Updates from GamesWithWords.org — Language science on the Web
Games With Words
Many thanks to everyone for your support of our research and of the language sciences more generally. We have several big announcements.
1. The initial “pilot” phase of VerbCorner — our first Citizen Science project — concluded successfully earlier this year. The results were presented at a scientific conference earlier this month. During the pilot, over 10,000 volunteers contributed over 525,000 linguistic judgments. The results are some of the strongest evidence to date for a tight relationship between the structure of language and the structure of thought. In addition to this scientific result, the VerbCorner projects shows that volunteer linguists, in collaboration with professionals, can make important contributions to language science that would otherwise be impossible. Read more about the results on our blog.
2. The results of the pilot shows that VerbCorner can succeed, but there is still *a lot* to do to reach our goal of the first-ever complete theory of verb syntax. In the pilot, we successfully analyzed 31,429 sentences — or about 1% of the total that we need. We have set a goal of reaching 50,000 by July 1st. This is a lot. However, if everyone receiving this email answered 100 questions, we would exceed that target easily. You can participate here.
In the meantime, our team of computer scientists is hard at work finding ways of making data-analysis more efficient, which will speed up the process.
3. I have been busy setting up the new Language Learning Laboratory at Boston College, and so am behind on announcements. If you did not see it already, our paper on how your mind changes with age -- named the #1 Brain Science and Psychology study of 2015 by Forbes -- received extensive coverage in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and many other publications. Much of the data came from gameswithwords.org volunteers, so many thanks again to everyone.