Having been a frosh at the time of the disappearance of the cow head, I felt I should clarify that we really didn't care very much about it. It was a papier-mache cow's head left over from a party a few years previous (mmmm, a large viking ship built in the courtyard) which, since it was still in decent shape, got hung up in the (unlocked and easily accessible) dining hall. It was nifty, but there wasn't much attachment to it.
When it did disappear, we weren't all that phased. Yes, we did try to send our Hovse president (who was dating a student at the Claremont colleges at the time, so it wasn't too much out of his way) to try to get it back, but more to make the gesture than because we cared.
As for the party - certainly no one mentioned it to me, and I'm pretty sure most other people didn't know about it either. (also, a pretty substantial subset of the members of the cow head's former Hovse much prefer building parties to attending them, so even if we had known, it's not all that likely that lots of us would have shown up)
On a semi-related note, I am impressed by the parentheses prank. That one's quality.:)
It still strikes me as odd that paying $0.25 for a CD at a garage sale or thrift store is far superior (in the eyes of the industry) than me downloading the songs instead (and perhaps someday buying the CD new since I like the music enough). Sure, maybe somewhere way down the line someone'll buy that CD new since the used one wasn't available, but for some of them I rather doubt it.
I keep meaning to send money to those obscure artists whose CDs I would have bought new if I hadn't found dirt-cheap used ones first...
On a side note, thanks to my early days of being able to go "oh, that's who wrote that song!" my CD collection has exploded in size, and I now own far more music "legally" than I would have without being able to connect artists to songs on my playlist. But there's only so much a starving grad student can do to "help" the industry...
There may be a double-standard, true - but you're still being interesting to linguists.
(Check out Dr. Alexander Z. Guiora's work on "The Effects of Experimentally Induced Change in Ego States on Pronunciation Ability in a Second Language." (and a few more studies in Language Learning) He and his colleagues, back in the '70s, examined the way impaired subjects (drunk, hypnotized, under the influence of valium...) pronounced foreign languages they knew. Interestingly enough, these subjects had better pronunciation when drunk etc. than sober! So it's all about making yourself interesting to someone and having their grants pay for the fun...)
This sort of work certainly sheds no light on syntax and semantics and the visibly complicated bits of language, but there are certainly other bits which can be influenced by this research. The fields of phonetics in particular, as well as phonology, do care about the production of simple sounds - because it's not always simple.
To take one example, try saying the words "cats" and "dogs" - notice that the "s" at the end of "dogs" sounds more like a 'z'. Is that because of a motor program, which tells the vocal folds to keep vibrating? Or is it a higher level process? At first glance, you'd probably say that it's a motor thing - why bother stopping the vocal fold vibration when it's easier to keep it going. But what of languages where it would be an 's' in that spot? Their motor "program" is different, so it can't be a "this is the only way it can be done" sort of thing. And what about perception? Clearly, English speakers recognize both as the same thing in terms of "oh, that's plural" until they think about it closely, but that's more than a motor issue. (This is only the most basic of problems, but there are plenty of others.)
In other words, learning the limitations and capabilities of the motor system helps separate the purely physical from the higher level processes - which may indeed be human-unique.
And birds are a heck of a lot easier to work with than small screamy children.
Since this research is relatively motor-specific, the human parallel is strictly phonetic - how we coordinate our vocal apparatus to produce the sounds of our language. While this study can possibly draw parallels to some slightly higher-level linguistic patterns (say, syllables or maybe even basic words), it makes no claims that this region maps motor sequences to meaning (beyond "I sound like dad, yay!") let alone the complex syntax brought to our attention so many years ago by Chomsky (and his compadres).
So no, the birds aren't waking up those furiously-sleeping ideas - at least, not yet.
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Having been a frosh at the time of the disappearance of the cow head, I felt I should clarify that we really didn't care very much about it. It was a papier-mache cow's head left over from a party a few years previous (mmmm, a large viking ship built in the courtyard) which, since it was still in decent shape, got hung up in the (unlocked and easily accessible) dining hall. It was nifty, but there wasn't much attachment to it.
:)
When it did disappear, we weren't all that phased. Yes, we did try to send our Hovse president (who was dating a student at the Claremont colleges at the time, so it wasn't too much out of his way) to try to get it back, but more to make the gesture than because we cared.
As for the party - certainly no one mentioned it to me, and I'm pretty sure most other people didn't know about it either. (also, a pretty substantial subset of the members of the cow head's former Hovse much prefer building parties to attending them, so even if we had known, it's not all that likely that lots of us would have shown up)
On a semi-related note, I am impressed by the parentheses prank. That one's quality.
It still strikes me as odd that paying $0.25 for a CD at a garage sale or thrift store is far superior (in the eyes of the industry) than me downloading the songs instead (and perhaps someday buying the CD new since I like the music enough). Sure, maybe somewhere way down the line someone'll buy that CD new since the used one wasn't available, but for some of them I rather doubt it. I keep meaning to send money to those obscure artists whose CDs I would have bought new if I hadn't found dirt-cheap used ones first... On a side note, thanks to my early days of being able to go "oh, that's who wrote that song!" my CD collection has exploded in size, and I now own far more music "legally" than I would have without being able to connect artists to songs on my playlist. But there's only so much a starving grad student can do to "help" the industry...
There may be a double-standard, true - but you're still being interesting to linguists.
(Check out Dr. Alexander Z. Guiora's work on "The Effects of Experimentally Induced Change in Ego States on Pronunciation Ability in a Second Language." (and a few more studies in Language Learning) He and his colleagues, back in the '70s, examined the way impaired subjects (drunk, hypnotized, under the influence of valium...) pronounced foreign languages they knew. Interestingly enough, these subjects had better pronunciation when drunk etc. than sober! So it's all about making yourself interesting to someone and having their grants pay for the fun...)
This sort of work certainly sheds no light on syntax and semantics and the visibly complicated bits of language, but there are certainly other bits which can be influenced by this research. The fields of phonetics in particular, as well as phonology, do care about the production of simple sounds - because it's not always simple.
To take one example, try saying the words "cats" and "dogs" - notice that the "s" at the end of "dogs" sounds more like a 'z'. Is that because of a motor program, which tells the vocal folds to keep vibrating? Or is it a higher level process? At first glance, you'd probably say that it's a motor thing - why bother stopping the vocal fold vibration when it's easier to keep it going. But what of languages where it would be an 's' in that spot? Their motor "program" is different, so it can't be a "this is the only way it can be done" sort of thing. And what about perception? Clearly, English speakers recognize both as the same thing in terms of "oh, that's plural" until they think about it closely, but that's more than a motor issue. (This is only the most basic of problems, but there are plenty of others.)
In other words, learning the limitations and capabilities of the motor system helps separate the purely physical from the higher level processes - which may indeed be human-unique.
And birds are a heck of a lot easier to work with than small screamy children.
Since this research is relatively motor-specific, the human parallel is strictly phonetic - how we coordinate our vocal apparatus to produce the sounds of our language. While this study can possibly draw parallels to some slightly higher-level linguistic patterns (say, syllables or maybe even basic words), it makes no claims that this region maps motor sequences to meaning (beyond "I sound like dad, yay!") let alone the complex syntax brought to our attention so many years ago by Chomsky (and his compadres).
So no, the birds aren't waking up those furiously-sleeping ideas - at least, not yet.