Landau, E. (2010). “From brain to language to accent.” CNN Online. Retrieved on October 4, 2010: http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/23/from-brain-to-language-to-accent/?hpt=Sbin Becoming a proficient speaker of at least one language is a hallmark of the typical human psychological development. When it comes to learning more than one language, however, our abilities seem much more widely dispersed. Why might some people display a greater “talent” for learning a second language (or more) than others? By far the best known predictor of success at foreign language learning is the learner’s age. An increasing number of children who grow up in bilingual environments from early on may well grow up to be fluent speakers of both their native languages. But you don’t have to be natively bilingual in order to master multiple languages at the native-speaker level. In a classic study of second-language acquisition by Johnson & Newport (1989), immigrants to the USA were tested for high-level mastery of English (including phonetic and grammatical nuances), and the results were examined as a function of age at initial immersion in the English-speaking environment. People who started learning English before the age of 7 tended to achieve native-like proficiency. From there on, the older one was at arrival, the less native…
Contributor, Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Language, Metaphor Mistakes, Product Design Strategy
Language and thought in user-centered design
by mabelev •
Deutscher, G. (2010). “Does language shape the way you think?” New York Times Online Edition. Retrieved on October 4, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html This article summarizes the history and the current status of the linguistic relativity hypothesis or the idea that “language shapes thought.” This idea comes in several different formulations. The version on which Deutscher’s review focuses is a cross-linguistic claim that speakers of different languages use different mental representations or processes as a result of having learned different languages as children. A particularly strong version of the cross-linguistic hypothesis suggests that our native language provides us with a basic toolbox of conceptual representation, so if a concept or a mode of thought is not encoded in a given language, its monolingual speakers would be incapable of thinking about such a concept or thinking in such a mode. For instance, linguistic relativity led to the prediction that people’s perception of differences in color should reflect the way their language encodes color. This prediction was spectacularly disproven by the discovery that people whose language only has two color terms in its vocabulary perceive and categorize colors similarly to speakers of English, which has 11 basic color terms, plus many non-basic ones (Berlin…
Conceptual Design, Contributor, Flow, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Product Design Strategy
On “For digital artists, apps provide new palette”
by mabelev •
Harmanci, R. (2010). “For digital artists, apps provide new palette.” New York Times Online. Retrieved on October 4, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/us/20bciart.html To illustrate the impact of mobile/handheld-device technology on the arts, this article describes the work of several individual artists who have used iPhone/iPad applications as an artistic format. In my overview, I focus on the work by Scott Snibbe and pose the following question: what is it about handheld apps that sets them apart and makes them a more successful environment for interactive art than any other? Scott Snibbe is an artist for whom interactivity, i.e. the opportunity for audience participation, is a central theme. His installations are often designed to capture human bodily actions and respond to them. The audience thus has the experience of bringing an art piece’s content into existence. For example, in Falling Girl (2008) and Make Like a Tree (2006), people’s movements are replicated, with some time lag, by silhouettes projected onto screens, while in Blow-Up (2005) people’s breath triggers fans that reproduce its spatio-temporal contour. Snibbe’s very popular mobile apps are closely based on an earlier Dynamic Systems interactive series that involved manual action, except that their original version used more traditional cursor-based interface. …