Lexicon [Max Barry]

Summary:
A homeless street magician is recruited by a secret society that trains its recruits in the art of persuasion to the extent that they can manipulate the minds of their unwitting victims once they have identified the person's core personality type. In an alternate story line, Wil, a man whose memory has been altered, is attacked and kidnapped, according to his captors, for his own good. Someone is using the persuasive arts for their own gain and it is up to Wil to figure out the madman and the motives behind the massacre of every inhabitant in a small town in Australia.

What I hoped would be a smart book about language ended up being your average brainwashing story, so I have to admit I was disappointed. For me, the weakness of an author's imagination is unveiled when there is unnecessarily crudeness so that was another disappointment of this book. It was an intriguing story but I won't be running back to Barry's oeuvre.

Red to Black [Alex Dryden]

Summary:
An unlikely couple--a KGB colonel and an MI6 spy--try to balance their loyalty to each other and to their respective countries during the dawn of Putin's reign of Russia. When Finn goes missing, Anna is left with diaries, coded letters, and a trail of rebels living off the grid as the only clues to his whereabouts. She reads through the history of their relationship and realizes as Finn becomes increasingly disillusioned with London's policies toward Russia, he also becomes increasingly obsessed with unveiling the truth of Putin's ambitions.

I picked this book up because Dryden has a number of books taking place in Russia and I hoped that I would enjoy this one enough to keep reading them. I kept reading this book because, though clearly fiction, it made me feel like I was reading a denouncement of Stalin during Stalin's time. I had the eerie feeling while reading it that this book would definitely be banned in Russia due to the subversive overtones and clear implications about Russia's current president (ahem: dictator). The acknowledgements at the front of the book read: Thank you to the many people in Russia and the former Soviet republics, who helped with this book and who wish to remain nameless. After reading, I understood why. It is a fairly typical spy novel, reading like a transcript of a James Bond movie. Plot points are described through arduous dialogue rather than being revealed, the time line is so convoluted I didn't understand when the "now" part of the story was taking place until almost the end, and the conspiracies are so complex that I was more than tempted to skim entire chapters. The "big reveal" at the end is underwhelming, to say the least, but the story did keep me up late at night in order to learn what had happened. Though I won't be running back for the next installment, I also won't cross it off my list.

Peperkamp, Pettinato, & Dupoux 2003

Allophonic variation and the acquisition of phoneme categories

Q: How do children acquire the distinction between allophones and phonemes?
H: A minimal pair analysis (would need a substantial lexicon) or a distributional analysis.

So, actually, the authors don't directly address this question, but this is the big question which motivates the other questions that they do directly attempt to answer. 

Experiment 1: Perception of Phonemic vs Allophonic Contrasts
 Q: How well is the allophonic contrast perceived? Does it vary in isolation versus in a phonological context?
Q: Is the perception of the contrast affected in a phonotactically legal vs illegal string? 

Method:12  Native French speakers (no ages given) listen to [VC.CV] in which the first syllable is a/i/u + voiced uvular fricative or voiceless uvular fricative OR m/n and the second syllable is an obstruent + a/e/i/o/u

• The voiced/voiceless uvular fricative is allophonic in French.
• The m/n option is to compare phonemic/allophonic contrasts.
• The adjacent consonants agree in voicing

French speakers are told [VC.CV] is a two word phrase in a foreign language and are asked if the first word is the same. They also hear the first syllable in isolation and are asked if it is the same.

Results: ANOVA- discrimination is better without context p<.02, in context, discrimination of m/n is better than the uvular fricatives p<.02

So, the uvular fricatives are acoustically different and an be perceived in isolation, but in the phonological context the discrimination of the allophonic contrast differs significantly from that of a phonemic contrast.

Experiment 2: Acquisition of Phoneme Categories
Q: Does the same effect arise with the allophonic contrast in context? 
Q: Is the bias to create two categories given a bimodal distribution overriden if they appear in complementary distribution?
P: Monomodal distribution--> 1 category, Bimodal Distribution--> 2 categories, Bimodal distribution+ complementary distribution--> 1 category

Method: 60 native French speakers are given exposure in each of the three patterns listed in the predictions. Tokens are a/i/u+ a continuum from the voiced to the unvoiced uvular fricative.

Results: ANOVA- difference between pre and post tests was significant only in the bimodal group; no block (pre vs post test) x group (distribution) interaction 

They draw pretty strong conclusions (that the results are in accordance with the predictions) from this statistically very weak data. I found the results to be dubious.

My Reaction:
I found this paper to be more difficult to read (and less interesting) but I'm glad I waited until after I discussed it with my advisor to write this. Most of my qualms came from the second experiment, but my advisor's primary interest is with the first. 

The question is why there is increased difficulty of perception of the allophones in context. The paper offers three options:

• The first they dismiss off hand is a low-level masking explanation, which they say is unlikely because that explanation would seem to affect the phonemic contrast as well.
• The second is that allophonic contrasts are initially represented as two distinct category and then if they are in the right context, there is some 'inverse phonology' which recodes the segments as being the same. This they also reject, because this predicts that in illegal contexts, the allophones should be easily discriminated, which didn't happen in their experiment.
• The third is that allophones are represented as a single phonological category in a similar way to that of nonnative contrasts being mapped to a single category.

My advisor noted that low level masking explanations are often pooh-poohed but in her opinion, there may be some merit to an explanation like this, particularly if there is something "special" about allophone perception. 

Quentins [Maeve Binchy]

Summary:
Ella Brady had a perfectly charmed childhood, but adulthood opens her eyes to the fact that reality beneath the surface isn't always as pretty as it seems at first glance. An affair with an enchanting married financier opens up her world to disgrace, disappointment, and betrayal. She slowly puts the pieces of her life back together with the help of loyal friends and kind-hearted neighbors as she endeavors to make a documentary about Quentins, the fanciest restaurant in Dublin. 

This was a lovely "beach read" (as I fondly refer to books that don't require any thought). I picked it up because, although I had never heard of Maeve Binchy, she had quite a selection at the library so I figured if I liked it, I had others like it to choose from! Binchy is from Ireland, so that's where her stories take place, but the location-at least in this book-is almost beside the point. The story is more about relationships than the plot and spotlights both the best and the worst of humankind. I'll pick up another of Binchy's books when I'm looking for a quick read.

The Holy Thief [William Ryan]

Summary:
In one of the early years of Stalin's Great Terror there begins a series of brutal murders of seemingly unrelated people: a foreign nun, a feared gang leader, a Party member. Militiaman Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division reluctantly takes on the task of determining the motives and the people behind the murders. Although the crimes are political, the NKVD are unwilling to take the case completely upon themselves, and Korolev realizes there is no way for this investigation to have a happy ending. A clear portrayal of the paranoia and dualism within Soviet citizens at all levels during this era.

I'm a sucker for a good Soviet thriller, so this was right up my alley. It was eerie without getting too dark, intriguing without being creepy. It was a very interesting picture of the internal conflict that average Russians must have felt between the party line and their humanity, which is a side that I haven't read as much about. There was a slow unveiling rather than a dramatic reveal, and the 'twist' ending wasn't exactly a plot definer, but overall, a satisfying read.

Shea & Curtin 2010

Discovering the relationship between context and allophones in a second language: Evidence for distribution-based learning

Q:Are learners aware of the factors that condition distribution of allophones?

Experiment 1
Method: Yr 2 and Yr 3 Spanish LLs choose which syllable is stressed
Stimuli: CVCV 2-syllable words; C are [b] [d] [g] or approximates; V alternate stress
Purpose: Determine association of stress with stop-initial syllables
*Subjects have all had explicit instruction on the stop-approximate alternation

Results:
NES and Yr 2 ratio of stop+stress:approx+stress was around 1 (chance)
Yr 3 ratio ~2
NSS ratio ~2.75
-- More experience led to greater association of stress with the stop
*All groups show trochee bias, only NSS additionally show bias for the stop

Experiment 2
Method: same as Exp 1
Stimuli: same as Exp 1 but vowel stress was neutralized; duration of consonants was manipulated
*So any perception of stress is an illusion!
*Duration of consonants was non-significant

Results:
NES and Yr 2 ratio of stop+stress:approx+stress was around 1 (chance)
Yr 3 ratio ~1.9
NSS ratio ~2.4
All showed a bias toward stop-onsets

--More experience led to greater association of stress with stop

My reaction:

• The illusory stress evidence is fascinating
• That there was that strong of a difference between yrs 2 and 3 is surprising
• Would there be differences without explicit instruction?
• Lots of different statistical tests were run to account for all kinds of bias

Bel Canto [Ann Patchett]

Summary:
An international gathering of important businessmen and politicians and-importantly-a famous opera star is attacked by a group of terrorists. When the plan is thwarted, the terrorists realize that there was no plan B, and nobody quite knows what to do next. As the hostage situation drags on from hours into days and weeks into months, this assortment of people without a common language, background, or goal develops an intimate culture of their own, all but forgetting that an outside world exists.

This was a beautifully written, fascinating story that used very little dialogue (as the characters could barely interact with each other), but somehow didn't need it. It's a story of relationships and personalities, and the way that one's true self can be revealed in the absence of the structure of the civil world. It's not a suspenseful story, and for much of the book it is easy to forget it is a hostage situation at all. A poignant read.

Blog Vocabulary

Two words I came across while thinking about blog titles:

Sobremesa: the Spanish concept of lingering around a table after a meal to continue conversing with friends and family. Is there really anything better?

Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which is somehow infused with the passage of time. (coined by John Koenig)

Indeed.

Why a book blog?

I know what they say: a good writer writes every day. And I want to be a good writer. I know I have good instincts. When I was in 4th grade, my teacher Mr. Reinsmoen told me that he knew he would have a book on his shelf with my name on it one day and that's a promise I've held on to.

My "personal blog," the one that I started when I moved to Salt Lake City, stresses me out, to be honest. I feel pressure to paint a realistic--yet exciting and glamorous!-- picture of what my (frankly pretty boring) life looks like here for my friends and family back home. I can barely bring myself to write every few months let alone every day.

Yesterday one of my friends dropped by and I started telling her about the books I have been reading since school let out. I could feel my heart beat faster and my voice getting more and more animated as I gushed about the books that have made me feel alive. I realized that all of my best conversations with people since I've gotten here have been about books.

Reading is one of life's true joys and whenever I finish a book-good or bad, in tears or with a light heart- I always want to tell someone about it. And when someone asks me for a recommendation, I love to be able to give a few that were uniquely chosen for their particular taste in literature.

So, as I finished my third book of summer vacation today, I decided I would start a book blog. This blog will be for myself: a form of expression for my reactions to books as well as an archive to revisit them in the future.

And, as I was formulating the plan in my head, I realized I could make an even better use of it if I also wrote up summaries and reactions to the articles that I read for school/work as well.

Third, asa I was trying to come up with a good title for the blog (isn't that always the hardest part?) I came across some truly delicious words so I think this may be a nice repository for vocabulary as well!

If anyone else is interested in reading about my musings, I'm happy to share them, but this one is for me!