her pagan parents persecuted her for her newfound Christian faith. Arriving in Malula, she found her path blocked by a mountain. She prayed, and the rocks divided in two, a stream flowing out from under her feet.
Today, tourists walk up and down the narrow canyon where the saint is said to have fled, with rose-colored rocks rising 100 feet above a well-trod footpath. Nearby, two dozen nuns live at the Convent of St. Takla, presiding over a small orphanage. (“We teach the children the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic,” said one black-clad nun, “but everything else is in Arabic.”) There is a shrine in the mountainside where St. Takla is said to have lived, with a tree growing horizontally out of it.
But even the town’s Christian identity is fading. Muslims have begun replacing the emigrating Christians, and now Malula — once entirely Christian — is almost half Muslim, residents say.
Malula’s linguistic heritage stirred some interest after the release of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” with its mix of Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew dialogue. Virtually everyone in town seems to have seen the film, but few said they understood it. That was not their fault: it included different dialects of Aramaic, and the actors’ pronunciation made it hard to understand anything, said Mr. Sabar, the Semitic languages professor.
Aramaic has also changed over the centuries, taking on features of Syrian Arabic, Mr. Sabar said.
But most residents of Malula believe that their town’s ancestral language is still the same one Jesus spoke, and will speak again when he returns.
“Our parents and grandparents always spoke to us in this language,” said Suhail Milani, a 50-year-old bus driver with a wizened face. “I hope it will not disappear.”
And one on teaching math
Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices
By KENNETH CHANG
One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)
“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”
Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Though the experiment tested college students, the researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods.
In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system through purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples like combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.
Then the students were tested on a different situation — what they were told was a children’s game — that used the same math. “We told students you can use the knowledge you just acquired to figure out these rules of the game,” Dr. Kaminski said.
The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.
The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.
“They tend to remember the superficial, the two trains passing in the night,” Dr. Kaminski said. “It’s really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information.”
The researchers said they had experimental evidence showing a similar effect with 11-year-old children. The findings run counter to what Dr. Kaminski said was a “pervasive assumption” among math educators that concrete examples help more children better understand math.
But if the Ohio State findings also apply to more basic math lessons, then teaching fractions with slices of pizza or statistics by pulling marbles out of a bag might prove counterproductive. “There are reasons to think it could affect everyone, including young learners,” Dr. Kaminski said.
Dr. Kaminski said even the effectiveness of using blocks and other “manipulatives,” which have become more pervasive in preschool and kindergarten, remained untested. It has not been shown that lessons in which children learn to count by using blocks translate to a better understanding of numbers than a more abstract approach would have achieved.
The Ohio State researchers have begun new experiments with elementary school students.
Other mathematicians called the findings interesting but warned against overgeneralizing. “One size can’t fit all,” said Douglas H. Clements, a professor of learning and instruction at the University of Buffalo. “That’s not denying what these guys have found, whatsoever.”
Some children need manipulatives to learn math basics, Dr. Clements said, but only as a starting point.
“It’s a fascinating article,” said David Bressoud, a professor of mathematics at Macalester College in St. Paul and president-elect of the Mathematical Association of America. “In some respects, it’s not too surprising.”
As for the answer to the math problem at the top of this article, the two trains pass each other at 11 p.m. at the midway point between Stations A and B. Or, using the abstract approach, t = 4.