“The sun’ll come out, tomorrow, betcha bottom dollar…”

“The sun’ll come out, tomorrow”

Whenever people end a Facebook post – or a tweet – with “do your own research,” there’s a chance that they’ve done no such thing themselves. Or to be more specific, they’re unlikely to have gone through a set of procedures that are what folks who actually do research for a living would go through. There are hundreds of books out there that explain, in excruciating detail, what “research” is but I’d bet money on the probability that the number of folks who have read ONE book on the research process is significantly lower than the number of people who believe the world is secretly governed by lizard people [1], that aliens regularly visit the earth [2], and that if there is no evidence for X, that in itself is proof that X exists [3].

Research is essentially a tool used by scientists to test the veracity of hypotheses. Or in words of one syllable, a way to find out if what you think is true is, in fact, true. But let’s go down the rabbit hole a little more here and try to avoid the words “true” and “truth” because like “commonsense,” so many people claim to know what it is but often turn out to be as subjective in their thinking as everyone else. For many people, “truth” is simply what they believe to be true and may have zero bearing on any actual, observable, demonstrable, measurable quality. The majority of people reading this will believe in some supernatural deity (or deities) with absolute conviction that this is “true,” yet given the opportunity to provide any supporting evidence that is objective and replicable, they will fail stunningly. Faith is not Truth, and Truth is not Belief. Anyone can have faith in something or someone, and anyone can believe in any ridiculous things they like. As I’ve said for years, the First Amendment of the US constitution pretty much guarantees your right to be a complete idiot, and it’s a testament to its power that so many people are making the most of it.

Deciding that something is “true” turns out to be a devilishly difficult and intellectually irritating thing. Even when Little Orphan Annie sings, “The sun’ll come out, tomorrow, betcha bottom dollar that tomorrow, they’ll be sun,” the scientist in you should be thinking, “Oh yeah, how do you know that’s true?” Annie is definitely on my list of “irritating imps” from literature, with the number one spot reserved for Dickens’ Tiny Tim, but she can’t be blamed for at least attempting to make a statement that has all the appearance of being unassailably truthful.

To be more accurate, we’d first have to make sure we all shared the same definitions of the hypotheses she’s espousing; that “The sun will come out tomorrow.” In relation to “the sun,” it would be churlish to suggest that someone might interpret what she’s referring to as Canis Major or Corona Borealis but if we want to be as accurate as we can, we’d make explicit that “the sun” is the star closest to Earth some 93 million miles away. Then, by “come out,” we mean that it will take a position in the sky above the horizon, regardless of whether it is obscured by clouds, smoke, overhanging branches, or a roof. That way is someone tries argue that, “I was in my cellar and didn’t see the sun so it didn’t ‘come out'” you can happily sneer and smack them on the head with a large dead cod and remind them of the definition. This also infers that we must have some way of measuring the act of “coming out” that is objective, which means it doesn’t really on belief, opinions, points-of-view, or any other internal mental phenomena), and repeatable by others, which means anyone else could do the same measurement. Finally, “tomorrow” also needs to be defined as being a point 24 hours after an initial point. If it’s 48 hours before it appears again, then that’s not tomorrow but “every two days.”

But it doesn’t stop here, does it? The location in which I take the measure may also affect the truth of the statement. It may work for Annie who’s in New York city but what about Pippi Longstocking on her visit to grandma’s house in Svalbard, Norway. Being inside the Arctic circle means she’s singing, “The sun’ll come out, in April, betcha bottom Krone that in April, they’ll be sun.” Clearly there is still a sense that “the sun will come up” at some point but it’s not as clean cut as it appears in the Tomorrow song.

Now, given that we’re happy with defining our terms and restrict our experiments to places closer to the equator, what happens when we find that we see the sun rise on Jan 1 at 7:20 AM, then again on Jan 2 at 7:21 AM. Can we say, “Yes, it’s true, the sun’ll come out tomorrow?” You could try and maybe many people would believe you. But the problem is that this is based on ONE sample and it’s a very poor piece of research that takes one sample and concludes it’s the truth. That’s like watching one video on YouTube of someone checking ballot papers and then concluding that the entire election was a scam (unless it was a vote for your candidate, in which case it was true!) No, you’d want to take another sample 24 hours later on Jan 3. Then Jan 4. Then Jan 5. And keep doing that until… well, when?

This is another feature of research that people can misunderstand; that there is an “end” to research [4]. Their understanding is that “research” and “scientific analysis” provide truth and “an answer” when, in reality, that’s not quite right! Back with the rising sun, if you were to say it’s true that the sun will come up tomorrow, what you’re really saying is “given that we’ve observed a sunrise since records began, and that the laws of physics which apply to the universe and how planets revolve around suns have not changed, there is probability close to one that the sun will come up tomorrow.” Is there a chance that the sun may NOT come up? Could there be an unforeseen cosmic accident (black hole hitting the sun) that may wipe out sun and the Earth during the night? Well, maybe. And that is where all research ends up.

Research is about creating hypotheses – ideas that may or may not be true – and then dreaming up ways to test them. You determine in advance what measurements you consider will support the hypotheses and after testing, see if those measures were achieved. If they were, then you can say, “yeah, the objective measure support my hypothesis and it’s therefore worth considering as ‘useful’ or ‘important.'” The more measures you take and the more support you find, then the more meaningful the results. Better still, if lots of other people do the same measures and get the same results, then your hypothesis becomes tougher, stronger, and develops a bit of a cocky swagger.

But although thousands upon thousands of repeated experiments can support a hypothesis, it only takes ONE discrepancy to shatter it into tiny pieces. This notion is sometimes called the “Black Swan” approach. If you set up the theory that “All swans are white” you can spend years out in the world looking at swans and see that every swan you comes across is white. You can then have hundreds of other bird watchers report back that every swan they’ve seen is white. But as soon as ONE person person provides evidence that they’ve found a black swan, the “All swans are white” is now wrong; it’s downgraded at best to “Not all swans are white” or “Most swan are white” or “All swans in the world, except for in the village of Little Turdington that are black, are white.”

Of course, this also introduces the issue of determining what constitutes valid data. The ornithologist from Little Turdington may have taken a photo of a white swan but, armed with a copy of PaintShop Pro 2021, changed the color to black in an attempt to discredit the original hypothesis. Real researchers wouldn’t take that one photo and accept it as proof but more likely send out lots of other researchers to LIttle Turdington to see if they, too, can observe and measure black swans. As more evidence of black swans appears, then the truth, or veracity, of the original claim is diminished.

Science progresses step by step by step. One hypothesis leads to another and depends on what has gone before. In the development of a vaccine for COVID-19, one of the claims by vaccine-skeptics is that it was developed too quickly and not tested enough, which completely ignores that fact that work on similar vaccines has been going on for years, and that all the work that has gone before always sets the scene for what comes next. Sir Isaac Newton, whose “Theory of Gravity” is still a theory [5], is credited with saying that, “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants,” and that’s pretty much what research is all about.

And if you don’t believe me, do your own research 🙂

Notes

[1] According to Wikipedia, the increasingly deranged ex-sports commentator, David Icke in the UK, believes that “tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, now hiding in underground bases, are the force behind a worldwide conspiracy against humanity.” He is, sadly, not alone. Proof, should you need it, includes videos of famous people (the Queen, Hillary Clinton, the Pope) all blinking like lizards, so it must be true.

[2] Given that (a) reports of aliens from outer space visiting earth have been around for as long as folks have been writing and (b) not one has yet gone through the “take me to your leader” process, it makes me wonder just how “alien” their thinking must be. Imagine investing unimaginable amounts of time, money, and energy into building interstellar spaceships that can carry you anywhere in the universe, traveling millions and millions of miles -perhaps over immense periods of time – and then landing in some backwoods to pick up a random person so you can stick an anal probe up their arse before flying back home. Now that IS some alien psychology!

[3] The best conspiracy theories are the ones that evolve in such a way that they become completely impervious to any evidence against them, and where all and any statements are “proof” of the theory. Any “proof” of election fraud in the US 2020 election is seen by conspiracy theorists as “clear evidence” for the stolen election; any absence of evidence of fraud is “proof” that the fraud was effective and therefore also evidence for the stolen election! According to one of my favorite philosophers of science, Karl Popper, this type of thinking is referred to a “metaphysical” because it is incapable – by design – of being tested by any objective measurement and is, ergo, non-scientific. Popper was no fan of Psychoanalysis and always deemed it a metaphysical philosophy rather than a science. Religion, as a phenomenon, is also metaphysical in nature in that there are no measurements we can do to test for the existence of a supernatural entity, or entities (it seems unfair to throw Odin, Thor, and Loki into the “myth basket” while allowing Jehovah and Allah special status as “real”).

[4] All research article end with “much more research is needed,” which is (a) probably true and (b) setting the scene for the next grant application. If anyone can cite a paper that concludes with “and, ergo, there is no need to look at this topic anymore because we now have all the answers” I’d love a copy.

[5] Just because something is labeled a “theory” doesn’t imply that is is somehow wrong. Both “gravity” and “evolution” are spoken of as “theories” but if you chose to believe gravity isn’t “real,” I suggest throwing yourself off a high building and seeing how well your disbelief stops you from hitting the ground at 150 miles per hour and leaving you intact enough to stand up and say, “See, I told you it was just a theory.” In this case, you’d be well advised to treat the “theory of gravity” as a practical reality.

28 Words to Boost Your Client’s Vocabulary – Maximum Bang for Buck

When developing a vocabulary set for an augmented and alternative communication (AAC) system – or indeed when deciding on what vocabulary to teach anyone – one of the most fundamental of measures you can use is frequency count; how often is a word used in a language? No-one can predict with 100% accuracy which words will be “best” for an individual, but if you’re going to take bets, you’re pretty safe to assume that words such as that, want, stop, and what are going to be used by everyone from ages 2 to 200. By the same token, you’d not be missing much if you didn’t spend too much time on words like ambidextrous, decalogue, and postilion [1].

In the field of AAC, this type of high frequency vocabulary that is used (a) across populations and (b) across situations is referred to as core vocabulary and it’s often contrasted with the phrase fringe vocabulary, which refers to words that are typically (a) low in frequency and (b) specific to isolated activities or situations. For a refresher on core and fringe – and an introduction to keyword vocabulary – check out my article entitled Small Object of Desire: The Monteverde Invincia Stylus fountain pen – and Keyword Vocabulary from two years ago.

The core/fringe distinction is now so embedded in the world of augmentative communication that it is rare to see any new app appear on the market that doesn’t use the phrase “core vocabulary” somewhere in its marketing blurb – even if it isn’t actually making good use of the core! And as core vocabulary is, by definition, common across ages, activities, situations, and pathologies, it’s not surprising that many AAC software offerings look the same, particularly with regard to the words being encoded [2].

But it’s worth taking a look at another level of frequency measurement, and that’s at the phrase level. Specifically, one area of research that seems to me to offer some value to Speech and Language pathologists and Educators working in vocabulary development is in the study of how phrasal verbs (PVs) are distributed.

So what’s a phrasal verb? Well, simply put, it’s a phrase of two to three words that are yoked together, which include a verb and a preposition and/or adverb. Examples include, “I ran into Gretchen at the ATIA conference,” “I backed up my hard drive,” and “I came across an interesting article on phrasal verbs.” The English language is stuffed to the gills with these type of verbs, and a feature of them is that they tend to have multiple meanings.

To find out how polysemous a phrase can be, you can use the excellent WordNet online tool, a huge database of words and phrases that let you check out noun, verb, adjective, and adverb meanings. For example, would you believe that the simple phrase “give up” has 12 different meanings? Or that “put down” has 8 variations? It’s not surprising that learners of English find phrasal verbs quite challenging.

The other fascinating feature of phrasal verbs is summarized in a 2007 paper by Gardner and Davies, who point out that of you look at the 100 million word British National Corpus you find that;

…a small subset of 20 lexical verbs combines with eight adverbial particles (160 combinations) to account for more than one half of the 518,923 phrasal verb occurrences identified in the megacorpus. A more specific analysis indicates that only 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly one-third of all phrasal-verb occurrences in the British National Corpus, and 100 phrasal verbs account for more than one half of all such items. Subsequent semantic analyses show that these 100 high-frequency phrasal verb forms have potentially 559 variant meaning senses.

Read that again and see if you get the same tingle I did seeing those numbers. Over half the entire phrasal verbs found in the corpus can be accounted for by combining 20 verbs with 8 particles. In short, if you learn just 28 words, you’ve learned 50% of all the phrasal verbs you’ll need to use.

Let’s take a look at those Top 2o verbs first:

Table 1: Top 20 Verbs in PVs

And now the Top 8 particles:

Table 2: Top 8 particles in PVs

All the verbs and prepositions as individual items are already high frequency, with the exception of perhaps the verbs point and set, which wouldn’t be on my list of “first words to teach.” However, the real bonus here is that not only do you get the benefit of teaching your client 28 high frequency words in isolation but if you then use them as phrasal verbs, your “bang for buck” is significant!

Here’s a link to a PDF of those 28 words: https://app.box.com/s/vng5hr2tctp87ufdjoyjvyv2ln8300yb

This frequency analysis of phrasal verbs by Gardner and Davies has recently been supported by and extended upon by Dilin Liu (2011) and by Mélodie Garnier and Norbert Schmitt [3] (2014). In their paper, The PHaVE List: A pedagogical list of phrasal verbs and their most frequent meaning senses, they point out that a limitation in Gardner and Davies’ analysis is that they failed to take into account the polysemy inherent in the phrases – like the 12 meanings of “give up.” In fairness to Gardner and Davies, they did, in fact, talk about the polysemous nature of PVs but didn’t offer any measure of the different frequencies with which the various meanings are used. They wrote that:

For instance, the list-high 19 senses of the PV break up … could be arranged from highest to lowest semantic frequency, thus prioritizing them for language learning. We acknowledge, however, that corpora of this nature are much easier talked about than constructed. (p.353).

Garnier and Schmitt are interested not just in identifying the frequency with which a phrasal verb occurs but also the most common senses of those PVs. They say that;

…our main purpose for creating the PHaVE List, which is to reduce the total number of meaning senses to be acquired to a manageable number based on frequency criteria.

On a pragmatic level, they want a learner not to have to learn every meaning of each PV but just focus on the most frequent, and therefore most useful meanings. Using the original list from Gardner and Davies, along with additions by Liu (2011), and including data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008), the duo created the PHaVE List; a list of the 150 most frequently used phrasal verbs, and 280 of the most frequently used meanings. So on the 12 potential meanings for “give up,” they use the following:

16. GIVE UP
Stop doing or having something; abandon (activity, belief, possession) (80.5%)
Example: She had to give up smoking when she got pregnant.

The general entry starts with a rank (in this case, 16th out of 150); the basic phrasal verb; a definition; a percentage frequency; and a specific example use. The complete list is made available as a download from the Sage journals website [4]. If you can get access to it, it is well worth the read and the download. And all the articles referenced in this article are good examples of how we can use corpus linguistics to help guide our practice of developing the vocabulary of our clients with language challenges.

References
Davies, M. (2008-). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 425 million words, 1990-present. Available from Brigham Young University The Corpus of Contemporary America English, from Brigham Young University http://corpus.byu.edu/coca

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2007). Pointing Out Frequent Phrasal Verbs: A Corpus-Based Analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 41(2), 339-359.

Garnier, M., & Schmitt, N. (2014). The PHaVE List: A pedagogical list of phrasal verbs and their most frequent meaning senses. Language Teaching Research, 1-22.Published online before print http://ltr.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/12/08/1362168814559798.abstract

Liu, D. (2011). The Most Frequently Used English Phrasal Verbs in American and British English: A Multicorpus Examination. TESOL Quarterly, 45(4), 661-688.

Notes
[1] A postilion is the driver of a horse-drawn carriage, who sits posterior to the horses. The sentence “The postilion has been struck by lightning” is the basis of a wonderful little paper by the linguist David Crystal, published in 1995 in the journal Child Language Teaching & Therapy. Simply titled “Postilion Sentences,” Crystal defines a postilion sentence as “one which has little or no chance of ever being useful in real life. It could be used, obviously, because it is grammatically well-formed; but the contexts in which it would be natural to use it are either so restricted or so adult that the chances of a child encountering it, or finding it necessary to use it, are remote.” In the design of AAC systems, using pre-stored sentences may have some limited value but many “pragmatic utterances” turn out to be nothing more than postilions; unlikely to be used. This is why teaching sentences is neither language nor therapy.

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[2] The now-common practice of using core vocabulary also makes it much harder to prove plagiarism – or as we Lancastrians would say, “nicking someone else’s ideas.” People, of course, don’t “steal” ideas – they are “inspired” by the work of others. But such inspiration inevitably leads to systems appearing almost clone-like in their structure. It’s only when you get to the fine details of how words are organized and encoded that you can separate the wheat from the chaff. And there’s a lot of chaff out there.

[3] If I haven’t mentioned it before, Norbert is the author of an excellent book on vocabulary research methods. Here’s the full reference: Schmitt, N. (2010). Researching vocabulary : a vocabulary research manual. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. It’s full of useful information and lots of web links worth exploring, and worth the $30 you’ll spend on Amazon US – or the £20.99 in the UK.

[4] Just a reminder to all members of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists that you membership benefits includes access to a number of Sage journals online, and Language Teaching Research is one of those. In fact, you have access to over 700 (yes, count ’em!) titles, including my personal favorites Child Language Teaching and Therapy, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, English Today, and the riveting Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy. OK, so I lied about the last one being a “favorite” 🙂

“I don’t care what the research says…”

A colleague of mine was asking for some references to support the notion that kids with severe learning difficulties can learn to use high frequency core words (such as want, stop, and get) because they were being told that what these kiddos really use (or need) are words like toy, cookie, and banana. I duly provided a quick sample of peer-reviewed articles and shared the information with other colleagues. And what the hell, I’ll share them with you, dear reader, in the References section at the end of this piece.

Reading the research

But another of my friends also commented that there are still those folks who respond with comment such as, “I don’t care what the research says, I don’t care who these kids are. These are not the kids I’m working with. The kids I’m working with just aren’t going to use these words.”

So what do you do about this? At what point does being “critical of the research” become “ignoring the research because I don’t believe it.”? In the world of Physics, it’s hard to say, “I don’t care what the research says, I’m still going to fly using my arms as wings.” Mathematicians don’t say, “I don’t care what the research says, 1 + 1 does equal 7.” And it’s a brave doctor who would say, “I don’t care what the research says, you go right ahead and smoke 40 cigarettes a day and you’ll be just fine.”

No-one would argue that Speech and Language Pathology as a profession will ever achieve the rigid, statistical certainties of physics and mathematics, but what does it say about our profession if we openly admit to ignoring “the research” because it doesn’t fit with our individual experience? There are certainly enough practices  in Speech Pathology that are hotly debated (non-speech oral motor exercises, facilitated communication, sensory integration therapy) and yet still being used. But all of these are open to criticism and lend themselves to experimental testing, whereas an opinion based on personal experience is not. I could tell you that I have used facilitated communication successfully, but that is still personal testimony until I can provide you with  some measurable, testable, and replicable evidence. This is one of the underlying notions of evidence-based practice in action.

However, it’s  one thing to talk about using evidence-based practice but another to actual walk the walk. If the evidence suggests that something you are doing is, at best, ineffective (at worst, damaging), how willing are you to change your mind? If 50% of research articles say what you’re doing is wrong, how convinced are you? What about 60%? Or 90%? At what level of evidence do you decide to say, “OK, I was wrong” and make a change?

If there’s anything certain about “certainty” it’s that it’s uncertain! Am I certain that teaching the word get to a child with severe cognitive impairments is, in some sense, more “correct” or “right” than teaching teddy? No, I am not. But what I can do is look at as many published studies of what words kids typically use, at what ages, and with what frequency, and then feel more confident that get is used statistically more often across studies. This doesn’t mean teddy is “wrong,” nor does it preclude someone publishing an article tomorrow that shows the word teddy being learned 10x faster than the word get among 300 3-year-olds with severe learning problems.

But until then, the current evidence based on the research already done is, in fact, all we have. Anything else is speculation and guesswork, and no more accurate than tossing a couple of dice or throwing a dart at a word board.

Being wrong isn’t the problem. Unwillingness to change in the face of evidence is.

References
Banajee, M., DiCarlo, C., & Buras Stricklin, S. (2003). Core Vocabulary Determination for Toddlers. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 19(2), 67-73.

Dada, S., & Alant, E. (2009). The effect of aided language stimulation on vocabulary acquisition in children with little or no functional speech. Am J Speech Lang Pathol, 18(1), 50-64.

Fried-Oken, M., & More, L. (1992). An initial vocabulary for nonspeaking preschool children based on developmental and environmental language sources. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 8(1), 41-56.

Marvin, C.A., Beukelman, D.R. and Bilyeu, D. (1994). Vocabulary use patterns in preschool children: effects of context and time sampling. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 10, 224-236.

Raban, B. (1987). The spoken vocabulary of five-year old children. Reading, England: The Reading and Language Information Centre.