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o x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on thursday june 05 2014 i ve updated the interactive visualization of the relationships between the englishes of the world to include a couple dozen additional native languages check it out 1 comments labels findings gameswithwords org language whichenglish forums find gameswithwords email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on wednesday june 04 2014 a number of forums have picked up the whichenglish quiz and have produced some really intelligent and insightful conversation i recommend in particular this conversation on metafilter there is also an extensive conversation at hacker news and a somewhat older discussion at reddit and there is a lot of discussion in finnish and hungarian but i have no idea what they are saying 0 comments labels on killing time when i should be working on the internet whichenglish handling viral traffic email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on monday june 02 2014 around 4am est on may 28 we started getting a lot of traffic to the website this very quickly overloaded the server resulting in the website running very slowly we did some optimization things sped up and our reward was more traffic so we switched to a more powerful server and so on things are finally under control at least for the moment anyway you can see that we ve managed to get the average page load time down to a reasonable length of time for the last day or so without any large spikes of course overwhelming amounts of traffic is a good problem to have and i won t complain if things overheat again 5 comments labels gameswithwords org on the website whichenglish which english the science part 1 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on monday june 02 2014 i ve gotten a number of questions about the science behind our whichenglish quiz actually i had intended to post a more detailed discussion days ago but i got distracted by other matters in this project we are looking at three interrelated issues 1 how does the age at which you start learning a language affect how well you learn that language 2 how is learning a foreign language affected by the language you already know 3 how are the grammars of different english dialects related and of course we train an algorithm to predict participants native language and dialect of english based on their answers i return to that at the end age of acquisition although whichenglish has a few scientific targets age of acquisition effects were the original inspiration everybody knows that the older you are when you start learning a foreign language the harder it is to learn one possibility is that there is a critical period up to some age you can learn a language like a native after that age you will never learn it perfectly the other possibility is that there is no specific period for language learning rather language learning simply gets a little harder every day the evidence is unclear ideally you would compare people who started learning some language say english from birth with people who started as 1 year olds and people who started as 2 year olds etc or maybe you would want something even finer grained the problem is that you need a decent number of people at each age 50 would be a good number and it quickly becomes infeasible one study that came close to this ideal used census data the authors led by kenji hakuta realized that the us census asks foreign born residents to rate their own english ability the authors compared this measure of english ability with the year of immigration an approximation for the age at which the person started learning english their results showed a steady decline rather than a critical period we are trying to build on this work in a few ways for one it would be nice to confirm or disconfirm the previous results with a more sensitive measure of english ability so rather than just ask people how good their english is we have them take a test also we are getting more precise information about when the participant started learning english and in what contexts also there is good reason to suspect that age of acquisition affects different aspects of language differently studies have shown that even people who began learning a language as toddlers have detectable if very subtle accents however people who start learning foreign languages as adults usually report that learning vocabulary isn t so hard grammar seems to be somewhere in between the hakuta study didn t distinguish these different aspects of language whichenglish focuses on grammar we also have a vocabulary quiz to look at vocabulary a pronunciation test is in the works first language effects when we started thinking about studying age of acquisition effects we quickly realized a problem we needed questions that would be difficult for someone who learned english as a second language but which aspects of grammar are difficult seems to depend on your first language i personally have difficulty with aspect in russian because the english aspect system is much less complex however dealing with tense in russian is relatively straightforward since the russian tense system is much less complex that english s since we didn t know for sure what the language backgrounds of our participants would be we wanted a range of questions that covered the different kinds of problems people with different backgrounds might have as we combed the literature we realized that it was pretty fragmented one study might say that grammar rule x is difficult for japanese speakers and grammar rule y is difficult for german speakers but there would be no information on how japanese speakers fare with grammar rule y and how german speakers manage with grammar rule x this actually makes sense most studies look at speakers of one or at most a handful of language backgrounds this is partly a matter of research interest the researchers are usually interested in some particular language and partly a matter of feasibility in a lab setting you can only test so many participants we realized that our study by virtue of being on the internet and recruiting people from a wide array of backgrounds would provide an opportunity to get more systematic data across a large number of languages this is pretty exploratory we don t have strong hypotheses but as data comes in we will be analyzing to see what we get and we will report it here the grammars of english in designing our age of acquisition study we realized a second problem correct english grammar varies across different dialects in newfoundland you can say throw me down the stairs the hammer but most places you can t i have heard that this is said in parts of rhode island too but only anecdotally we don t want to count a late learner of english who says throw me down the stairs the hammer as not knowing english if in fact she lives in newfoundland so what we really wanted were questions for which the correct answer is the same in all english dialects but we didn t know what those were again the literature was only partly helpful here for obvious reasons researchers tend to be interested in understanding peculiar constructions specific to certain dialects rather than recording what is the same everywhere boring we picked out a lot of grammar rules that we at least had no reason to believe varied across dialect but we also realized that there was an opportunity here to study differences across dialects so we included a subset of items that we thought probably would be different across dialects so that we can explore relationships across dialects the algorithm when you take the quiz at the end we give you our best guess as to what your native language is and what dialect of english you speak how is that related to the three issues i just discussed it s deeply related the best way of proving that you understand how people s understanding of grammar is affected by the age at which they started learning their first language if any and the dialect of english they speak is to show that you can actually distinguish people based on their grammar in fact training an algorithm to make just that distinction is a common way of analyzing and exploring data there are also obvious practical applications for an algorithm that can guess someone s language background based on their grammar for education localization of websites and so on but an important reason we included the algorithm s predictions in the quiz itself was to present the results of the study to participants in the study as the study goes on certainly you can read this and other blog posts i ve written about the project as well but it probably took you as long to read this post as to do the quiz the algorithm and its predictions boil down the essence of the study in a compelling way based on the numerous emails i have gotten it has inspired a lot of people to think more about language which is great the best web based studies are a two way street where the participants get something out of the experience too we chose the particular algorithm we use because it runs quickly and could be trained on very little data you can read more about it by clicking on how it works in our data visualization we are testing out more sophisticated algorithms as well which are likely to do much better algorithms for detecting underlying patterns is actually a specialty of my laboratory and this will be a fantastic dataset to work with these algorithms mostly run too slowly to use as part of the quiz nobody wants to wait 10 minutes for their results but the plan is to describe those results in future posts and or in future data visualizations in conclusion if you have any questions about this work please ask in the comments below or shoot me an email at gameswithwords gmail com 34 comments labels gameswithwords org l2 language language acquisition whichenglish good problems to have email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on thursday may 29 2014 gameswithwords org will be experiencing periodic outages as we upgrade the server the incredible response we ve had for whichenglish has completely overwhelmed the server after bringing it back from the dead multiple times the techs at datarealm convinced me to upgrade to the next tier of server this is possibly overkill in that we don t normally get the kind of traffic we got today over 12 of all visitors to the website since jan 1 2008 came in the last 24 hours still traffic has been steadily rising over the last year and large spikes are getting much more frequent worst case scenario this should result in a faster more stable experience for people going forward upgrading while there is heavy traffic to your website is not ideal but then neither is having the site crash constantly update after my optimistic comments about overkill i ve spent most of the last 5 days performing various upgrades to the server traffic to the site peaked at about 100 000 visits day it was a little lower sunday but then weekend traffic is usually down there was a lot i could do to shrink page load time compressing images minimizing javascript files etc but the biggest issues were with sending data to and from the database here i did some work to optimize and cut down the number of calls to the database but the real heroes are the folks at datarealm who based on the amount of time they ve put into helping me with the site over the last week have definitely lost money on having me as a client if you are looking for someone to host your website i warmly recommend them 0 comments labels gameswithwords org on working when i should be killing time findings which english updated dialect chart email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on friday may 23 2014 i have updated the dialect chart based on the results for the first few days since the new version shows up automatically in the frame in the previous post i haven t added it in here and you can get a better look at it on the website the biggest difference is that also added several dialects for non native speakers of english that is i added five new dialects one each for people whose first language was spanish german portuguese dutch or finnish i ll be adding more of these dialects in the future but those just happen to be the groups for which we have a decent number of respondents as you can see the algorithm finds that american canadian speakers are more likely one another than they are like anyone else similarly english irish scottish and australian speakers are more likely one another than anyone else and the non native english speakers also form a group i ll leave you to explore the more fine grained groupings on your own if you are wondering why new zealanders are off by themselves that s mostly because we don t have very many of them and the algorithm has difficulty classifying dialects for which there isn t much data same for welsh english south african english and black vernacular english so if you know people who speak any of those dialects 5 comments labels findings language mslw whichenglish the english grammars of the world email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on tuesday may 20 2014 it s widely observed that not everybody speaks english the same way depending on where you grew up you might say y all you guys or just you you might pronounce grocery as if it were groshery or grossery there have been some excellent fine grained studies of how these aspects of english vary across the united states and elsewhere such as this one but vocabulary and pronunciation aren t the only things that vary across different dialects of english we are in the midst of a soft launch of a new project which will among things help map out the differences in english grammar around the world i put together a visualization of early results below you may want to load it in its own page depending on your browser the embedded version below may not work you can use this graphic to explore the similarities among nine english dialects american canadian english english irish new zealandish northern irish scottish and south african as more results come in about other dialects like ebonics and welsh about specific parts of america or canada etc i ll be updating this graphic so please take the survey and then check back in soon load the graphic directly here 0 comments labels findings language mslw whichenglish doing your homework email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest posted by gameswithwords on wednesday february 05 2014 i just finished a radio interview about birth order apparently not very much research goes into booking guests for radio tv shows lately i ve been getting at least one interview request a month to ...