kent lee's blog & ramble

Here's the transcript of my talk at the 세바시 on Freedom from English. This is an approximate transcript that I prepared for my talk, so that they could provide Korean subtitles for listeners. My delivery was kind of unnatural and sometimes not so fluid, because I had to give my speech from a memorized script. Freedom from English I remember several years ago, I was at a bus stop near 왕십리 [Wangshimni], when some high school boys came up to me, wanting to practice English. But as they opened their mouths, all they could say was, “Hi... I like kimchi... I love you” - and then walked away quickly, giggling, and embarrassed. Sadly, they studied English in school for many years, yet they could not say anything meaningful – just a few simple, awkward phrases, not knowing that it is not appropriate to say “I love you” to stranger. I often hear of how Koreans spend so much time, so much effort and so much money on studying English, but with such poor results. In fact, English has beco...

Another example of pop psychology is in the area of self-esteem, and equally disheartening, religious over-reaction against the concept of self-esteem among fundamentalists. Many self-help books and pop psychology pundits talk about self-esteem without a proper understanding of it, and thus oversimplify and misapply it. First, self-esteem is a legitimate concept, and an important domain in social psychology research. There's been a good deal of interesting research in psychology over the years. However, self-esteem is not just one simple thing, that people need more of. There are different types of self-esteem, or different dimensions to self-esteeem. These dimensions can include one's self-knowledge and self-understanding, one's appraisal of one's abilities and general self-evaluation, one's feeling of control, in addition to evaluation of self, others, and social relationships. Often these things are fluid, and can actually vary depending on the context - specific...

In my websites I describe myself as a psycholinguist, so you may wonder what that means. Well, I study the processing of language in the brain, including how linguistic information is represented in the mind, cognitive processes behind language, and the psychology of reading. My dissertation project deals with Chinese character reading - how people make use of the linguistic information in characters in the process of reading. When you read a word in English (or other alphabetic languages), you translate the letters into sounds, and from the sounds you access the word in your mental lexicon, where words are stored in your brain. But at the same time you also are looking up words directly based on the spelling. Depending on how regular the spelling is and how frequent the word is, one of those routes - the phonological or orthographic - will end up retrieving the word from the mental lexicon. That's the standard dual route model of reading in psychology. But what about Chinese? That...

More on "left brain / right brain" pop psychology, and why it is incorrect: 4. Is the left analytical and logical, and the right intuitive? There's no evidence for that, really, and that represents a gross misunderstanding of how language, intuition, math, music, or whatever work in the brain. To say that language can be reduced to something logical and analytical is terribly simplistic, and reflects a total ignorance of linguistics and langauge structure. Traditional logical cannot explain how semantics, pragmatics, the lexicon, syntax, phonology, and morphology function or interact in a way that we can produce and comphrehend langauge. In fact, non-traditional types of logic form the basis of more recent linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, like connectionism, optimality theory, cognitive linguistics, and dual route processing models. These are based on optimization logic, or abduction (as the philopher Peirce described it; it is also the type of logic behind game ...

Okay, I want to rant and vent about this pop pscyhology stuff that keeps popping up. As a linguist and cognitive psychologist, I find references to "left brain / right brain" annoying, and this stuff pops up on the Internet, in business or marketing contexts, in sermons, on TV, etc. This is pop psychology because it is a grossly inaccurate distortion of what psychology and neuroscience tells us about differences between the two brain hemispheres, and is always misapplied. It is wrong for these reasons. 1. You use all of your brain all the time, not just half of it (unless you're a politician or TV/movie celebrity). Just because the whole think doesn't light up under an MRI or CT scan at a given moment doesn't mean the rest is dormant; it's working, too, just at a lower level. And there's more than the left and right cerebral cortices (upper advanced mammalian brain) that this pop theory refers to. There's the front brain (frontal corex), which is neith...