Two gems from the Language Log

The folks at the Language Log over at UPenn have a few gems to point out. The first’s a linguistic rap. The voice and rapping isn’t terrific, but it’s worth listening to once just to hear the lines “hooting like owls cause I’m a linguistic freak/oh you’re a linguist, eh? how many languages do you speak?”

The other is some rebuttals to some of the things pop psychologist Leonard Sax has been writing about. His basic argument is that boys and girls are on different developmental timetables (basically true) and that their vision and auditory systems are qualitatively different (oh boy). You can read a more detailed rebuttal from the Log, but the basic idea is that Sax took some rat studies (bad idea – rat eyes are not similar to human eyes) with uncertain results and abstracted from them to humans in a way that is contrary to the information in basic textbooks. And here I was, thinking that only some linguists co-opt scientific data to uphold their unusual convictions.