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Friction in language learning: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature
Sometimes the tools that make life easier also make us think less. Google Maps has smoothed navigation to the point where many of us no longer know where we are without it. Our phones store every number we need, so our memory no longer has to remember them. When friction disappears, so does the cognitive…
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Scientific papers: When “Clarity” Isn’t Clear
I was rereading some recent work on linguistic bias in academia & found myself thinking about how often “clarity” is treated as a neutral, objective standard. Yet the more you look at how clarity is judged, the more it resembles a social category rather than a linguistic one. A study by Haley Lepp & Daniel…
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Maybe “universal grammar” isn’t so universal after all
I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of a universal grammar — the long-standing claim that humans share an innate blueprint for language, shaping how all grammars are built. It’s been one of the most influential & contested ideas in linguistics. A new open-access paper in Nature Human Behaviour by Verkerk, Shcherbakova, Haynie, Skirgård, Rzymski,…
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It tracks: your L1 affects how you read
Why would linguists be interested in tracking someone’s eyes as they read? Because eye movements give us a moment‑by‑moment record of how readers process text — what they notice, what they skip, where they hesitate & how they build meaning. It’s one of the few tools that lets us observe reading as it happens, rather…
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Dictation: ‘it may be used against you’
I’m sure we’ve all made use of dictation at one time or another: as a spelling focus or as a means to encourage learners to notice connected speech. It’s easy to think of dictation as something that belongs squarely in the classroom. However, it’s also common in the criminal justice system. Before electronic recording became…
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Blink & You’ll Miss It: Eye‑Tracking and Text Difficulty
A recent paper by Shingo Nahatame & Kazuhiro Yamaguchi, published in Language Learning, takes a fresh look at a classic ELT concern: what actually makes a text “hard” for L2 readers to process. Using eye‑tracking data from longer texts than most previous studies, the authors revisit readability a Bayesian lens, which essentially means the model…
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