Findings, an article, and a new experiment

[Joshua Hartshorne]

Hi Folks,

Thank you all for your interest in our work at GamesWithWords.org. I realize there was some confusion during the recent shift to the new mailing list (combining the new list with the old Cognition & Language Lab list), but I hope that is all cleared up now. As promised in the subject line, there are some findings, an article and a new experiment. Here they are in the reverse order:

The Video Test

This is actually the revival of an old Cognition & Language Lab experiment. The paper based on that work is back from review, and we need to do some more work. It's one of my favorites, as the central part involves watching one of my all-time favorite short videos. If you're interested, you can find the experiment here.

Of course, we're primarily looking for people who didn't do one of the old versions of the experiment. This is the only experiment we've done that involved watching a video, so if that doesn't sound familiar, you probably haven't done it. (If you do discover you participated previously, there are questions in the course of the experiment that will capture that fact, so we can do the appropriate analyses.)

An Article

I have a new article on the Scientific American website about fantasy languages and how they could be used for scientific research. Here's the editor's intro:

Editor's note: Joshua Hartshorne is a graduate student at Harvard University's Psychology Department interested in human behavior and language. He wrote the open letter below because HBO is currently creating a new fantasy language, called "Dothraki," for an upcoming television adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. At least some fans are guaranteed to try to learn Dothraki, just as thousands have studied Klingon, Sindarin and Na'vi. The letter to Martin, the show's executive producer David Benioff and Dothraki creator David Peterson suggests a few different elements or structures for the language that could do science a favor by inventing a language that includes exactly those features that researchers would like to test to see if subjects—in this case, the show's highly motivated fans—can learn.

Findings

Puntastic -- otherwise known as "rate-a-pun" -- is still running at GamesWithWords.org, but there's a lot of data now, so I pulled it out to see what the most (and least) popular puns were. Some of that information is now on the blog.

Thanks again for your support,

Joshua Hartshorne

GamesWithWords.org

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