La fin du Monde-real

So here I am at Trudeau Airport in Montreal awaiting my slightly delayed flight to Atlanta and then home.   The place is a ghost town given that all flights to airports from Raleigh to Boston are cancelled a cause de l’ouragon Sandy.  I am sad to be leaving the polyglot cacophony that became the sonorant soundtrack of my weeks here, but am at the same time so eager to be home with Sharon and Sarah with a renewed energy and dedication to all facets of our life.  I miss them dearly (though having Talia here for a while was a salve for that.

I don’t have any deep or even funny comments to add, so let me simply take you on a tour of my Montreal ‘hood, and my tour around the city on a glorious autumn Friday.

Here’s my apartment and apartment building.  Mine is two floors above the awning, second from right in this shot.

Here’s where I shopped—the funky P/A Supermarche a half block away and the Marche al Mizan two blocks away.

Here’s where I ate, all within 3 blocks of home.  Of course, Cafe Myriade..they loved me there! And Concordia has developed a little Chinatown, hence the dumpling and noodle shops, and then Restaurant Nilufar with the best $1.50 falafel pita evah!!

On Boulevard deMaisonneuve near the downtown Concordia campus and looking back up Crescent towards Mount Royal

McGill University campus a bit further east and at the foot of Mount Royal.

Rue St. Denis in le quartier latin near UQAM (Universite  de Quebec a Montreal) and l’Amere a Boire microbrasserie

The evening—Plateau district.  Dieu du Ciel again, where I met cool cat musician Marc Francis (check out his beats under his nom d’oreille Taperecorder.) and his equally cool Quebecoise wife Jessica.   Hope to run into them again at some point in the future.  Thanks also to bartenders Alex and Kevin for a great pub experience.   And to finish things up,  Cabaret du Mile-end with La Sera and Father John Misty.

12 hours, 10 miles walked, and ?? pints later, I had to say it was a good day.

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Il etait une fois a Quebec

Travelogue: 

     It’s been a busy, fun, and productive 10 days since I last wrote.   The non-work highlight of this period was having Talia here for much of last week during her fall break from Vassar.   Though she was hobbled by a badly sprained ankle (who told that kid to play ultimate, anyhow?) and wearing a walking boot, we still managed to explore a bunch of the city, with a big assist from Diane who drove us around on Wednesday afternoon.  

      Among other adventures and just hanging out, Talia and I went to a lovely Impressionist exhibition at Musee des Beaux Arts, and ate some great food (Montreal deli, poutine, classic French, and Taiwanese wonton soup).  After I dropped Talia off at the train station on a spectacular Saturday morning, I took a big walk (about 10 km) through old Montreal, the historic port, back up through Chinatown and to my apartment.  Then on Sunday, Diane took me and Andre, a new post-doc from Brazil (via the University of Texas) to the Jean-Talon Market and back to her house in the Town of Mount-Royal, an independent borough surrounded by the city of Montreal.   There we ate the goodies from the Market (joined by Denis, Diane’s husband) and had a thoroughly enjoyable late afternoon and early evening.   My French/Quebecois is improving—people aren’t immediately switching to English when I engage them in conversation, and one merchant at Jean-Talon actually complimented my French.   Here is a selection of pictures from the week.

Psychologue:      On the work side of things, I submitted one manuscript, am close to submitting another, received encouraging new data from my RA in Arkansas, gave what was apparently an enjoyable and coherent colloquium at the Center for Research in Human Development, and started planning a collaborative project with Diane and several other new colleagues here at Concordia.   Not bad, not bad at all.  So I think this blog has served very well one of the purposes I hoped it would.   I’m writing more and more quickly than I have in a while, thinking pretty damn lucidly, and I’m  fired up about what I’m getting accomplished and what’s ahead.  The (still preliminary) data on the “privileged information” study is in particular very exciting, showing a classic (for developmental psychology, at least) age by condition interaction.  In other words, children of different ages are showing different patterns of responses to the two types (conventional vs. privileged) of information.     Even better, they are doing so in a manner that is consistent with our hypothesis.  As the kids would say, “W00t!!”

   Of course this is just the beginning of the scientific story.   Several of the questions following my colloquium last week were of the form, “Well couldn’t result X be a function of factor Y?”  This is par for the course.   Science, and behavioral science in particular, proceeds incrementally and competing/alternate explanations for findings—especially those findings that are new or counterintuitive—must be considered and tested for.      These competing explanations can fall into several categories, the most common of which are 1: procedural/methodological (what if you did it THIS way), 2: experimental design issues (most notably a confound, a variable that is unintentionally manipulated along with your independent variable of interest), and for my field in particular, 3: some other (usually unmeasured in the experiment) previously demonstrated ability or effect that could be responsible for the new findings.   All of these can be—and usually are—legitimate explanations for or arguments against a particular research finding that then must be discounted via further experimentation, additional analysis of data, and/or logical scientific arguments such as “It can’t be factor Y because Smith & Smith have shown that factor Y is unrelated to phenomenon X.”    In fact, I am designing a study to handle one such alternate explanation for these new results.

     However, these sorts of arguments against new findings are one of the reasons many have perished in the Publish or Perish game.   The field of psychology is particularly tough on its own members, as most of the top journals have rejection rates of somewhere between 80% and 90% and many other respected journals say no to over half of all papers submitted.  Now, the types of arguments I’ve listed above are legitimate and necessary to help ensure that well-designed, replicable studies that serve to advance a discipline are the ones that are published and widely disseminated for the benefit of the science and, hopefully, of humankind as well.   However, there are many other types of arguments that are levied against research findings that have absolutely no place in the scientific enterprise.    Here are a few that many of us have encountered over the years:

1.        This can’t be right because it’s not what MY studies show.  Not good enough.  Please refer to categories 1,    2, and 3 above.

2.         We tried that and it didn’t work.   I agree that failures to replicate are really important and are underreported, but didn’t I just fail to replicate your failure to replicate?  Mangez-le.

3.       You’re just reinventing the wheel.   Right.  Like alloy rims aren’t any different from wooden spokes.

4.       Well I know a kid who can/couldn’t do that so I don’t believe you.   Sorry, we report group data and probabilities.   There are almost certainly kids like this represented in my sample.

5.       What if scenarios.  Counterfactuals, tall tales, just-so stories, and thought experiments fit here (apologies to my philosopher friends—er, former friends—for that last one).  Look, I love speculation and argument for the sake of argument as much as the next guy (depending on who the next guy is) but as arguments against a novel finding or, worse yet, against publication, these just burn me.  There are more than enough ways to argue a point legitimately without resorting to make-believe.  Buy me a beer and I’m MORE than happy to consider an impossible premise like, “What would happen if a hurricane formed at the end of October and is projected to take a path never before recorded and you are scheduled to travel in precisely that direction at precisely that time?”

Merde.  Je suis fourre.

Moliere du Temps

     Travelogue:   A relatively quick check-in this morning.    The highlights of this weekend were a trip to the l’Amere a Boire brewpub (loved the place, liked the beers) and, even better, an evening of dinner and theatre with my host Diane and her husband Denis.    We went to see Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Women) at the Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal’s modern and thriving arts district.   The district reminds me somewhat of the Lincoln Center complex in New York, and is the home of Montreal’s famous jazz festival each summer.   The theatre has a bistro directly off the lobby where we ate—I think it’s so smart to do this because the servers at the restaurant KNOW that most of the clients are trying to make curtain.   It was a lovely, bustling restaurant on a mild evening, and the confit de canard and sticky toffee pudding were excellent.   The theatre itself, though very modern on the exterior, is small and classically constructed, shallow and steep with the rear of the orchestra (le parterre) set under two small levels above (le loge et le balcon).    I didn’t get pictures of the interior (because I didn’t want to look TOO much like a tourist), but here are some near-dusk shots of the exterior and some others of the arts district.

                                                                                                                                     

     And the play.   I did pretty well with the language.  The show is done completely in verse, and was produced in classical French so the Quebecois accent wasn’t much of a problem.   The cadence of the verse helped with my parsing most of the time--I understood 60 or 70% of what was said and could use the context and outstanding acting to help me along.   The show is a comedy about a family with three daughters with a kind-hearted father and domineering mother.  The mother, aunt and one of the daughters desire the life of a savante and are enthralled with the foppish and pretentious M. Trissotin.   The youngest daughter wants the simpler married life (the third daughter was sent away for reasons I didn’t quite understand but returned for the denouement).   Of course, the simple daughter is the daughter that Trissotin desires.   Trissotin is eventually exposed for the fraud that he is when he finds out that the family fortune is not so fortunate.   As a commentary on the pretentions of the scholarly life, it plays quite well even today.   Mise en scene by Denis Marleau, one of Canada’s best known directors, it was staged simply and beautifully, and the acting (especially Trissotin and the aunt, played as a martini-swilling hanger-on) was as strong as you’d expect at one of Canada’s most well-known theatres.  

Psychologue:   The play struck a little close to home to someone firmly in the Ivory Tower who is currently seeking intellectual enlightenment in a manner that is afforded to a precious few of us.  Though I make every effort to not be pedantic (here and elsewhere), I am sure to many non-academics, much of what I and many other “intellectuals” do is pedantry defined.   Wait, was I just pedantic by using the unusual nominal form ‘pedantry’ in that sentence?  Undoubtedly.  In fact, there is a brief appearance by a “true scholar” in Les Femmes Savantes—a simple and humble man who helps to expose Trissotin but is driven away by his rival’s charm and, yes, pedantry.

     I do believe that an important part of most scholarly work is to give it away; that is, to share our scientific and artistic and creative accomplishments with the rest of the world.   The question is how to do this in a way that does justice to the work but also allows individuals not trained in our particular disciplines to gain some real knowledge from it.   A Yahoo headline or USA Today microparagraph certainly doesn’t do the trick but neither do our dissertations, books, and journal articles.   Thinking back to my first entry in this blog about ‘privileged information,” I think what I’m saying here is that scientific and creative products should NOT be privileged—we should do our best to spread the wealth of our work to all whom are interested.   The internet has made the access part of this equation almost a non-issue for billions of humans, but what it hasn’t done, or perhaps has even harmed, is encouraging at least some depth of understanding to the issues of the day.   The temps most certainly are a-changin’.

So if you’ll excuse me now, I’m going to go check Twitter so I can see who’s gonna win this damn election.

True Magritte

Travelogue:  Not much to report here today as I’ve been focusing on work and haven’t gone out and about much yet this week.   I should have more to report after the weekend as I am going to see Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes at Theatre du Nouveau Monde, en francais, and on Sunday my host has planned a tour of Montreal spots that I might not ordinarily get to as a tourist.   I might even drink some more beer.   In the meantime I have felt (strongly) my first earthquake (4.5, centered just southeast of downtown) and shared an enjoyable lunch with an old college friend who is an economics professor at the University of Ottawa.  Last night I attended a talk at Concordia given by Dr. William McComas of, holy mother of poutine, the University of Arkansas.   I refrained from saluting him with a Hog call.    

But here are a couple of pictures of where I’ve been spending most of my time.

The view from my apartment on Boulevard de Maisonneuve

Looking down Ste. Catherine 

Pictures of the Concordia-Loyola campus where I am working to follow.

Psychologue:  Ever since I saw an exhibit at SFMoMA in 2000, I have been fascinated with the art of Rene Magritte, the Belgian surrealist/absurdist painter.     If no others, you are probably familiar with these works of his entitled, “Le Fils de l’Homme”  (The Son of Man) and “la trahison des images “ (The Treachery of Images).

As I discovered at that exhibition for the first time, Magritte painted a number of additional works that build on the theme of the famous “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”   In these works, images are paired with  written words that apparently serves to label the object depicted in the images.   Here are a couple.  

     So Magritte either had severe anomia (none of the labels match the images) or was onto something really important.   I’m going with the latter, but whereas Magritte was mostly concerned with treacherous images, I view these works as an excellent illustration of the arbitrary relationship between words and the objects they label.   As I said in a previous entry, there is no clear causal connection between the phonological shape of a word and that word’s referent.   So what’s treacherous here—the image, the word, or the association between the two?

     This work is also relevant to research on early word learning that has been important in my field in recent years.  This work on ‘selective trust,’ pioneered by my colleagues Melissa Koenig and Paul Harris, has shown that children as young as 3 prefer to learn from somebody who has a history of being right about things.   So, in a typical selective trust experiment, children are exposed to two speakers, one who labels common objects correctly and one who labels them incorrectly.   A novel object is then presented and children are either asked to choose which of the speakers they would ask to find out what the object is called or, more typically, they hear the speakers provide different novel labels for the new objects and then are asked what it is called (“What do you think?  Is this a modi or a gimble?”).   Some three-year-olds and most four-year-olds choose (the word used by) the speaker who’s been reliable in the past to guide these judgments.   There are many diverse demonstrations of this effect, and my former student Jason Scofield and I have even shown that 4-year-olds can do this retroactively; i.e. they learn a word and then find out later that the speaker doesn’t know a shoe from a pencil and are then given the opportunity to choose the label they originally learned or a label provided by another speaker.   Most 4-year-olds switch to the other label.      

     That’s all well and good, but how about this Magritte gem (ignore the colorful border which is not part of the original):

     Rene Magritte was a native French speaker but here he is labeling (incorrectly) common objects in English.   This is an interesting case because perhaps we shouldn’t expect Magritte or any francophone to know the correct English labels for these objects.  So this raises the following question:  Whom would you rather learn from, a speaker of your own language who doesn’t know a shoe from a pencil or a speaker of another language that you may not understand but who may know what things are called?  This is a question I’ve asked in another series of studies with some of my students.  Using the selective trust procedure, we initially found that preschoolers (in the US) prefer to learn from an inaccurate English speaker to an accurate Spanish speaker.   Of course, these kids didn’t understand Spanish so they didn’t know whether the speaker was accurate, inaccurate, or speaking gibberish so in a second study we provided a translation of the Spanish word  (e.g. “zapato is the Spanish word for shoe”) and the children changed their preference for word learning from the inaccurate English speaker to the accurate Spanish speaker.  

     This is a cool finding because we  find that in nearly all social situations young children prefer same-language speakers (even preferring unaccented speech to accented speech as shown by Kinzler and her colleagues) but here, for knowledge-based tasks, accuracy trumps language.   A follow-up question that could be asked here in Montreal is how bilingual children perform on these tasks.   Finally, an interesting question is whether social preferences would change as well in this situation.   Think about it, would you rather hang out with someone who speaks a different language but knows his stuff, or with someone who speaks your language who doesn’t know his trou from his Magritte?  I'd like to know your gut reaction to this question. We have some data on this question from children, so stay tuned.

Parse for the Cours

    Travelogue: It’s been a fine weekend here in Montreal.  After a trip to Mont Tremblant was cancelled due to weather on Saturday, I’ve been able to enjoy more of this fantastic city.   For the non-Canadians out there, today is also Thanksgiving here, so it’s been a 3-day weekend for me.   I’ve enjoyed my schedule of working early and then exploring later in the day, and taken a bit of time to watch some of the MLB playoffs (don’t get me started on the one-game wildcard).   I’ve done some aimless wandering around the city, but my two primary excursions this weekend were done in pursuit of food and drink.   It’s alimentary, my dear readers.

     By late Saturday afternoon the weather had improved somewhat, so I ventured on the Metro to the Plateau Mont-Royal district with a couple of specific destinations in mind.  My first and highly anticipated stop was the Dieu du Ciel brewpub.   I had been unable to find time for a trip here during a conference in 2011 and knew it would be one of my first stops.  I was not disappointed.    The pub was busy but not packed when I arrived around 4:30 and I took a seat at the small bar.  The beer menu (16 on tap that day) was on a chalkboard behind me, and the brewery was 15 feet to my right.   The taps were simply, though not orderly, numbered 1 through 16.  I decided to do a tour of some of their pale ale varieties.   I started with the Corpus Christi, a rye pale ale.  I’ve had both Sierra Nevada’s Ruthless Rye (just OK) and our local West Mountain Brewery’s rye (which I recommend), and this one was on another level, medium bodied, beautiful balanced, subtle rye overtones, and a moderately bitter finish all at 4.9% ABV.  Next was the Decibel Extra Pale Ale (5.2%), which was in classic Extra or IPA style, extremely floral nose and solidly bitter at the end but not overwhelming.   The Corne du Diable (devil’s horn)  was an American Pale in a similar style but not as memorable or distinctive.  Finally, I tried the Route des Epices (6.2%), one of their flagship ales, brewed with peppercorns and …   This rye brew was stunning--a pale ale, yes--but with a complex bouquet and non-overpowering spiciness that I loved.  Only toward the bottom of the glass did I start distinctly tasting the pepper on the tip of my tongue.   I ordered a second (I was drinking half-pints, so I wasn’t THAT drunk) and savored it as the sun set and the pub filled with a nice variety of beer-lovers.   They have a small menu that comes out of a tiny kitchen, and also have a small wine and scotch selection .    I will return to sample their other styles, and a couple of other brewpubs are on my to-do list as well (more on that later).

     Though the food looked good, I didn’t eat because just a couple of blocks away from Dieu Du Ciel is Fairmount Bagels, one of the venerable bagel shops in this city.   They are open and making bagels 24 hours a day, there’s no place to sit, you just come up to the counter and order yours with some schmear or get a bag to go.   The sesame bagels are Montreal’s favorite and are made all day there, cut and shaped by hand, boiled, and then baked in a wood-fired oven.  I ordered one with cream cheese to go and few more to take back to the apartment.    A chilly rain had started to fall, so I hustled back to the Metro and dug into the one with cream cheese as I waited for the train.   I really liked the bagel—it was chewy and a bit crisp (due to the wood fire) on the outside, had an ample if uneven coating of sesame seeds, and with a slightly sweeter bread than we are used to in a savory New York style bagel.  The bagel was also a lovely size (not huge) with a large hole in the middle and not the ‘bagel-shaped bread’ that has become commonplace.  It reminded me a lot of the bagels I remember eating growing up in NJ (with the addition of some sweetness).    There are other bagel shops in town (St. Viateur is supposed to be great) to try.   I toasted another one when I got back home and never went back out as I had originally planned to do.

     Sunday dawned sunny and cold, but by the time I had put in my writing time, it was close to noon and warming up (towards 11 celsius), and I decided to walk to the Marche Atwater near the Canal Lachine, a couple of kilometers from my apartment.  Picture this:  it’s the day before Thanksgiving and instead of Wal-Mart, you get to go to an indoor/outdoor market with produce vendors, bakers, fromageries, boucheries, charcuteries, patisseries, etc.   I was overwhelmed with the selections I had (and word has it that the Jean-Talon Market is even better), but after a circuit or two around the place, I settled on several shops and gathered some choice morsels for my own little Thanksgiving feasts.  For lunch today I had Toulouse sausages (pork, a little smoky, heavy on the garlic) braised in ale, 3-year-old Beemster gouda from the Netherlands, kosher caraway rye, Dijon mustard, Seville olives, and rainbow carrots, washed down with the rest of the Griffon red ale.   For dinner, it will be (I’m writing this on my balcony overlooking Boulevard de Maisonneuve during the afternoon) petites brochettes d’agneau romarin and de poulet a l’estragon, mixed greens, Tomme de Grosse-Ile cheese and Empire apple from Quebec, une ficelle (a small baguette), and a 2009 Brouilly.   Une bonne journee, indeed.   I should also mention that I had an outstanding pork bun at Satay Brothers at the market.  Next weekend is their last weekend before they close for the winter and I WILL make a return trip.  I only got a couple of pictures as my phone was out of charge.

Psychologue:   So the language stuff is going OK.  I conducted about ¾ of my transactions at the market in French, though the butcher’s accent was nearly impenetrable.   When I struggled, the merchants switched easily to English or, in one case, patiently waited until I made myself clear in French.  One of the amazing feats of spoken language comprehension is the ease with which we find the beginnings and end of words and phrases to effectively parse the speech stream into its meaningful units.  There are distinct acoustic markers that help us with this task (think of the subtle difference between hearing “catch it” vs. “cat shit,’ but knowing that intellectually doesn’t always help in real time.   Listening to French language television and conversations around me helps, as do contextual conversational cues, but one still makes mistakes.  

     Or at least I still make mistakes.  The couple next to me at the bar at Dieu du Ciel struck up a conversation about which beers we were drinking, and after about a dozen conversational turns in French, monsieur switched to English to ease things along.  He told me  about a couple of other brewpubs I should visit, Le Cheval Blanc (the white horse, easy enough) and what I was sure I heard as “La Mere a Boire”  (I know I’m missing the diacritics) on Rue St. Denis.  “Ah, La Mere a Boire,” I replied confidently in the most authentic accent I could muster, “as in The Mother of  Drink.”   “No,” he replied, “not la mere.”    Not deterred by my mistake, I chuckled and said, “Then it must be La Mer a Boire, The Sea to Drink?”  The Quebecois shook his head and laughed, and then pulled out his tablet and showed me the web page for “L’Amere a Boire.”   Now given the context, and the number of times I wrote the word “bitter” earlier in this piece, I should have put deux and deux together (amere is French for bitter), but I did not.   Is it a play on words by the pub?  I would guess so, but at that point I would have loved to have found un cheval blanc on which to ride away, with what little of my multilinguistic pride still remained. 

Mount Royal Oui

     As at least some of you know, I am spending most of this month in Montreal as part of my Off-Campus Duty Assignment (my university’s god-awful euphemism for sabbatical).  I am being hosted at Concordia University by my wonderful colleague and friend Diane Poulin-Dubois.   This is only my second OCDA in my 23 years at Arkansas (though we can apply for one every 7 years).   For those of you who are non-academics, sabbaticals are intended to free professors from their more quotidian academic duties (i.e. teaching, administrative, and committee work) so they may focus intently on their scholarly and/or creative endeavors.  Often sabbaticals involve trips away from home for collaboration with other scholars, visits to museums, libraries, or other institutions that have resources unavailable at one’s home institution.   There is also the benefit of just “getting out of Dodge”—a change of context can do wonders for the intellect.   As part of getting my intellectual flame re-kindled, I am starting this blog as both a way to share my experiences here (the travelogue) and reflect in less formal ways on the issues that I am currently thinking about in my scholarly work (the psychologue).   Here goes.

     Travelogue:   I took a roundabout route from Fayetteville to Montreal, stopping for one last trip at the family homestead in New Jersey to help my parents finish packing for their move to Florida and then in Poughkeepsie, NY to visit my daughter Talia at Vassar (I may write about these in a future post).  I then took the Amtrak Adirondack train here, which was a long but very comfortable trip.  Here in Montreal, I have an apartment in an ideal location just west of the Concordia downtown and McGill campuses.  I can take a free shuttle to the Concordia Loyola campus where my office is, and can walk or Metro to just about anywhere in the city.   I have already found my go-to coffee shop (Café Myriade) among a dozen within 4 blocks of my place, and the food and beverage choices are, in the non-hyperbolic sense, too numerous to mention here.   Yes, I will report on the gastronomic aspects of my trip as well!

     Friday afternoon was mild and muggy so I made the required tourist trip up Mount Royal.  For those of you who haven’t been here, the main business district of Montreal sits between the St. Lawrence River to the southeast and three ‘hills’ just about a couple of kilometers northwest of the river.   The tallest (233 m.) and most famous of these is Mount Royal (Mont Réal, comprennez-vous?).   With the fall colors nearing their peak, it was a beautiful walk, as these pictures should show.  

 Mount Royal Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who is also responsible for Central Park in New York.   You can walk, bike, or roller ski up the broad and gently graded Olmsted Road or take the more direct route on the stairs and paths through the woods up the hill.  I did a combination of the two. It had been about 20 years since I had been to the summit on foot.   The park and the chalet at the summit are cleaner and in much better shape than I remember and the view, well, is spectacular.   Though my old iPhone camera doesn’t show it through the humid air, from here I could see the first tall peaks of the Green Mountains in Vermont across the vast St. Lawrence valley.    For reference, my apartment is about two kilometers southwest of this spot.   I took the long way back past Le Croix de Mount Royal (not all that different from the Mount Sequoyah cross at home!).   I estimate I walked between 6 and 7 miles on the excursion.

Psychologue:  Montreal is intellectual porn for someone interested in language and cognition.   It is a multilingual city, and not only French and English.   I’ve already heard (and identified) Mandarin, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, and Farsi, and have heard (and not identified) at least that many other languages.  In the café where I am sitting now, there are groups speaking several languages among themselves, often code-switching (i.e. changing languages) in the middle of a conversation.  I hear children, students, and visitors attempting to speak a language other than their native language with varying degrees of success.   At most places of business in this area, someone will greet you in either French or English, and depending how you respond will either continue with the language of the greeting or switch to the language of your response.   It’s a nice, implicit negotiation.   I will be heading to the more strictly francophone areas of the city later this weekend and we’ll see how that goes.

One of the topics I am currently studying is how children come to understand that not all information is conventional and/or public and that some information is, for lack of a better term at the moment, what I am calling privileged.  There are several proposals out there that argue that children are prepared to learn information from others via verbal interactions (as opposed to through direct perceptual observation).  Most notably, the Hungarian team of Gergely Csibra and Georgy Gergely (yes, that's Gregory Csibra and George Gregory in English)  have called this type of learning ‘Natural Pedagogy’ and they argue that via the parallel evolution of mind and culture, not only are children prepared to learn from verbal interactions but they are prepared to treat the information learned via such interactions as conventional, that is to say, that it is information that one can expect all members of your community to know (names for common objects, rules of games, etc.).  This is beneficial to kids because this sort of information isn’t necessarily transparent; there’s no way to tell just by looking at an animal that it is a dog, or un chien, or uno perro.  Similarly, non-observable (at least not directly observable) scientific phenomenon (the existence and behavior of microbes, the speed of sound) and spiritual/religious phenomena (prayer, the afterlife) MUST almost always be learned via the pedagogical route.  If information is learned as conventional, then not only should children believe that others know that knowledge but, in addition, that such information is free to pass on to other members of the community.

However, not all information learned from others is conventional or public in this sense and, as such, we should neither expect others to know such information nor should we feel free to pass that information on willy-nilly.  Obviously this includes things such as secrets and surprises, but how about that juicy piece of gossip you just overheard, or the latest unsubstantiated tweet or Faceburban myth, or a unique family tradition, or a wikileak?  Under what circumstances do we, should we, or can we share this information with others?    Can or should information ever be restricted?  Can information or ideas be owned in the same sense that a car can be owned?   What marks information as being shareable or not shareable?

Well, maybe language does.   The couple next to me in this café are speaking Mandarin and I think they, quite reasonably, expect that the Anglo guy sitting next to them wearing a Vassar ballcap doesn’t have a clue about what they’re saying and, in that sense, their conversation is privileged between them at this place and point in time. But what if I, despite my appearance, had studied Mandarin or had worked in Shanghai and understood every or most words they said?   If they were sitting in a café in Beijing, surely they would understand that their conversation was not privileged, and if they wanted to keep their conversation private, they would need to speak sotto voce or whatever the Mandarin equivalent of that would be.

I had an experience yesterday that illustrates how we expect language to be, in some cases, a privileged code.  As many of you know, I was a French major and though I’m not fluent any more, I understand and speak the language assez bien, merci, though this Quebecois accent is a bit of a challenge.  I needed to go to my apartment building manager’s office to complete some business and to inform the management of some problems with my unit.   I said bonjour, and then introduced myself (in English) as we had not yet met except via email and phone.   When I explained the issues with my apartment, the manager and her assistant addressed me in English and then, in what they thought was a privileged conversation that I understood almost completely, spoke to each other.  I responded in French with what I thought the solution to my issues ought to be, they both looked at me with astonishment.  The manager, une vraie Quebecoise around 60  said, in heavily accented English, “Oh, shit.”  

I was moved to a different unit immediately.