How to Talk Language Science

with Everybody

Do you want to talk about the linguistic research that you think is important,
but you don’t know where to start? Language is a topic that is relevant to
everyone, and linguists are often asked to speak publicly about their
research, to a range of lay audiences in the media, politics, festivals and
fairs, schools, museums, and public libraries. However, relaying this vital
information in an engaging way can often feel like an insurmountable task.
This accessible guide offers practical advice on how to talk about language to
a range of nonacademic audiences. It draws on the linguistics behind
effective communication to help you have cooperative conversations, and to
organize your information for a diverse range of people. It is illustrated with
a wealth of examples from real-life scenarios and includes chapter-by-
chapter worksheets, enabling you to make your own fun and interesting
language science activities to share with others.

Laura Wagner is a professor in the Department of Psychology at The Ohio

State University. She directs the Language Sciences Research Lab at the
Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, OH.
Cecile McKee is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at The
University of Arizona, where she directs the Developmental Psycholinguistics
Lab. The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently
recognized her service in promoting public awareness of the significance of
linguistic study.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 How to Talk Language
Science with Everybody

Laura Wagner The Ohio State University

Cecile McKee The University of Arizona

Published online by Cambridge University Press

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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108841511
DOI: 10.1017/9781108894227

© Laura Wagner and Cecile McKee 2023

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place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wagner, Laura (Professor of linguistics), author. | McKee, Cecile, author.
Title: How to talk language science with everybody / Laura Wagner, Ohio State
University; Cecile McKee, University of Arizona.
Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023001157 (print) | LCCN 2023001158 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108841511
(hardback) | ISBN 9781108794923 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108894227 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Outreach programs in linguistics. | Linguistics–Public relations.
Classification: LCC P53.6122 .W34 2023 (print) | LCC P53.6122 (ebook) |
DDC 410.1/4–dc23/eng/20230228
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001157
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001158
ISBN 978-1-108-84151-1 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-79492-3 Paperback

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or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
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accurate or appropriate.

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 Contents

List of Figures page vii

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi

1 Why Bother? 1

2 You Can Be the Expert 17

3 Cooperative Conversations 29

4 Conversational Goals 38

5 Know Your Audience 53

6 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 66

7 Creating Relevance by Making Connections 80

8 Quality and Credibility 91

9 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 101

10 Learn to Listen 116

11 Information Structure 129

12 The Curse of Knowledge 138

13 Start with Examples 147

14 What’s New?: Jargon 162

15 From Given to New: Scaffolding 178

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 vi Contents

16 The Three-Legged Stool Approach 192

17 Working with a Range of Different Audiences 203

18 Where Can I Go? 215

19 Being a Good Partner 231

20 Finale 242

Appendix: Teaching with This Book 247

References 254
Index 262

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Figures

1.1 Amount of time Americans spend in different

learning environments page 4
1.2 Attendance at several types of informal learning venues 5
1.3 The authors on the job 10
1.4 A Google Ngram graph comparing usage of engagement and
outreach 14
2.1 Photos of early (1993) and later (2017) Bill Nye 18
2.2 An Ohio State University student teaching a child how to
make a few signs in ASL at the AAAS Family Science
Days festival 23
4.1 A University of Arizona student doing the language
lateralization demo with a child at the Tucson Festival
of Books 46
4.2 Children wearing left-hemisphere headbands after
participating in the language lateralization demo 47
5.1 Events like the AAAS Family Science Days festival attract a
diverse audience 57
5.2 Lexical stress demo 62
6.1 A child using an ultrasound machine at the Tucson Festival
of Books 68
6.2 Ohio State University students having fun at the COSI
Science Festival 70
6.3 Sometimes, you really want to talk about eating a shoe! 72
7.1 Everybody enjoys their phone! 84
7.2 A wave form (top) and a spectrogram (bottom) showing the
words see, sue, and saw 85
8.1 Who would you trust about space travel? 92
8.2 Three Ohio State University students getting ready to engage
with visitors at the COSI museum 98
9.1 The Stroop task, as seen on the back of a T-shirt 108
9.2 This image shows the word for jaguar 111
9.3 This image shows the syllabic breakdown for jaguar 111
9.4 This image shows the glyph for jaguar 112
9.5 Here’s an example of a logo-phonetic symbol (it also means
jaguar) 112

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 viii List of Figures

10.1 You don’t need a giant ear to be a big listener! 119

10.2 Picture used to elicit a term for a carbonated beverage 123
10.3 Map showing what different dialects of Spanish around the world
call a carbonated beverage 124
12.1 The mover sees a bag that has a roll of tape in it, but the director just
sees a bag 141
12.2 The director mentions the tape, and the mover thinks about what’s in
the bag 141
13.1 Number of native speakers of different languages around
the world 147
13.2 An Ohio State University student engaging a COSI museum visitor
with the word learning demo 149
13.3 You can feel your vocal cords vibrate! 151
13.4 A partial collection of different ways that we engage people with the
Stroop task 157
13.5 XKCD comic #2456: Types of Scientific Paper (https://xkcd.com/
2456/) 159
13.6 Name the shape outline 161
14.1 What is this? 162
14.2 Learning concepts before jargon helps in the classroom 164
14.3 The syntactic ambiguity demo 167
14.4 XKCD comic #1133: Up Goer Five (https://xkcd.com/1133/) 172
15.1 It’s no fun to be left hanging with no scaffolding to support
you! 180
15.2 A plot of eleven vowels of English 182
15.3 A look at Praat windows showing sound files, spectrograms, and
wave forms 189
15.4 Instructions from a manual on ladders: Start at step 1, then go to step
2, then step 3, and so on 190
16.1 iPad in a shock-resistant case 195
16.2 This picture shows what a parasaurolophus looks like 199
18.1 Ohio State University students at Westfest, a university-sponsored
science festival 217
18.2 An Ohio State University student prepared to talk about hearing loss
during a Deaf Awareness Day event at the COSI museum 219
18.3 A scene at a USA Science and Engineering Festival 221
18.4 Teaching Navajo demo at the Tucson Festival of Books 223
19.1 Vowel mouth shapes demo at Children’s Museum Tucson 238
20.1 Relationship between perceived brilliance and women’s participation
in academic fields 246

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 Preface

Becoming an expert is a narrowing process. We start by wanting to answer

the broad questions: What makes people tick? How does the universe work?
But the only way to answer such questions is to break them down into
smaller pieces. By the time that you become an actual expert in something,
the question you’re trying to answer can look downright tiny. What’s
important is that you never lose sight of what the bigger picture is. For
example, there are people who spend their whole lives studying how children
learn the meanings of verb endings (or, as one of our mothers once said:
“You’re only studying parts of words? You can’t even study how children
learn whole words?”). Verb endings are a very tiny piece of language, but
understanding how children learn them tells us a little bit about how children
learn their native language, which in turn tells us something about what the
human mind is capable of learning, which in turn tells us something about
what it means to be human at all. Verb endings are a tiny piece of a very
broad question.
This book is about how to do effective science communication, and our
goals are both broad and narrow. Our broad concern is to help someone with
scientific expertise (or really, any kind of expertise) communicate what they
know and why it is important to people who don’t have the same knowledge.
Effective science communication is important because it genuinely matters
for societal problems. We wrote this book during the COVID-19 pandemic,
which illustrated to us daily what happens when people don’t trust scientific
experts. Scientists who know how to connect with people, how to explain
their science, and how to engender trust as they do so are a rare commodity.
We hope our book can help make more of them.
However, science communication is too broad a topic area to focus our
advice: We needed to narrow ourselves down to one particular science so
that our points could be concrete and understandable (which are important
properties for effective communication). And we feel very lucky that the
science we know best is language science because it’s a really good domain
to use to illustrate our broader ideas. Language is a piece of the world that
people have a lot of personal experience with, making it easy to find relevant
examples and also to connect with people’s lived experiences. It doesn’t hurt

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 x Preface

that our science also helps explain why many core practices in science
communication are effective.
These two different levels are on display right in our title. Broadly, our
book is about how to talk science with everybody. More narrowly, we are
aware that our specific scientific topic is language and that this book will
have special resonance for people who are interested in language specifically.
We’ve made the language part of the book’s title look a bit different typo-
graphically, though, to help us remember that other topic areas fit there too.

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 Acknowledgments

We have many people to thank, both individually and collectively, for

helping us with our engagement work as well as with this book specifically.
We thank the major institutions that have supported us: our home univer-
sities, The Ohio State University (OSU) and The University of Arizona (UA);
the National Science Foundation for its generous funding of our regular
research as well as our public engagement work; the Linguistic Society of
America; and the venues that have hosted us in ways large and small: the
Center of Science and Industry (COSI), Children’s Museum Tucson (CMT), the
Tucson Festival of Books, Tucson Meet Yourself, Mission Garden, the USA
Science and Engineering Festival, and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) Family Science Days festival.
We thank the colleagues and students who have been integral to our
engagement efforts. Joan Maling was an extraordinary champion for us
and for the importance of connecting language science with larger commu-
nities. The Language Science for Everyone group, led by Colin Phillips, has
also been an important source of support and inspiration. We also benefited
from an outstanding workshop led by Liz McCullough at Seattle’s Pacific
Science Center.
LW wants to especially thank the executive committee of the Language
Pod at COSI: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Cynthia Clopper, Rachael Holt, Leslie
Moore, Nikole Patson, and Shari Speer. In addition, Jan Weisenberger at OSU
and Andy Aichele at COSI have done more than they probably realize to
make this book possible. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler and Leslie Moore deserve
extra thanks: Creating OSU’s public engagement training course with them
was a critical starting point for this book, and their ideas are embedded
throughout all of my work. Hundreds of students have used (and improved)
the demos used in the Language Pod and beyond. The following students
made substantive contributions to specific demos described in this book:
Nick Bednar, Shasteny Cabrera, Sherman Charles, Luana Lamberti,
Madeleine Manly, Nathaneal Miller, Emily Perko, Mike Phelan, Abigail
Sarver-Verhey, Victoria Sevich, Alexis Wilson, and the Spring 2018
5700 training class. And thanks to Jory Ross, who created the vowel plot
shown in Chapter 15.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 xii Acknowledgments

CM wants to especially thank CMT colleague Autumn Rentmeester, who

welcomed her into the museum world and so taught her a great deal more
about it than one finds in books and articles. UA colleague Sally Stevens
introduced CM to the funds of knowledge approach, which radically affected
everything after that. The following students made substantive contributions
to specific demos described in this book: Nikolis Atkinson, Marg (Max)
Beltran, Yamile Diaz, Genesis Grijalva, Sean Harley, Jaycie Martin, Joe
McDonough, Matt Mutterperl, Donovan Pete, Mia Vento, and especially
Elly Zimmer. The students in the Spring 2016 LING 392/492 course contrib-
uted critically to the CMT-based project described here: Marissa Amezcua,
Yahaira Garcia, Julia Ribeiro, Noemi Rodriguez, Lexie Sorrentino, Lisa
Winslow, and Hannah Zedek.
Many of the photos of people used in this book were taken in public
venues (such as the AAAS Family Science Days festival), which grant the
use of images taken there. We would like to thank the students (and former
students) who are pictured here: Maram Alrjub, Nikolis Atkinson, Lian
Arzbecker, Marg (Max) Beltran, Christina Brindley, Michelle Bullock,
Donna Green, Sean Harley, Chris Heffner, Rachel Hughes, Izabela Jamsek,
Dosia Kumbe, Marissa LaVigna, Shea Mangan, Joe McDonough, Donovan
Pete, Daniel Puthwala, Mikayla Perry, Jory Ross, Kelly Schroeder, Victoria
Sevich, Anna Sies, Hannah Zedek, and Elly Zimmer.
The development of this book owes thanks to a few particular people and
places. We are grateful to the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistic
Institute at UC Davis (2019) for including our workshop on public engage-
ment. We honed several ideas (and our collaborative working process) at that
workshop. Special thanks go to Sue Allen. Not only has her work inspired us,
but she deserves credit for suggesting that we explain core informal science
education practices in terms of linguistic theory in this book. In addition, we
want to thank a few other people who inspired us, although we never met.
Emily Dawson’s work was important for shaping our thinking on many
things, especially the importance of inclusion in informal spaces. Our index
benefited from us attending a virtual Planet Word talk by Dennis Duncan
(see his book Index, A History of the).
We are extremely grateful to the people who read through this manuscript
in full or in part at various stages of its development: Nick Bednar, Chris
Heffner, Rachael Holt, Dan Reynolds. They helped us improve many things in
the book (and, of course, all remaining errors are our own). Thanks also go to
our reviewers (both of the proposal and of the manuscript) and to our
contacts Helen Barton and Izzie Collins at Cambridge University Press, who
also provided invaluable feedback. Our editor, Helen Barton, deserves special
thanks for being willing to take on a book that was a little different from the

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Acknowledgments xiii

typical linguistics title at Cambridge University Press. In fact, the whole field
of linguistics owes her thanks, as she’s shepherded a number of wonderful
books through Cambridge University Press’s processes.
On a more personal note, LW gives love and thanks to Dan Reynolds.
Beyond all the things he deserves thanks for every day, he has always been a
stalwart supporter of my engagement work, which has meant, among other
things, carrying boxes, bringing snacks, posing for pictures, traveling to
events, testing out demos, proofreading materials, and generally holding
me together. He has more than earned every language science T-shirt he’s
gotten (including the one he is pictured in within this book)!
CM is also grateful for her personal paladin. Though not a scientist, Jesse
Zoernig memorizes the periodic table and reads about astronomy and orni-
thology for fun. She believes in the enterprise that we describe here like we
do. Jesse responds enthusiastically to my every request (including demon-
strating some vowels for this book). Indefatigable and dauntless, Jesse has
run emergency errands during the maddest of events, entertained students,
and helped improve several of the demos we describe here.
Most of this book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we
both worried at times that we might be writing about something that was
forever past: a time when people met face-to-face and actually had a chance
to talk with each other. We are profoundly grateful that we all do again have
the opportunity to engage with people in real life.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 1 Why Bother?

OPENING WORKSHEET

What does PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT mean to you?

When you think about talking with the general public about language, what
are you picturing? The focus of this book is going to be on how to talk with
the public in free-choice learning locations – museums, festivals, libraries.
What do you imagine engaging with people in these settings might be like?

Why are you reading this book?

We assume you’re reading this because you have some interest in communi-
cating about language with nonexperts in public spaces. But let’s go deeper
and get personal. You know your own interests, strengths and weaknesses,
and long-term goals. Why do you want to engage with a public audience?
Write down three reasons that are meaningful to you.

This book is about how to talk with members of the general public about
science, particularly in informal, free-choice settings. If you have a strong
interest in language and how it works, and if you have a genuine interest in
sharing that interest with nonexperts, then this book is for you.
Throughout this book, we’re going to argue that the best way to engage the
general public about language science (or really, any complex topic) is to
have honest-to-goodness conversations with people, one-on-one and in
small groups. We’ll be giving practical advice for how to have good
conversations, and we’ll guide your development of what we’ll call your
DOABLE DEMO . By the end of the book, you should be able to use your doable
demo to get such conversations going. But we also have a long-term agenda:
We believe that engaging with the public in an accessible way should be a
regular part of the job of working scientists.
If you’re currently a working language scientist – whether you call yourself a
linguist, a psychologist, an audiologist, a computer scientist, a speech patholo-
gist, an anthropologist, an English teacher, or something else – this book is for

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 2 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

you. We appreciate that people are interested in language for lots of different
reasons and study it from many different perspectives. We’ve included examples
throughout this book that span a wide range of language topics to illustrate how
any part of language science can be used to engage with people. We also suspect
that your training up to now didn’t include much on how to talk with the public,
and we hope you will see this book as a form of continuing education.
If you’re still getting your training – whether that means you’re a graduate
student working toward becoming a full-fledged language scientist, or you’re
an undergraduate who has only recently discovered how amazing the study
of language can be – this book is also for you. Engaging with the public is a
skill, and the more you do it, the better you’re going to get at it. We (both
authors!) have taught many college students the core lessons in this book and
we have a healthy respect for their ability to use them well. You don’t need to
be the world’s leading expert on a topic in order to convey a sense of
excitement about language. What you need is a willingness to try.

Why Bother?
Most language science classes ask you to learn about how language is
structured, how people use it, how children learn it, how it changes, what
happens when it breaks down, and so on. Language science has been a very
successful field for the last hundred (or more!) years, so there is a lot to know
about. If you’re passionate about language science, you can easily devote
your entire life to learning the field. And traditionally, that’s what most
experts in the field have in fact done.
So if the science has moved forward so nicely without much engagement
with the general public, why should we bother to do it now? One reason is
that language is something that impacts our everyday lives in many ways.
We believe that understanding how language works is critical for making
certain choices, at both the personal and societal levels.
Should parents worry if their child uses a funny past tense form like
runned? Is it OK to raise your child bilingual? What’s the best way for a
school system to educate multilingual children? Why is English hard to learn
to read? Should we invest government money to encourage people to learn
multiple dialects of Arabic? Why do computer assistants like Alexa and Siri
regularly misunderstand people who use certain dialects of English? Can
people tell what race you are from a telephone call? How can we help
children born with hearing loss learn to read? To what extent do face masks
make it difficult to understand what someone is saying?
Language scientists know the answers to such questions, and this infor-
mation can be relevant to social issues such as parenting, immigration,

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 Why Bother? 3

education, law, national security, and technology development. We would be

delighted if the general public came to be more knowledgeable about all of
these areas, and your public engagement just might move us toward that goal
in a small way.
But the very act of public engagement does something else: It demon-
strates that language is studied by scientific experts. There is a wonderful
world of language out there, and there are guides who can help you navigate
it. When an issue arises that touches on language, the public does have
someone they can turn to for expert advice: language scientists.
Of course, if you need a more personal reason to engage with the public,
the skills you need to do it well are relevant in many other situations.
Knowing how to communicate effectively with a range of people is just plain
useful. If your goal is to be an academic, the skills we promote here will come
in handy. The average introductory classroom is just a room full of non-
experts. The dean of your college is also likely to be a nonexpert in your field,
and trust us, it’s good to be able to explain to your dean why your work is
interesting and worthwhile. Doing interdisciplinary work requires you to be
able to talk with people whose backgrounds and goals differ from yours.
Even talking with your fellow professors within your own department, you
will find that background knowledge differs and it’s useful to be able to
explain your work in a way that builds bridges to others.
If your goal is not to become an academic, effective communication skills
are just as necessary. Outside of the ivory tower, you are likely to interact
with a very large range of people coming from very diverse backgrounds.
Being able to explain complicated, technical information is highly prized. It
is common practice for businesses to foster collaboration among teams of
people with different skill sets, so being able to communicate with people
who have different perspectives will help you succeed. The principles for
being clear and interesting will help you give an excellent professional
presentation in any field. Mastering the core lessons in this book will make
you a more marketable commodity.
Whether you’re motivated by a desire to improve society, your field, or
yourself, this book is for you.

Talking with the Public in Informal Free-Choice

Learning Environments
One distinctive thing about this book is that it will focus on talking
with the public in INFORMAL FREE - CHOICE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS . Before we
tell you why we chose to focus there, let’s be clear about what these
environments are.

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 4 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

What we have in mind are places such as festivals, libraries, and

museums. These are places where people visit in order to have fun and
learn a little something. They are informal learning environments because
they are not in classrooms with a podium or a screen at the front of the
room. That means you don’t get the usual tools of a classroom to work
with – no quizzes, no reading assignments, no homework, no grades.
Also, these environments aren’t structured like classrooms, where stu-
dents are often sitting in specific places and the main talker is typically
the teacher. These locations are free-choice because visitors come and go
freely. You might be in a crowd or in front of a booth or behind a cart,
and you will need to capture the interest of people passing by and sustain
that interest long enough to inspire new thinking about language. If
people don’t like what you’re doing, they will freely choose to go some-
where else!
What kinds of people go to these locations? All kinds. And lots of them.
People spend a lot more of their lives outside of school than inside school,
and they do a lot of their lifetime learning in informal free-choice locations.
The graph in Figure 1.1 comes from research by scholars of free-choice
science learning, John Falk and Lynn Dierking. It shows how much exposure
people get to any kind of science education over their lifetime. As you can

science
education
time of day

3:00
p.m.
K–12 college
June

s
nth
8:00 mo
a.m. September
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
life span (years)
Figure 1.1 Amount of time Americans spend in different learning environments
Note. This elegant figure from Falk and Dierking (2010) shows that Americans may spend on
average only about 5 percent of their whole lives in formal classrooms. The amount of time they
spend getting formal science education is so small, it can only be shown in droplets. Used
with permission.

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 Why Bother? 5

see, at least for Americans, most of that isn’t coming from standard
schooltime.
This research also found that the percentage of people from all around
the world who had visited an informal learning location was high. From
these same researchers, the graph in Figure 1.2 shows that a high percent-
age of people visit public libraries, zoos/aquariums, natural history
museums, and science/technology museums. Language science fits well
in at least three of these places (and you might even bring language
science into a zoo/aquarium through a connection with animal
communication!).
Beyond major institutions that are devoted to informal learning and free-
choice settings, there are many event-based opportunities as well. Many
organizations host science festivals, and language science makes for a terrific
booth. Language science can fit into other kinds of festivals – arts festivals,

United States Japan China Russia

South Korea Brazil European Union

70

60
number of visits to informal science
or cultural institutions (percent)

50

40

30

20

10

0
public library zoo/aquarium natural history science/technology
museum museum
Figure 1.2 Attendance at several types of informal learning venues
Note. This graph from Falk and Dierking (2010) shows that all kinds of informal learning venues
are popular around the globe. Moreover, Falk and Dierking suggested that the fact that the US
public visits science-oriented institutions at particularly high rates may account for why American
adults have similar proficiency in science to other adults worldwide even though American
children tend to lag behind: Americans learn science in informal venues all through their lives.
Used with permission.

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 6 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

food festivals, children’s festivals, and cultural festivals all have room for
language connections. Often for these kinds of events it’s worth tailoring
your focus to fit the event, but with the breadth of topics that language
science covers, that’s rarely a problem.
What’s more, if you are connected to a university or college, it’s likely
that your home institution has events that would welcome you. The events
might target local students (freshman orientation and meet-your-
major fairs are great!), or they might be events intended to reach the
wider community. Either way, they offer some infrastructure to support
engagement with the public. Toward the end of this book (Chapters 18 and
19), we’ll offer some more specific suggestions for places you might
practice your new public engagement skills, and provide some advice for
how to be a good partner with institutions or groups you might want to
work with.
Our own public engagement efforts have centered on free-choice learning
environments (see the Worked Example Box in this chapter). We like them
for many reasons. First, they allow us to reach a lot of people, both in terms
of raw numbers (as you saw above, lots of people go to these kinds of
locations) and in terms of types of people (not just college students, but
families; and in many of the venues, families from diverse backgrounds).
Second, they are great places for our students to get training in how to talk
with the public. Most of the interactions we have at these locations are
relatively short (often fifteen minutes or less), which means our students
get many opportunities to practice. They also get feedback from the people
they talk with – there is nothing more satisfying than hearing someone walk
away saying, “That was so cool!” Finally, we believe the challenge is worth
it! To paraphrase a famous song by Kander and Ebb, “If you can make it in a
free-choice learning setting, you can make it anywhere!” For most people,
talking with the public doesn’t come naturally, and mastering the relevant
skills takes effort and practice. But your communication abilities and public
speaking confidence will improve dramatically.

What You Won’t Find in This Book, at Least Not Directly

There are lots of different ways to engage with the public around language
science. As we laid out above, this book focuses on something we have a lot
of experience with: encouraging informal learning in free-choice

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 Why Bother? 7

environments. But often when we tell people that we train people to talk with
the public, they assume we’re doing something different – like helping people
talk to politicians, or helping people create a podcast or a social media page.
We think reaching various kinds of nonexperts and using different media are
worthwhile, and if that’s what you’re interested in, we encourage you to do it.
But it’s not what this book is about. The core lessons of this book will be
useful if you talk to politicians or create online materials, but they aren’t
targeted toward those goals. And we certainly appreciate – and we hope
that you do as well – that there are going to be differences between working
with the general public at a festival and talking to your local elected
representative.
LINGUISTIC ACTIVISM is another sort of public engagement that has a strong
presence in the language sciences. Many researchers, especially those whose
work depends on linguistic data from distinctive speech communities, have a
tradition of giving back to those communities. Sometimes these efforts
involve creating educational materials to help preserve a local language or
dialect; sometimes they involve combating prejudice against the community;
sometimes they involve celebrating the history and culture of the
community. We have the greatest respect for these activist efforts, but that’s
not what this book is about either.
Our emphasis is much more general than most linguistic activism. We
believe that just about every dimension of language science is worth
sharing broadly, from highly theoretical topics in syntax and phonology
to experimental results in language processing and acquisition to the
sociolinguistics of identity. We will recommend that you tailor your
messages to the needs and interests of your audience, and that can mean
being sensitive to the cultural background of the people you’re talking
with. But we’re not expecting that your activities will be embedded
within a specific community or that your language science topics will
necessarily be connected to classic issues of social justice or combating
prejudice.
We do, however, think that the kind of engagement we’re promoting in
this book can be seen within the activist tradition. Ultimately, the goals of
this engagement are to encourage a field that is committed to communi-
cating with broad audiences, and to creating a public that is more informed
about language science. But we see these as very long-term goals. What you
will be doing with each conversation with a nonexpert is contributing in a
small, incremental way to these long-term goals.

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 8 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

It’s Language Science All the Way Down

The science content that we know best is language science, and the examples in
this book emphasize language and how it works. But language science is not
only important as our core content; it has also created some of the most
important insights for how to effectively communicate with others. As you’ll
see in the upcoming chapters, our advice draws heavily on two foundational
results from language science: Grice’s principles of COOPERATIVE CONVERSATION
and the information processing principle of GIVEN BEFORE NEW .
We’re not trying to suggest that you need a degree in linguistics to prepare
to talk with the public. If you’ve taken an introductory course on linguistics,
you’ve likely run across both of our core ideas. If you’ve taken a course on
informal science learning, you will likely have met these ideas there too. But
communication is a part of language science, and it shouldn’t be a big surprise
that our field has helped uncover how communication works, and what can
make it work better (or worse). We take our science seriously and encourage
you to put some trust in the results of the very field you are interested in. We
consider it a privilege that it is our science that we draw on to guide our efforts.

How to Use This Book

We think of this book as a guidebook for communication, and it can be used in
a few different ways. We’ve organized ideas into bite-sized chunks, so if you’re
looking for ideas about how to avoid using jargon, or about how to make your
work relevant to others, or want advice on where to go to do public engage-
ment, you can jump to the chapters that emphasize those topics. If you read the
book straight through, you’ll get the full story, from theory all the way to very
practical advice. If you want a slightly deeper dive into details – including
pointers for more to read – you can check out the further reading section at the
end of each chapter. Each chapter ends with a worksheet designed to help you
make a demo that should be doable by the end of the book. Collectively, these
worksheets will help you develop an activity on language science that you can
use with the public in a free-choice learning environment.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Informal learning venues are good places to reach a lot of people. This book
will help you engage people with language science at these locations.

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 Why Bother? 9

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Who are we? Why do we bother?

Laura Wagner
I’m a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Ohio State
University. My PhD is in linguistics, and I have spent my career doing
interdisciplinary research, mostly involving children’s language
development. My bread-and-butter research is on children’s understanding
of aspect, and I have also worked on children’s developing understanding
of indexical information such as social register and regional dialect.
A number of years ago I helped start the Language Sciences Research
Lab (https://u.osu.edu/thebln/language-pod/). The lab is embedded inside
of my local science museum, the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in
Columbus, OH. I collect my regular research data at the lab (alongside
several other language scientists), and the visitors to the museum are my
participant pool. Museum visitors can just watch, or ask questions about
what we’re doing, or participate in live research. At the lab, we think of
our research as a form of public engagement: One of our missions is to
demystify science for the public by showing them what the actual practice
looks like, from the inside (Wagner et al., 2015).
Because of the special location, the lab is also a permanent museum
exhibit that attracts hundreds of thousands of people every year. And
that’s more people than even our team of scientists can work with! So we
also use the lab as a platform to engage with the public using just the kind
of activities featured in this book. Another one of the lab’s missions is to
show people the range of things that language science has discovered and
help people to experience the wonder and joy of language.
I think there are lots of societally important reasons to do this kind of
work (and we laid those out in the chapter), but I think that what really
keeps me doing it is how much fun it is. I love to think about language and
science, and people regularly say things that are surprising and make me
think about both of them in new ways. For example:
One of our demo activities uses an iPad app that lets you record someone
speaking and then play it back for them (the app is called Singing Fingers and
is produced by the MIT Media Lab). It’s great fun to use with little kids because
they get permission to shout on the museum floor and hear their own voices.
One of this app’s features lets you play the recorded sounds backward as well as
forward, and that leads to some fun discussions about coarticulation effects
and how we can only produce sound in the forward direction. I once watched a
student doing this activity, and she started with a thought-provoking question
to a young child. The child had just recorded her name, and the student asked,

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 10 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)

“Do you think your name will sound the same backward as it did forward?” The
child said her name, then turned around so her back faced the student and said
it again. She triumphantly returned to the student and confidently announced
that her name did in fact sound the same when she said it backward.
I cracked up laughing, as did the student. But truly, the child was a natural
experimentalist and taught me something about space-time metaphors in the
process. You don’t need to be an expert in order to have insight or to come up
with the perfect example. Every time I go out on our museum floor is another
chance for me to learn something cool (and often to get to laugh while I do it!).

Figure 1.3 The authors on the job

Note. Cecile (left) and Laura (right) at the Family Science Days festival of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2016.

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 Why Bother? 11

(cont.)

Cecile McKee
I’m a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of
Arizona, but I’m also affiliated with units such as the Department of
Psychology. Before my university-based career, I was a K-12 teacher.
I was also Director of the Linguistics Program at the National Science
Foundation (NSF) 2001–2003. This latter experience is what crystallized
for me the importance of public engagement. This particular agency is a
sophisticated pipeline for distributing public monies to research on and
education about what’s called STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics) here in the United States, including both formal and
informal settings. I came to realize while working on that pipeline that
many of us who generate new STEM knowledge share it through relatively
narrow channels. The points we just discussed regarding the popularity of
informal learning venues suggest that scientists who are so inclined
should get out more. I myself was so inclined, and fortunately, so are
many of our colleagues (McKee et al., 2015).
While I’ve emphasized working at events like festivals more than
anything else, I’ve dipped my toes into some other streams as well. For
example, I took a workshop on public discourse a few years ago, which led
to publications and presentations for audiences outside of academia.
I volunteer at an agricultural heritage museum featuring edible plants of
Arizona, California, and Mexico (called Mission Garden); and I’ve worked
bits of linguistics into interactions with the public that I have through that
work. I’ve also collaborated with Children’s Museum Tucson for both
teaching and research activities. I do this for all the reasons we touched
on above. Because my research concerns language and literacy
development, my favorite interactions with members of the public include
ones like the following:
I was in a museum playing one of the games that my students and
I designed to engage children in science practices and to study their
practices. The game started with a demo of how mouth shapes relate to
vowels. Players produce the vowels [i], [u], and [ɔ] and then come up with
words having those vowels (like see, sue, and saw). Our conversations with
caretakers after children played this game emphasized that changing
something and noticing effects of the change was a science practice that
very young children could enjoy and that adults could encourage.
A Latina mother whose child had just finished a bilingual version of our
game stayed to talk about her family. Sharing that she and her husband

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 12 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
were native speakers of Spanish, she expressed concern that they dis-
agreed on whether to use Spanish at home. She called him over for a
spontaneous conversation on multilingual development, a topic that
experts across language sciences have studied extensively and that is
critically relevant where I live in Arizona and also more broadly.
This anecdote highlights one benefit of the free-choice setting, namely
that we can take more time with people who want to keep a conversation
going or who want to take it in their own direction. For me, then, it’s not
so much the chance to teach someone about vowels or young children’s
science practices. It is instead that such one-on-one conversations give me
the chance to show that science is flexible and relevant and even fun, that
scientists care about the applications of their expertise, and that science
engagement can happen anywhere.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Making a doable demo

The goal of this book is to inspire you to engage with the public, and to
provide some practical advice about creating an activity that you can use for
such engagement. We’ll be calling these kinds of activities demos, which is
our shorthand for demonstration activities. The Closing Worksheets at the
end of each chapter offer specific suggestions to help you apply the lessons
from that chapter to the demo you yourself make for public engagement.
So let’s begin!
First, brainstorm topics that you might turn into a doable demo. Try to
think broadly at this stage and consider a wide range of possibilities. Don’t
worry about coming up with a specific activity at this point – that’s what the
rest of the book is about. For now, try to think big. Write down three topics.
Now, for each of your three ideas, think about the following three
things:

• How knowledgeable are you about the topic area?

• How societally relevant is your topic area?
• How much fun would your topic area be to work with?

We recommend that you keep a file (or a notebook, or a set of index

cards, or a website – whatever works for you) where you save your

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 Why Bother? 13

responses to these Closing Worksheets. These sheets will build on each

other as you go through the book, and the later worksheets will be a lot
easier to do if you have a record of what you did for earlier ones. If you do
all the worksheets, at the end of this book you will have what you need to
do your very own (language) science demo!

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 What does public engagement mean to you?
Public engagement is our first technical term. We think that most readers will start
with a sense of what the term means, in part because they’re reading this book. We’ll be
using this term in the context of science education that occurs outside the formal
classroom. But it can also refer to decision-making processes that various governing
entities might use, as you can see in this guide published by the city of Fort Collins, CO
(USA): www.fcgov.com/excellence/files/publicengagementguide.pdf.
Researchers whose work has implications for public health often use public
engagement to share their results, not only to inform the public of the research
conclusions but also to inform the researchers of the concerns and questions of the
public. To get a sense of the breadth in each element of this term, see Duncan et al.
(2017): www.publicengagement.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publication/reviewing_pe_
in_ref_2014_final.pdf.

2 If you’re currently a language scientist

People study language in all kinds of fields and from all kinds of perspectives! This
blog post from computational sociolinguist Rachael Tatman gives a nice rundown:
https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2021/05/11/who-all-studies-language-%
f0%9f%a4%94-a-brief-disciplinary-tour/.

3 There is a lot to know about

If you’re interested in getting some general background in language science, we have
some recommendations! An Introduction to Language, by Vicki Fromkin, Robert
Rodman, and Nina Hyams (Fromkin et al., 2018), is a terrific introductory textbook
of a traditional sort, and The Ohio State Linguistics Department’s Language Files
(Dawson & Phelan, 2016) is full of bite-sized introductions to language topics. If
you’d rather read something aimed at a more popular audience, David Crystal’s How
Language Works (Crystal, 2007) is a good choice. And if you’d rather learn via video,
the Crash Course – Linguistics YouTube channel or Moti Lieberman’s The Lingspace
YouTube channel are both entertaining and informative. And if you just want more,
we recommend checking out Gretchen McCulloch’s All Things Linguistic website
(https://allthingslinguistic.com), which curates a list of podcasts, blogs, and other
resources to scratch your language itch.

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 14 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

4 Engagement with the general public

Many people refer to what we’re talking about here as outreach rather than engage-
ment. In fact, we ourselves have on occasion used the term outreach (e.g., reaching
out from the university to another institution). However, throughout this book, we’re
going to use the term engagement.
We think it’s a better choice for several reasons. First, engagement is an everyday
kind of word, while outreach may sound more technical. As people who value plain
speaking, we are in favor of using an everyday word for what we do. Second, we like
the way that the word engagement suggests participation from multiple people.
Engagement is something that you do with other people, while outreach is more
likely to be something you do to them. As you’ll see (for example, in Chapter 4), we
believe that it is important to respect the funds of knowledge that your conversa-
tional partner brings to the table. Engagement captures that cooperation and reci-
procity better. A final reason to go with engagement is that it is the genuinely modern
term for what we’re doing. As we know from historical linguistics, the popularity of
words changes over time, and right now, the popular word for our kind of work is
engagement. Google’s Ngram Viewer can show this! We used it to chart the frequency
of use of the words engagement and outreach for a couple of hundred years, as
represented in texts Google has access to (see Figure 1.4).

1800 - 2019 English (2019) Case-Insensitive Smoothing of 3

0.00400%
0.00350% engagement
0.00300%
0.00250%
0.00200%
0.00150%
0.00100%
0.00050%
outreach
0.00000%
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000

Figure 1.4 A Google Ngram graph comparing usage of engagement and outreach
Note. This graph was created with Google Books Ngram Viewer. See https://books.google.com/
ngrams/info.
Source: Michel et al. (2010).

As you can see, around the year 2000, the word outreach peaked in popularity;
since then, engagement has really taken off. We like to think that this rise is because
of the two reasons we started with above, but regardless of the reasons, it does appear
to be the word that everybody is using. Including us.

5 Informal learning environments

Informal learning can be thought of as being the learning that people do outside of a
formal classroom situation. However, it’s a bit more useful to think of it as consisting
of a set of positive features. Callanan et al. (2011) identifies five distinctive

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 Why Bother? 15

dimensions to informal learning: It is less didactic, it is socially collaborative, it is

embedded in a meaningful context, it is initiated by the learner’s choice, and it has no
consequential assessment (like a grade). These are all features that are common in the
venues we are focusing on here, but they are found in other kinds of places as well.
For example, Rogoff et al. (2016) takes an ethnographic perspective and discuss how
many cultures depend on informal learning practices in the home and community,
and how they are even present “on the side” in many formal learning contexts as
well. Critically, informal learning is something that happens a lot. Thinking about
learning as something that only happens in what Rogoff et al. calls the “factory
model of instruction” is missing an enormous part of how we all develop knowledge
and skills.

6 Science education over their lifetime

Falk and Dierking (2010) emphasizes the disconnect between where or how most
Americans get most of their science knowledge and the policies or funding sources
that typically support primary and secondary schooling in the United States – what
the authors call a “school-first” paradigm. Interestingly, science education in
American high schools and colleges is generally good, but these experiences aren’t
available to everyone. If public engagement like what we advocate here contributes
to the public’s science literacy, there is considerable democratizing potential in such
activities.

7 Linguistic activism
There are many linguists who engage in linguistic activism. We can’t mention them
all, but a few to consider include Ofelia Zepeda (University of Arizona), Rebecca
Wheeler (Christopher Newport University), and Walt Wolfram (North Carolina State
University). We also think it’s worth mentioning some of the linguists who collabor-
ate with the K-12 school system, like Maya Honda (Wheelock College), Kristin
Denham (Western Washington University), and Wayne O’Neil (MIT). Denham and
Lobeck (2010) describes a number of these collaborations.

8 Cecile McKee [Worked Example Box]

See Cecile McKee and her team in action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kXK6W8s0II

9 STEM
While NSF originally emphasized education in mathematics and the physical sci-
ences, it has long taken a much broader approach. The 1945 report to the US
president that motivated NSF’s establishment showed visionary attention to science
education (Bush, 1945). (This pdf has the original report, as well as NSF’s current
context: www.nsf.gov/about/history/EndlessFrontier_w.pdf.) NSF added social sci-
ences to its portfolio in 1957. It now uses the term STEM (standing for Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to include the many fields where it funds
basic research. Interestingly, though, Charles E. Vela coined this term in the early
1990s as a way of referring to an integrative approach to education in these broad
areas (Raupp, 2020). Vela developed this emphasis on integrative education at the

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 16 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education.

In 2001, when Judith Ramaley became head of NSF’s education arm, NSF was
referring to its portfolio as SMET. Fortunately, Ramaley took up Vela’s term (Chute,
2009). And now, the term is used everywhere English is spoken and beyond. Though
sometimes conveying a relatively narrow view (e.g., excluding the social sciences),
we ourselves follow Vela and Ramaley in using the term STEM more inclusively. If
you want to read more of this history, see www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf50/science_
policy.jsp.

10 Making a doable demo

The Closing Worksheets in each chapter will guide you through making your own
demo. Throughout the book, we’ll be talking about a variety of demos that we’ve used
in the past that cover a wide range of topics. In the index, we refer to these demos
using names that we hope are clear for readers. You’ll find each demo in the index at
least twice – once under the general header “Demos” and again under the linguistics
topic area that they exemplify. We also note that our own actual day-to-day
references to these are often different and somewhat more fun. For example, we
actually call the lexical stress demo the “taco demo”; we actually call the word
learning demo “mystery words.”

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 2 You Can Be the Expert

OPENING WORKSHEET

What does an expert look like?

Write down the names of three different people that you think of as real
experts in their field – they can be people who taught you (your eighth
grade history teacher, a college calculus professor), people who are fam-
ously smart (Nobel prize winners, legendary scientists), people who are
public experts (in government, or on TV and online), or anybody else that
you think is the kind of person you’d want to learn from.

What are some key strengths and weaknesses of your favorite

experts?
Are your favorite experts

Knowledgeable? Informed? Questioning?

Passionate? Calm? Funny? Quiet?
Single-minded? Interested in lots of different things? Well-rounded?
Preachy? Didactic? Long-winded? Inclusive? Responsive?
Friendly? Stern? Warm? Scary?

Write down one or two strengths and at least one weakness for each
of the people you identified.

What are some of your key strengths and weaknesses?

Write down at least one key strength and one key weakness of
your own.
Do any of your strengths or weaknesses overlap with those of your favorite
experts? Are there any features of your favorite experts that you wish you
had? Are there things that you are good at that your favorite experts
are not?

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 18 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Both of us writing this book have similar styles when we engage with the
public: We’re both high-energy, extroverted people. We also both have a
research background in children’s language development. But you don’t need
to share our personality traits any more than you need to share our academic
specialty in order to be good at public engagement. This book will lay out
some principles to help you have good conversations about your science.
The personal style that you bring to those conversations will always be your
own. And your style is one of your strengths as you engage with others. As
you’ll see in Chapter 16, you are one of the core ingredients for creating a
good engagement activity.
If you look at some of the best public science figures out there, you can see
how different styles can work well. For example, if you watch some classic
Bill Nye (the Science Guy) videos from the 1990s, you’ll see that he is super
goofy – he cracks jokes, does wacky things with his camera and his body, has
a nifty theme song, and wears outrageous bow ties. But if you check out Bill
Nye later (he’s got a nice Twitter profile), you’ll see that he is now more
restrained. (In Figure 2.1, you’ll see both versions.) The bow ties are still there,
but there’s less slapstick and his tone is less silly. You might prefer early Bill
Nye to later Bill Nye (or vice versa), but both versions of him are really
effective at what they do.
Or consider the best language science talks you’ve been to. Some speakers
are larger than life and give you a sense of the whole sweep of the field.
Others impress with clever examples and tightly constructed arguments that
address every objection. Again, which kind of talk you prefer is totally up to
you. Both are great models to analyze and even aspire to.
In the course of training students to engage with the public, we’ve learned
that plenty of styles different from our own can be effective. Bringing a
calm, even-keeled presence can help young children focus on your content.
Being really careful as you walk someone through an International

Figure 2.1 Photos of early (1993) and later (2017) Bill Nye
Note. Early Bill Nye is reprinted with permission from the Everett Collection (Photo credit: PBS).
Later Bill Nye is used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (Photo credit: Neil Grabowsky).

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 You Can Be the Expert 19

Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart can be a very effective way of explaining

how it works. Being a little bit shy or even awkward can help put some
people at ease.
In addition to your personal style, you also bring other properties of
yourself to the situation. We are conscious of the fact that we are both
female, and we enjoy representing the fact that women can be scientists.
Our students often tell us that some of their favorite interactions involve
connecting with families that don’t typically get to see someone who looks
like them being the expert – whether that means someone who is Black, or
wears a hijab, or is transitioning genders, or speaks Korean, or any of the
many ways we could describe our students.
In the ageless words of Muhammad Ali, sometimes you need “different
strokes for different folks.” Just as each person reading this book has a
different personality, so do the people who you’ll interact with: Different
styles will appeal to different people. Whatever your own style is will likely
be the perfect way to connect with somebody. And as Mr. Ali would also
appreciate, sometimes just being who you are in these informal learning
spaces will help you connect with people in a special way.
You’ve undoubtedly had a lot of practice being yourself, so you’re
probably very good at that. Lean into it! Living up to the principles in
this book – making your topic exciting and relevant, organizing infor-
mation for your audience, expressing yourself in an accessible way, really
listening to what your conversational partner is saying – isn’t easy. We
can’t imagine trying to do those things while also trying to act like
people we’re not. Luckily, all kinds of people can be good communicators
and all kinds of styles can be effective. There’s not just one way to be
good at this!

Attitude Counts for a Lot

One of the most important attributes that you can bring to this process is a
genuine interest in your topic area. Making a doable demo will take time
and effort, and you’re more likely to put that in if you enjoy what you’re
working on. But interest will matter even more when it comes time to use
your demo with public audiences. To get good at working with the public
takes practice. If you aren’t interested enough in your topic to talk about it
over and over (and over and over) again, then you’re not going to get the
practice on the demo that you need. If you are genuinely interested in what
you’re trying to communicate, then it’s fun to spend the time putting in
the work.

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 20 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Being genuinely interested in your topic will also make you more
engaging. People will respond to you and your enthusiasm. If you don’t
think that your activity is worthwhile, then they probably won’t either.
People are very good at reading social cues, and they can tell if you think
you’re doing something stupid or boring. Would you want to take a class
from someone who hated the material? Make sure you’re working on a topic
that you really do think is interesting. That will help people think that you’re
someone worth talking with.
A slightly different concern that you might have is that only real language
nerds will think that your topic is interesting. We appreciate the fact that
many of the people reading this book are probably some kind of language
nerd – after all, you think language is so cool that you want to talk with other
people about it. You might worry that your passion for templatic morphology
or tone sandhi or syllabaries will just come across as, well, weird.
Don’t worry! Showing off your passion is a good thing and most people
will react positively to it. That said, the lessons in this book will help you
channel your passion in a productive way. You’ll want to think carefully
about how to make your topic interesting (Chapter 6) and relevant to the
people you’re talking with (Chapter 7). We emphasize that one route
to relevance involves finding out what your conversational partners
already know – their funds of knowledge. And you’ll want to make sure
that you don’t overload people with technical terms (Chapter 14). We
are confident that any topic within language science can be turned into
a fun and fascinating activity. But it may take more effort to get some
topics there than others – so it’s a good thing you have the passion to
motivate you!

But How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

A critical part of being an expert is, of course, knowing something. If you’re a
tenured professor, then you’re probably used to being an expert on a topic or
two, and are pretty confident about what you know. But tenured professors
are also very aware of all the things that they don’t know! Syntacticians may
not feel comfortable talking about phonology. And even among syntacti-
cians, an expert on reference may not feel comfortable talking about argu-
ment structure. One of the things that happens as you go on in school is that
you are trained to be narrow: It takes a lot to become an academic expert on
a topic and you need a suitably small topic in order to earn an advanced
degree in it.

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 You Can Be the Expert 21

But public engagement has a goal that differs from that of a senior thesis
or a graduate program. We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but
your aim shouldn’t be to prove that you deserve a graduate degree or to
promote academic standards of erudition. Your goal is to talk with a member
of the public about some piece of language so that they know why it’s
interesting and a little bit about how it works. Your approach may start in
different places, depending on what your conversational partners already
know. You don’t need to be the world’s expert on a topic in order to do
those things.
So just how much knowledge do you need? The bare minimum you need is
an understanding of the basic science behind your doable demo and how the
examples within your demo work. Anything beyond that is terrific, but not
strictly speaking necessary. Take for example an activity we’ve used about
sign languages.
The main point of the sign languages demo is to show that sign languages
are like any other language. They aren’t just an advanced game of charades.
Instead, each has rules about how to produce the signs; many signs are
arbitrary in nature; and in fact, there are multiple sign languages around
the world that are different from each other. How do we show this? We teach
people how to count to ten in American Sign Language (ASL) and in British
Sign Language (BSL). If you are working in the United States, the idea that
there are rules about how to produce individual signs usually comes up when
we ask people to guess how to sign three in ASL – Americans count to three
with different fingers than the ones ASL uses to sign the number three, and it
is very rare for anybody in the United States to guess the right three fingers
to put up. The more general point that many signs are arbitrary (that is, they
can’t be guessed at all) comes up when we ask people to guess how to sign six
in ASL – people don’t even come close to suggesting what the actual sign is.
The idea that different sign languages are truly different from each other is
highlighted by contrasting BSL and ASL. Even though the spoken languages
of the United Kingdom and the United States are quite similar, BSL and ASL
don’t even use the same signs to count to ten!
You might think that in order to effectively do this demo you need to be
fluent, or at least proficient, in ASL. But that’s simply not the case. The
number of signs that you need to know to do the activity is exactly twenty:
You need to know how to count to ten in ASL and BSL. It’s pretty easy to
learn those twenty signs – the structure of the demo actually expects the
general public to be able to learn those signs in just a few minutes. And there
are many helpful videos online that will show you what the signs look like.
One of us (LW) has used this demo many times, and the signs in this activity

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 22 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

represent a large proportion of the ASL signs she knows (and 100 percent of
the BSL signs she knows).
What you do need to know in order to do this activity is something more
general about the status of sign languages and what it means for a sign to be
arbitrary (as opposed to iconic). It takes a little bit of reading to learn the core
facts, but not more than you would find in an introductory textbook or
an encyclopedia.
If you happen to have rich knowledge about ASL (or any other sign
language), then you can likely have a richer conversation with people
about how sign languages work. On the other hand, if your expertise
is shallow, you are likely to be asked a question you don’t know the
answer to. For the ASL counting demo, people frequently ask how to sign
different numbers – 11, 100, 69, etc. If you don’t how to sign those
numbers, what do you do? You say, “I don’t know!” There’s no shame
in not knowing the answer to something. Nobody knows all the answers.
Admitting what you don’t know doesn’t make you sound dumb – it makes
you sound humble. Real experts can admit the limits of their expertise,
and people respect experts who are honest about their limits. If you like,
you can always suggest how to find the answer. In the case of ASL, it’s
easy enough to look the answer up online. For other cases, people might
ask about something that actually isn’t yet known by anybody and would
require a whole scientific program to figure out. “I don’t know” is the first
step to moving science forward.
You might be worried that someone with a lot more expertise on your
topic area will come and talk with you. What should you do if you’re talking
about sign languages and someone who is fluent in ASL comes to talk with
you and your knowledge is very shallow? In our experience, have fun. The
people who are most likely to appreciate your efforts to engage the public on
a particular topic are the people who are deep experts on that topic. They
aren’t going to give you a hard time about the details of what you’re saying;
they are more likely to be grateful that someone is trying to promote their
topic area. Fluent signers won’t be mad because you’re not fluent yourself;
they will be happy that you’re explaining how sign languages are complex
and have all the same properties as spoken languages to people who might
not realize that. You might even learn your twenty-first sign from such
an expert.
On occasion, you might in fact get corrected by someone who knows more
than you. (It turns out it matters which direction the palm of your hand is
facing when you sign the numbers in ASL!) What should you do if that
happens? Thank the person. Because your topic interests you, you should
appreciate learning something new about it!

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 You Can Be the Expert 23

Figure 2.2 An Ohio State University student teaching a child how to make a few signs in ASL at
the AAAS Family Science Days festival
Note. The student pictured here is quite knowledgeable about ASL, and she knows far more than
the twenty signs used in the activity described in the text.

Build on Your Strengths and Work on Your Weaknesses

Like any skill you are honing, you’ll get better with practice. Learning how to
present yourself as an expert and getting comfortable in that role is
no different.
When you first start working with members of the public, we recommend
playing to your strengths. For the first activity that you put together, pick
something where you feel like you have a comparatively strong background.
Students working with us regularly draw on coursework they have done with
other instructors. The audiology majors love talking about how people hear –
they take a lot of classes on how the ear works and mechanisms of speech
processing and have a lot of details to draw on. By contrast, the psychology
majors are more likely to want to center their demos around a topic such as
how language can serve as a chunking guide for memory retrieval. And
students coming from more humanities-oriented fields often draw on phe-
nomena they have encountered there, such as the difficulty of translating
poetry across languages.
It’s also good to think about what your own personality is. Are you an
extrovert? An introvert? Do you like kids or adults? Do big gangs of

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 24 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

teenagers freak you out? Does working with technology relax you or
make you nervous? Design your demo to play to your personality
strengths. For example, if you’re a total extrovert, then the ASL activity
is a lot of fun – there’s nothing between you and the public except your
hands! However, if you’re more of an introvert, it can be reassuring to
have a physical object that focuses the attention of the visitor – perhaps a
game involving a set of cards or blocks, or an app on an iPad. As you
create your materials, it’s fine to realize that you are the person who is
going to have to use them. Make the demo be something that you are
comfortable doing.
Once you start engaging with public audiences, remember to be kind to
yourself. Nobody is born being good at this kind of activity. One thing we
often hear from (mostly senior) colleagues is that they just don’t have the
“natural ability” that you need in order to talk with the public. But many
skills don’t rest on natural ability. Instead, we gain them from a lot of
practice. Research by psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that when you
emphasize the importance of natural ability instead of effort, you are less
successful at persevering through a challenging situation (Dweck, 2008). She
encourages people to adopt a “growth mindset,” which really just means that
you think of your mistakes as things to learn from. When the going gets
tough, the smart thing to do is to think about what went wrong and keep
on trying.
No matter who you are, your first efforts won’t be ideal. Don’t beat
yourself up if you have problems at the beginning. Instead, keep track of
the things that aren’t working and try to learn from them. Developing your
skill at talking with the public is a process that you will never stop working
on! For example, both of us (LW and CM) struggle with the fact that we
are fast-talkers and we don’t like long pauses in the conversation. Sometimes
we go so fast that people can’t keep up, and sometimes we don’t leave space
for others to get their chance to speak. We’re both better than we used to be,
but it’s hard, and it requires conscious effort for us to slow down the
whole interaction.
One thing that is helpful about working in free-choice settings is that you
will get feedback about how you’re doing. How do people interact with you –
do they stay and chat for a long time (that’s good!)? Do they sneak away as
soon as you pause for breath (that’s not so good)? The public gets to vote
with their feet in these settings. Pay attention to how people respond to you,
and you’ll figure out what is working better or worse. One of the many
virtues of working in a free-choice setting is that you will have many, brief,
interactions with people. Or as we like to think of it, many chances to learn
from them.

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 You Can Be the Expert 25

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

There’s not just one right way to be good at engaging with the public. Be
enthusiastic and let your personal style work for you. The most important
thing to do is practice, practice, practice!

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

A common experience for our students is that members of the public –

usually children – will ask them if they are “real scientists.” For some
students, this question can create a bit of anxiety: They see themselves as
students, as trainees, as assistants, as learners. They don’t necessarily
have scientist as part of their self-image. In fact, many professional
science communicators resist identifying as scientists because they feel
like you have to do hands-on work in a lab setting in order to earn
that label.
We, however, want to encourage you to think about what it means to be
a scientist more broadly, and to accept scientist as part of your self-image
in general. We definitely want to encourage you to incorporate it into your
self-image while you are talking about language science!
Some of you, we expect, are actual practicing language scientists. Your lab
may not have any test tubes or beakers. But if you’re using evidence to test
hypotheses about some phenomena – whether that phenomenon is the trajec-
tory of sound change in Albanian or the neural organization of Broca’s area –
then you’re a scientist. If you’re a research assistant in one of these labs, then
you’re also a scientist: You’re using the scientific method to learn more about
how the world works. You don’t need to have an advanced degree to be a
scientist; you just need to be someone who believes in the scientific method
and who wants to learn more about how the world works by using it.
What’s more, when you are engaging with your doable demo, you are
presenting knowledge that language scientists have generated through the
traditional processes of hypothesis testing, evidence gathering, and theory
revision. Disseminating scientific information – whether you generated it
yourself or someone else did – is part of the job of a scientist.
When we train students, we now warn them that this question may be
coming their way. And the right answer to “Are you a real scientist?” is
“Yes, I am!”

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 26 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

CLOSING WORKSHEET

In the previous chapter, we asked you to identify three possible topics for a
doable demo and think about what you know about each topic, how
relevant each would be for other people, and how much fun each would
be to do. We hope you wrote all that down!
Now we want you to rank order your three ideas along each of the
dimensions you considered. Which one do you know most about? Which
one is most socially relevant for people? Which one sounds like the most
fun to do?
Now for the hard part: Pick one.
There is no single right answer for what makes the best topic area for a
doable demo. You don’t have to be the world’s expert on your topic
(though if you are, that’s fine too). You don’t have to work on a topic that
is ripped from today’s headlines (though it’s fine if you want to do that
too). We do, however, think that it’s a good idea to pick a topic that you
believe would be fun to work with. It will take you some time to create
your demo in the first place, and once you have it, you will be spending a
lot of time using it! That’s all going to be easier to do if you pick something
that you’ll enjoy working on.
For the rest of the Closing Worksheets in this book, we’ll be referring
to your doable demo choice: We mean the one you picked right here. Each
chapter will provide advice for how to develop your idea into an activity
that members of the public might enjoy and learn from.

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Early Bill Nye and later Bill Nye
In case you’re not up on older vs. newer Bill Nye, you might want to read this
overview of his background from the New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2013/06/
18/science/bill-nye-firebrand-for-science-is-a-big-man-on-campus.html.
(Fair warning: The New York Times has a paywall and only allows you to read a
limited number of articles for free. Contact your library for help.)
But there’s no substitute for hearing from the man himself! Bill Nye’s Official
website is https://billnye.com/, and many clips are available on the YouTube channel
Nye Labs. If you watch any of Bill Nye’s videos, pay special attention to the words he
uses. He illustrates Chapter 14’s points about having a clear critical take-home
message rather amazingly!

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 You Can Be the Expert 27

2 Attitude counts for a lot

If you need some inspiration to bring your attitude with you, we recommend this
short piece by Naomi Dalchand about channeling your inner Lady Gaga when
presenting (Dalchand, 2021): www.sciencemag.org/careers/2021/02/how-i-trans
formed-myself-confident-presenter-thanks-lady-gaga.

3 Many signs are arbitrary

Most of the words in spoken languages arbitrarily relate to their meanings. That is,
the word “shoes” doesn’t actually sound anything like shoes, and it isn’t directly
connected to other shoe properties. A language could pick any old sequence of
sounds, and it would work just as well to represent the meaning SHOE. In fact, other
languages do pick other sound sequences, and they work just fine. The word for shoes
in Japanese is kutsu, and in French it is chaussures. In sign languages, most of the
signs don’t look like what their meanings are. In ASL, the sign for shoes involves
tapping your fist-shaped hands together twice. (You can see it here: www.lifeprint
.com/asl101/pages-signs/s/shoes.htm.) However, there are a significant number of
signs in ASL (as well as in other sign languages) where the signs do look a lot like
what they refer to. For example, the ASL sign for book involves opening your hands
as if you were opening a book (https://lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/b/book.htm).
These signs are called “iconic” because the sign is like a pictorial representation (an
icon) of what it means. When and how these iconic signs are leveraged for language
learning is an interesting domain of research. To learn more, we recommend reading
Caselli and Pyers (2020).

4 Sign languages around the world are different

Many people are surprised to learn that there are at least 125 sign languages used
by deaf communities in the world (www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/sign-language).
As with spoken languages, the histories of these languages explain some of their
similarities and differences. In this light, it is interesting that the sign languages of
the United Kingdom and the United States are not very similar even though spoken
English dominates in these places. It turns out that ASL is more similar to French
Sign Language than it is to BSL. This reflects an early and critical collaboration
between the American Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (Gallaudet University is named
after him) and the French Laurent Clerc. In 1817, they founded the American School
for the Deaf, where Clerc became the school’s first deaf teacher. If you’re interested in
learning more about this, the book When the Mind Hears tells this specific story and
much more about the many interconnections across the deaf communities in France
and the United States, including linguistic similarities across these languages (Lane,
1989).

5 Growth mindset
You can watch a Ted Talk of Carol Dweck talking about her theory of growth
mindset: www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_
improve?language=en.

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 28 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

6 Many public science communicators resist identifying as scientists

The idea that “real science” is limited to work on just a few disciplines (usually things
like biology, physics, and chemistry) is widespread, as is the notion that to be a “real
scientist” you have to be actively engaged in creating new knowledge in one of these
disciplines. James (2020) interviewed science communicators who were working at
pop culture conventions to explore how they perceived their scientific identities even
as they were engaging in scientific communication. It appears that for many indi-
viduals, being a scientist is conceived quite narrowly.

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 3 Cooperative Conversations

OPENING WORKSHEET

Think about a time when you had an argument, or even just a minor
misunderstanding, with someone who you were talking with.
Briefly write down at least one factor that caused the misunderstand-
ing. You might want to consider the following list:

• Were you and the other person both being truthful? Did you tell each
other all of the truth or only part of it?
• Did you and the other person agree about what the real topic of the
conversation was? Were you arguing about the same thing, or were you
talking past each other?
• Were you and the other person using the same words to mean different
things? (For example, “out late” could mean different things to different
people.)
• Were you able to say as much as you wanted, or were you unable to get
a word in edgewise?
• Did the other person say enough for you to get their point? Or did they
say so little that you had to figure everything out for yourself? Did you
figure things out the way the other person wanted you to?

In this book, we’re talking a lot about conversations. The key to effectively
sharing your ideas with other people is to approach your interaction like
you’re having a conversation. Conversations are a core language experience,
and the field of language science has found out a lot about how they work:
what we expect when we are going into one, what kinds of things make
conversations run smoothly, what kinds of things make them go horribly
wrong. In this chapter, we’re going to briefly cover what language science
teaches us about successful conversations.

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 30 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Conversations Succeed When They Are Cooperative

At the heart of a good conversation is two people working together to
communicate with each other. The insight that conversations are fundamen-
tally cooperative goes back to at least the 1970s, thanks to a philosopher
named Paul Grice (Grice, 1975). Grice’s ideas were very influential, and we’re
going to use a lot of his terminology as we describe conversations.
Once you put cooperation front and center, it’s easy to see that under-
standing people is essential for understanding conversations. Words don’t
cooperate with each other; people cooperate with each other. Luckily,
cooperation is something that comes pretty naturally. Infants and toddlers
value it and know how to do it. For example, the psychologist Felix
Warneken has shown that children who weren’t even two years old would
spontaneously try to help unfamiliar adults having problems opening doors
and finding objects (see Warneken & Tomasello, 2006, for one compelling
study in Warneken’s program). Without being directly asked or getting any
kind of reward (besides the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with being a nice
person), these toddlers volunteered to work with someone to get something
done. This drive to cooperate with others seems to be a deep human instinct.
When we talk with others, we are drawing on this instinct to cooperate.
But for cooperation to be effective, you have to pay attention to the people
you’re cooperating (conversing) with. What do they know? What do they
expect? What do they want? The fields of communication and psychology
have a lot to say about how we track the mental states of other people, and
we’ll talk more about that angle in Chapters 11 and 12. For now, we’ll just
mention that keeping track of what’s going on in other people’s minds can be
tricky, and it’s very easy to mix up what you know (and expect, and want)
with what other people know (and expect, and want).
Our Opening Worksheet asked you to think about arguments. If anything
feels like it doesn’t involve cooperation, surely it’s an argument – right? Not
necessarily! First, think about something that’s more like a disagreement, or a
debate. You want to go out for Italian food, say, and I’d rather stay home and
cook Indian food instead. To talk through this, we need to agree on what the
problem is (type of cuisine, location of dinner) and each of us needs to make
our positions clear to the other person. That is, we need to create a common
understanding about what each of us wants and how important it is to us.
Once we have this mutual understanding, we still might not agree with each
other; our desires and interests might be so incompatible that we each end up
eating on our own. But if we had a cooperative argument, then at least we
will have made our decision based on an accurate understanding of
each other.

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 Cooperative Conversations 31

Now think of something a bit more heated – a real honest-to-goodness

fight with someone. Sometimes these fights are just like cooperative argu-
ments, but with more intense feeling (maybe I hate Italian food). But some-
times arguments break all the rules that make a cooperative conversation
work: We may not believe each other, or understand each other, or feel like
we’re even talking about the same topic, and we might just go round in
circles. Our fight about where to go to dinner might really be about money, or
politics, or the fact that you never clean the dishes – and we might not even
agree about what we’re fighting about!
But in these cases, it’s not clear that we’re having a conversation at all.
What Grice’s approach tells us is that our default assumption when talking
with others is that they are trying to communicate with us so that we will
understand them. Grice proposed four core rules for a cooperative conversa-
tion – he called them MAXIMS . When we follow all the rules, we are more
likely to have a successful conversation. When we don’t follow them, there
are unfortunate consequences: We don’t connect effectively, we misunder-
stand each other, we fail to communicate; we may even offend each other. Of
course, you can break the rules if you want to (there isn’t a conversation cop
out there!). In general, though, people don’t expect you to. Your goal in
public engagement should be to have a conversation where you connect,
communicate, and foster understanding. To do that takes cooperation. Let’s
see how this all works.

MAXIM OF QUALITY : Tell the Truth

The first rule for successful conversation is to be truthful. Most people, most
of the time, are telling you the truth. And most people, most of the time,
believe that you are telling the truth. We expect our friends to talk with us
honestly about their interests, their feelings, their plans, and even their
whereabouts. We even expect total strangers to give us honest answers to
all kinds of questions: What time is it? Has the bus stopped here recently?
How do I make this thing work?
Of course, not everybody tells the truth all the time. If you lie just a little bit,
you can often get away with it because you can free-ride off the fact that
everyone expects you to tell the truth. But there are consequences to being
caught out in a lie, and even bigger consequences to being viewed as a habitual
liar. We’ll be talking about how to have a conversation of a particular kind –
one where you’re the expert and you’re talking with a member of the public.
Following the Maxim of Quality has a special resonance in this case. We are all
familiar with conspiracy theories, “fake news,” and “alternative truth,” as well
as the distrust that these bring. One way to think about such issues is to see
them as breakdowns in the Maxim of Quality: We are all so used to having this

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 32 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

rule broken by (some) public figures calling themselves experts that for many
people, quality is no longer their default expectation for experts. In Chapter 8,
we’ll talk a bit about how to occupy the role of expert so people take you at
your word, as a person of true quality!

MAXIM OF QUANTITY : Say as Much as You Need to, but Not More
The second rule for having a successful conversation is about quantity. Grice’s
analysis is that Goldilocks had it right: You don’t want too much, and you
don’t want too little. You want to make sure you say just the right amount!
How do you know what the right amount is? It helps to have some idea about
what your conversational partner knows and needs. Suppose you hear someone
exclaim, “I got in!” If you don’t know that person at all, you might wonder what
they got in to. Did they just get admitted to college? Did they just crack a
government security system? Did they just dive into a pool? For a stranger, there’s
not enough information in that exclamation for you to know. But if you’re a close
friend, you would know if the person had recently applied to college, or was an
inveterate hacker, or hated cold water. And having that background knowledge
would allow you to understand what they meant. As a general guideline, the
better you know somebody, the more background information you share and the
less you need to actually say directly in your conversation.
How about the other direction? Have you ever had a conversation with
someone where they kept telling you things you already knew? It’s
annoying! “The Eiffel Tower is located in the 7th Arrondissement in the left
bank in Paris. In France. In Europe.” If you can already understand some-
thing with less information, getting more feels wrong. Often it feels very
condescending, as if the person has a very low opinion of what you already
know. (Come on! I know that Paris is in France!) In fact, this particular way
of violating the Maxim of Quantity can be more than off-putting; it can be
downright offensive.
Just like we have a default expectation that people will be truthful, we also
expect that people will give us the right quantity of information. If they tell
us something we already know, they must think it is something we don’t
know: That’s what makes it seem condescending. And if they give us too
little information, we might feel uncomfortable asking about what’s assumed
or we might feel that the speaker doesn’t care about our understanding. In
that case, the speaker seems to think we know enough to fill in the gaps, so if
we can’t, we might worry that’s because we’re missing something important.
Either way, as the listener, getting the wrong amount of information feels
like the speaker isn’t being respectful of what you know.
Getting the quantity right helps make for a better, and more respectful,
interaction. We will come back to this point in Chapter 9, where we talk

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 Cooperative Conversations 33

about how to balance the desire to tell the (whole) truth and the need to tailor
your message to what can usefully be related in a brief conversation.

MAXIM OF RELEVANCE : Stick to the Point

The third rule for a successful conversation rests on relevance. Conversations
are about topics, and our default expectation is that everything we say is going
to make a positive contribution to the conversational topic. Part of how we
interpret phrases like “I got in” is because we expect it to be relevant to the
topic of conversation. If we’re talking about hacking computers, then what
you got into should be relevant to security systems; if we’re talking about
swimming, then what you got into should be something relevantly wet.
Relevance is very tightly connected to the foundational idea of
cooperation. As we mentioned earlier, one route to relevance involves
exploring your conversational partner’s funds of knowledge. This takes
cooperation between you and them. A conversation is something we are
building together, but that only works if everybody is trying to contribute to
this goal. If we’re building a house out of Legos, I won’t be helping if I bring a
hammer and nails. I need to bring something that will fit with the rest – the
things that fit are relevant. Relevance is an extremely strong default assump-
tion, so much so that extreme violations of it are often taken as conversa-
tional signals. For example, if we are talking about something that
I find distasteful, uncomfortable, or boring, I might offer an out-of-the-blue
statement that is clearly unrelated to the topic (“Very fine weather we’ve
been having these days”). The statement is typically taken as being very
relevant – not about the topic under discussion directly, but about my
interest in continuing with the topic (clearly, I’m not).
Many researchers have argued that this is the maxim from which the other
ones flow. Truth is usually far more relevant than untruth. And we interpret
the quantity of information that people provide in light of its relevance. If it
looks like someone hasn’t given enough information to be understood, we
might try to connect what they said to the conversational topic. If the topic is
swimming, for example, we can assume that “I got in” relates to the topic and
so is more likely to refer to getting into a pool than cracking a security
system. Similarly, if it looks like someone has provided too much infor-
mation, we might try to figure out why that extra information is especially
relevant to the topic, perhaps in an unexpected way. (Is France considering
leaving the European Union?) Even the way that we say something (the
Maxim of Manner, coming up next) can provide a clue to what the speaker
wants us to think about the topic.
So can there be genuine violations of relevance in a conversation? Actually,
yes. It is possible for two people to be talking and to not notice that one of them

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 34 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

is using Legos while the other is using a hammer and nails. Earlier, we
mentioned arguments as a place where cooperation sometimes fails; in our
experience, many arguments have just this kind of problem. But another place
where this kind of problem can arise is in exactly the kind of conversations
that this book is about: when experts are trying to communicate with the
public. In upcoming chapters (especially Chapter 5), we will talk about where
your audience is likely to be coming from and suggest some ways to help make
sure that you and your audience are building a conversation together.

MAXIM OF MANNER : Be Clear!

The last rule for successful conversations concerns clarity. Ideally, speakers
should try to communicate clearly and concisely, ordering their contributions
to help their conversational partner. This rule is actually the same advice that
every writing teacher has given to every student they’ve ever taught. This rule
sometimes seems like it’s more about style than substance. But the fact is that
if people can’t follow what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter how accurate,
appropriate, on-topic, or otherwise awesome it is. They won’t be able to stick
with it, and that means you won’t be building anything together.
People sometimes underestimate the importance of manner in communi-
cation and feel like it just takes care of itself. We’re not sure that’s ever true,
but it is definitely not true for the kinds of conversations we’re focusing on in
this book: conversations where you are sharing complex language science
information with someone who likely has little expertise on that specific
topic. For these conversations, it is absolutely critical that you be clear and
organized. Creating a clear explanation is hard, and it does require thought
and planning. We think it’s hard enough that we devote Chapters 11–16 to
talking about ways to describe phenomena clearly and ways to organize your
information to facilitate real understanding.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Our default assumption when talking with someone is that they are trying to
communicate with us so that we will understand them. The cooperative rules
(or maxims) are what we do to participate in a successful conversation. When
we don’t follow these rules, there are unfortunate consequences: We don’t
connect effectively, we misunderstand each other, we fail to communicate. Our
goal when talking with the public is to have a conversation where we connect,
communicate, and foster understanding. To do that takes cooperation.

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 Cooperative Conversations 35

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Cooperation isn’t always easy to achieve in conversations! Sometimes,

even when everybody is trying to communicate helpfully, things still go
wrong. For example, in the 1970s there was a staff morale problem at
Heathrow Airport. The baggage handlers (mostly white men) felt like the
new food service workers (mostly Pakistani women) were being rude,
leading to bad interactions that made the food service workers feel dis-
criminated against. To help figure out what was going on, the airport
administrators brought in linguist John Gumperz to see if he could help.
He discovered that the heart of the problem was a communication
misunderstanding.
In the lunch line, the food service workers would ask their customers if
they wanted gravy with their food. In English (including the dialect
spoken by most of the baggage handlers), a fast way to ask that question
is to use one word (gravy) with rising intonation. However, drawing on the
intonation patterns of their native language, the food service workers were
asking that one word question with falling intonation. So instead of
sounding like they were asking a question (“Gravy?”) it sounded like they
were insisting on adding it (“Gravy!”).
The way in which a single word was uttered led to different interpret-
ations. The food service workers thought they were politely asking about
preferences, but the baggage handlers thought their preferences were
rudely ignored.
Where did the cooperative breakdown come from?
When it comes to Quality and Relevance, there doesn’t seem to be much
of a problem. The food service workers and the baggage handlers were
surely talking about the same general topic: What did the baggage hand-
lers want to eat? And gravy definitely seems to have been an option
for them.
The troubles here came from Quantity and Manner. You have to give
the food service workers credit for being concise – a one-word question is
about the least wordy way to ask something! But as it happens, the one
word wasn’t clear enough. The food service workers were assuming that
the baggage handlers shared all the same assumptions they did about how
to ask that question, and so they didn’t spell everything out. But since the
baggage handlers didn’t share the same assumptions, they filled in the
gaps in a different way.

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 36 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
This example also shows the special problems that can arise when
conversations are between people from very different backgrounds –
whether that means different languages, cultures, or levels of expertise
in a subject. Getting Quantity and Manner right depends on correctly
assessing what the other person knows; the more different someone is
from you, the more likely it is that you will know different things.
You can read more about this example and more about John Gumperz’s
remarkable life in his New York Times obituary (Fox, 2013).

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Remind yourself of the topic you selected for your doable demo (see the
Closing Worksheet in Chapter 2). Now think about how you can apply the
different conversational maxims to it!

• Establish your base of Quality: Write down five true things about
your topic.
• Find an ideal level of Quantity: From that set of five true things, identify
the two that are the most important ones to talk about.
• Anticipate what is Relevant: Write down two reasons why your topic
area matters in people’s everyday lives.
• Practice your Manner: Write down your two most important true things
in language that is clear, concise, and easy to understand. Now do that
for your two reasons that the topic area is relevant.

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 The philosopher Paul Grice
Paul Grice is a foundational figure in the fields of philosophy and linguistics. He’s
important enough that you can read about him in most textbooks, or here: https://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/grice/. But it is worth noting that Grice laid out his theory
in the 1970s, and there has been a substantial amount of technical work on this topic
written since then. If you’re interested in finding out more about what this subfield of
language science has discovered, we recommend starting with the book Relevance

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 Cooperative Conversations 37

(Sperber & Wilson, 1986), or articles by the linguists Craige Roberts (Roberts, 2012)
and Judith Degen (Degen & Tanenhaus, 2019).

2 The psychologist Felix Warneken

To learn more about Warneken’s work, a good place to start is Warneken and
Tomasello (2006). Or, you can watch some delightful videos on Warneken’s website
of children engaging in cooperative behavior: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/warneken/
study-videos/.

3 You and your audience

This book refers to audiences a lot, so we want to note that we do not use this term to
refer to any conventional group of hearers or spectators. Instead, we use audience to
refer to our immediate conversational partners and to the people who attend events
like festivals and places like museums. We emphasize in several chapters how
important it is to learn what your immediate audience knows and then to calibrate
your contributions to the conversation accordingly. Further, as the glorious Oxford
English Dictionary (2013) tells us, the etymology of audience starts with the Latin
audire, meaning to hear. But this book concerns an interactive audience made of
people who both talk and listen.

4 Facilitate real understanding

We (like Grice) recognize that it isn’t always possible to satisfy all the maxims equally
well all the time. Sometimes, in order to deeply satisfy one maxim, you have to
violate one of the other maxims. But nobody ever said having a successful conver-
sation was going to be easy! In Chapter 9, we will talk about one of the places where
you may have to work to find the right compromise between the maxims of Quality
and Quantity.

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 4 Conversational Goals

OPENING WORKSHEET

Think about how things work in a regular classroom. Write down the
answers to a few of the following questions:

• Who is present and why are they there?

• Who does most of the talking?
• Who are the experts in the room?
• When do you talk and when do you stay quiet?
• How does a teacher make you feel that it’s OK to ask a question?
• What do you do when you’re confused? How do you ask questions?
• Have you ever felt like you asked a ‘dumb’ question in a class? What
happened to make you feel that way? What did you do?
• What do you do when you’re bored or tired?
• What classroom activities are truly fun for you?

Now think about a free-choice learning environment – a museum, a

fair, a festival, a café, a library. Which of your answers to the questions
above are the same and which are different?

The purpose of most everyday conversations is pretty general – to catch

up with a friend, to discuss a movie, to get some advice. For these kinds
of conversations, you don’t need much of an agenda or a plan to make
them go smoothly. But for conversations supporting your public engage-
ment, some planning will help. Before you begin, it’s helpful to reflect
on your goals and to have some ideas about how you’ll accomplish
them. If you know what you’re trying to do with your conversation,
you will be better able to choose what to say (and what not to say) and
you’ll be better prepared to handle the conversation when it takes an
unexpected turn.

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 Conversational Goals 39

School’s Out!
You may be most familiar with the learning situation in the school setting.
You’re probably someone who liked school, and maybe you even did (do!)
pretty well in your classes. You’re probably very comfortable with the idea of
an expert explaining complicated material to a room full of quiet students
there to master that material. Get ready to leave that zone! Engaging with the
public in an informal learning setting is not like being in a classroom, and if
you approach it as if it is, you will turn people off and likely fail to spark their
interest in your topic.
The public who you will be talking with are not your students. They didn’t
sign up to be in your class, and they don’t need your course for their major.
There are also no external incentives for them to learn from you – they won’t
get an A for learning about your topic and there are no penalties for not
paying attention. People will converse with you because they want to. That
means that one of your core goals is to make your conversation interesting
enough that people want to talk with you.
But no matter how interesting you are, the people you talk with in these
environments are not as invested as students are in a typical class. Partly
that’s a product of time considerations – most of your interactions in these
locations will be relatively short (often fifteen minutes or less) and you’ll
interact with each person (or group) just once. That’s just a tiny fraction of
the time that students spend with a teacher in a regular semester. And that
means that the amount of content that you’ll be able to get across will be just
a tiny fraction of what would be covered in a regular class. Your goals need
to be tailored to what can be accomplished in that short time.
Another factor that affects these interactions is the fact that people are
likely to engage with you in an opportunistic rather than a planned way. That
is, many people come to festivals and museums because they want to learn
some new things. But they are very unlikely to be expecting to learn about
your specific topic. You can’t expect that anyone is coming in having read a
lot in your area, or even that they are coming with any passion for your
particular science.
Imagine that you are just one offering on a large buffet table (or tapas bar).
If you are appealing, then lots of people will want to put you on their plates.
But there are usually lots of things for people to choose from in these locations,
and most people don’t want to load up their plate with just one offering.
People are looking for a bite-sized chunk of your science to think about.
In Chapter 9, we will cover the idea that it is not just OK to emphasize only
some elements of your topic; it is in fact ideal. Being incomplete doesn’t

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 40 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

mean that what you’re saying is incorrect. You’re setting people up to learn
more about the wider world. Giving people their first taste of a topic is an
important part of that process.

Public Knowledge: Deficits vs. Funds

Getting out of the school mindset can be hard. And there is a long, unfortu-
nate, tradition of scientists bringing the worst kind of school teaching into
their interactions with the public. There’s even a name for assumptions
behind this unfortunate approach: the DEFICIT MODEL . On this model, the
general public lacks knowledge (they have a deficit), and what they need is
for the expert to provide what they’re missing. A common thing to say from
this perspective is, “The reason people believe X is because they just don’t
understand the facts.” Depending on the week, that X might be “climate
change isn’t real” or “humans didn’t evolve” or “vaccines give kids autism”
or “bilingualism is bad for babies.” Whatever the X, it is usually stated in an
exasperated tone of voice. But this perspective convinces absolutely nobody.
People aren’t empty vessels who are waiting to be filled up with scientific (or
any other kind of ) knowledge. People live in connected communities, and
during the normal course of their lives they learn about all kinds of things.
When they talk with an expert, they bring their own experiences and back-
ground knowledge with them. For hot-button issues, these background experi-
ences can often be very emotional. The scientific facts you offer people may be
in competition with ideas that they already have. And really, what would you
expect someone to believe? Something they just heard from a person they just
met, or something that a trusted member of their own community has told them
and that they may have had personal experiences with?
In the case of language, people will likely be bringing with them a lifetime
of experience with prescriptivism. Linguistic prescriptivism is the approach
that aims to fix people’s language by telling them (prescribing) correct
language usage. People have had favorite teachers grade them for their use
of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ words; their parents have told them to avoid (or use)
certain words; they probably have their own pet peeves about ‘bad’ things
people say or ways to write. Language science, of course, embraces descrip-
tivism: Everything that people say is important for understanding how the
human mind creates and uses language. The fact that people judge others for
their language choices is interesting primarily as a social (or perhaps
sociolinguistic) phenomenon.
You could simply tell people that their prescriptivist attitudes are wrong,
uninformed by modern linguistics, and that their attitudes reflect centuries of

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 Conversational Goals 41

classism, sexism, and racism. Speaking as language scientists, we may be

confident in what the facts are and the implications of those facts. But simply
telling people they are wrong, or even explaining to them the history of
grammar policing, is unlikely to convince them of much. And you probably
already know that: Most of us have tried the direct approach at least once
with people in our lives. One reason it doesn’t work is that it flies in the face
of what people already know: Their lived experiences tell them that standard
forms of language do matter in some circumstances. In other words,
prescriptivism is real and it matters. Who are you to deny their personal
histories?
So what’s the alternative? Instead of treating people’s prior experiences as
baggage to be dismissed or wrestled with, treat their experiences as an asset
that you can work with. There’s a name for this perspective as well: the FUNDS OF
KNOWLEDGE approach. In this approach, you assume that the knowledge that
people already have is a valuable resource. People can draw on their own
experiences to contribute to their conversation with you. You can make your
contributions more interesting and more relevant for someone if you can
connect your work to what they already know or believe. What’s more,
sometimes people will have knowledge that you can learn from yourself – their
lifetime of language use means that they might have noticed something that
you haven’t. You and they are partners in a joint exploration of knowledge.
In the case of language, the funds of knowledge approach is a natural fit.
People use language every day – everyone you talk with has thousands (and
thousands and thousands) of hours of language use under their belt. Not only
that, but most people have spent time thinking about language – they’ve
likely noticed regional accents; they may appreciate a clever rhyme in a rap;
they may have misheard some song lyrics; they may have taken a foreign
language class or speak another language natively; they might have a
dyslexia; they may have a grandparent with an aphasia; they may have
struggled to find the perfect phrase to use in a wedding toast. Part of the
reason that language is fun to talk about in informal learning settings is
precisely because people have such a rich personal history with it!
How do you leverage these funds of knowledge? Here’s an example. One of
the activities we’ve done a lot involves showing people the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). At the end of the activity, we usually make name
tags with people’s names spelled in the IPA for them to take home. A not
uncommon reaction, especially from children when you write out their
names in the IPA, is that you did it wrong. They know the right way to spell
their names, and depending on their age, they may be very proud that they
know how to do it right! In effect, they are throwing up a strong prescriptivist
objection: Their fundamental concern is with the language being ‘correct.’

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 42 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

We don’t tell these children that they’re wrong and we’re right. After all,
there is real value to the prescriptive point of view in this case: We all care
that people spell our names correctly. Instead, we have children show us how
they spell their own names, and validate their knowledge. Then we talk with
them about how hard it is to learn how to spell some words, an experience
that is easy for (English-speaking) children to relate to. (If the child is young
enough, there’s a parent nearby who is appreciating this conversation.) That
turn in the conversation connects to the core educational message of the IPA
activity, namely that letters and sounds are different things: One reason
spelling is so hard in English is because the mapping between sounds and
letters isn’t straightforward. Having highlighted spelling challenges for chil-
dren, the motivation for using the IPA is clearer: Each IPA symbol maps
simply to one sound.
Now we can ask children to compare the IPA way and the standard way of
spelling their own name and get them to think about what sounds in their
name are hard to spell. Children can often connect this discussion to their
own experiences – teachers who have mispronounced their written names
before, or friends who have similar names but spell them differently. If the
child happens to come from a non-English-speaking background, they may
also have experience with a different writing system or how their name looks
different in different alphabets.
In fact, this activity is a wonderful way to draw explicitly on the funds of
knowledge for these families because they know very well how English
spelling doesn’t always capture the sounds that they are saying. For example,
if you’re working with a Spanish-English bilingual family, you might focus
on differences in vowels in the two languages. The letter “I” is used to
represent a variety of sounds in English: It sounds very different in pin, vine,
and magazine. But Spanish has five vowel sounds and five vowel letters, and
the same letter is consistently linked to the [i] sound. In fact, this consistency
is helpful! A child learning to read English will typically have a harder time
than a child learning to read Spanish. The IPA is a good tool for helping
people think about how sounds and letters are different things. People’s
background experiences provide a rich set of examples that you can draw on.

SIX STRANDS of Science Learning

The field of science communication has been working for a while on methods
to promote good interactions between scientists and the general public –
methods that avoid the deficit model, respect people’s funds of knowledge,
and in general, make learning about science fun. A national panel of experts

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 Conversational Goals 43

in informal science learning put together a report that distilled the work in
this field into six strands of science learning (Fenichel & Schweingruber,
2010). These are called strands in part because of how they work together,
like elements in a rope. To clarify how the strands can be woven together to
make coherent and strong links for people who we engage with, we’ve
framed each one here as a goal to strive for when you are working with
the public.

Strand 1: Generate interest and excitement.

Strand 2: Celebrate scientific knowledge.
Strand 3: Foster observations, explorations, and questions.
Strand 4: Invite people to reflect on science as a process.
Strand 5: Collaborate in using the tools of science.
Strand 6: Encourage people to think of themselves as science learners and as
potential scientists.

It is hard to make a single activity embody all of these strands, and

different strands are better suited for different audiences and topics and
locations. The one strand that we encourage you to aim for with absolutely
every person – no matter their age – is Strand 1. Capturing people’s interest
and getting them excited about your topic prolongs your conversation and so
gives you more time to address your other goals. Your success here also
means that your audience is enjoying the experience you’ve engineered for
them. In addition, Strands 2 and 3 are usually pretty easy to incorporate into
your activity. Strand 2 focuses on getting people to appreciate the content of
your science – the phenomena that it describes. We hope that the previous
part of this chapter has convinced you that this strand is one to be very
careful with: Don’t fall into the school trap or the deficit model! Try to focus
more on celebrating what we know than on testing people on what they don’t
know. Strand 3 focuses on some principles of a good interaction style,
principles that are helpful for achieving all the other strands.
The last three strands concern elements that may or may not fit well with a
particular activity. For example, the IPA activity mentioned above is a great
way to address Strand 5 (the IPA is definitely a tool of language science). And
depending on who you are talking with, you might have a conversation
about the IPA that naturally leads to Strand 4 – thinking about how a linguist
might describe the sounds of a new language invites a discussion about the
process of linguistic discovery. By contrast, our activity about teaching
people to count in ASL (from Chapter 2) doesn’t embody Strands 4 or 5
particularly well. But that’s OK. Again, each individual activity and each
individual encounter with a person doesn’t have to accomplish all possible
learning goals. You can’t be all things to all people all the time.

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 44 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

And what about Strand 6? How do you get people to think about them-
selves as able to do science? The content of your demo is unlikely to be where
this strand is going to come out. Instead, you can weave this strand in
through the kind of interactions you have. Encouraging people to reflect
on their experience with your demo and to come up with some new ideas
about how your phenomenon works (that is, hypotheses!) is really encour-
aging people to think like scientists. We’ll suggest some concrete ways
(such as using juicy questions) to promote these kinds of interactions in
Chapter 10.
In addition, your very presence makes you a model for one way to be a
scientist. We hope you are modeling the idea that a scientist is someone who
is interested and interesting, engaged, and friendly. That might be the kind of
person that would inspire some children to want to be scientists themselves!

Two Mantras
It can be a little bit overwhelming to think about all the things you could, or
should, do when you’re talking with the public. We offer here two short
mantras that can take some of the pressure off.

It’s Not about You

Don’t worry about being the smartest person there, or the biggest expert on
your topic. Just as you don’t have external rewards to give the people you’re
talking with, they also don’t have any to give you. You’re not on a job
interview or defending your dissertation – you don’t have to prove yourself
here. In fact, if you’re taking the funds of knowledge approach seriously, you
will be hoping to learn new things from the people who you interact with.
Just relax and have a conversation with people. It’s OK if one of your goals is
to have fun while you do your demo!

Take the Long View

Ultimately, you’re trying to raise public awareness about language science:
The big goal with this kind of work is to change the world. But you’re not
going to achieve that with any individual conversation. Or two. Or even
three. People change gradually, and you’re not likely to see an Aha! moment
where people walk away changed for life. Each conversation contributes to
incremental progress toward this big goal. So just try to make sure that your
conversations encourage people to keep talking with you, or with some other
scientist, again and again.

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 Conversational Goals 45

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Talking with the public in an informal learning setting is very different from
a school-based setting, and your goals need to match where you are. The six
strands of science learning provide a great framework. But focus on Strand
1 (generate interest and excitement), no matter what else is possible. We
also advocate for the funds of knowledge approach: Find out what people
already know. Respect and appreciate the prior experiences of the people
you’re talking with!

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Strands of science learning and the language

lateralization demo
One activity we’ve done many times uses a finger tapper to show that our
left hemispheres care about speech. We ask people to use their right index
finger to tap a counter on a wooden board for thirty seconds. Each person
decides whether to talk or stay silent while tapping. Anyone can do the
tapping task, although it’s ideal for people older than eight years (because
of dexterity). Another reason we especially like this demo is that anyone
speaking any language, including ones that we don’t know, can
participate.
When people are done tapping, we ask if the person is right- or left-
handed and record their total number of taps on a poster. The poster has a
grid on it that allows us to illustrate the results of a few comparisons. The
rows are labeled for whether the person talked or stayed silent; the
columns are labeled for whether the person is right- or left-handed. We
don’t do anything fancy with the data: We just write the tap totals of each
person in the correct cell, and every so often we compute averages to make
it easy to compare across the cells.
Even though we ignore factors like age and sex, the averages after a
dozen or so right-handers show that people who talked while tapping tap
slower (fewer taps in thirty seconds) and people who stayed silent while
tapping tap faster (more taps). (It takes a long time to find enough left-
handed or ambidextrous tappers to fill the rest of the cells. So we bring
numbers from previous uses of the demo with us.)

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 46 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)

Figure 4.1 A University of Arizona student doing the language lateralization

demo with a child at the Tucson Festival of Books

Then we tell people one important fact about the brain while teaching
them one technical term: The brain has contralateral connections. That
means that the left hemisphere is primarily responsible for making the
right hand do the tapping. With just that one fact and the pattern of data
on our poster, people can compare the numbers in the talking and silent
cells and say why they think the numbers in the silent cell are on average
bigger. At the end of this demo, we offer each person a paper left-
hemisphere headband (see photographs in Figure 4.2).
Here are a few possible ways to hit the six strands with this demo.

Strand 1: Generate interest and excitement

The tapper is relatively loud, which draws a small crowd, which draws a bigger
crowd. Friendly competition makes this demo popular with groups, friends
egging the tappers on as they tap madly away. The big poster with numbers
that are constantly changing also gets some attention. And the headbands
bring us more visitors as time passes. People often come to our booth asking,
“Is this where I can get a brain?” All joking aside, this demo is super fun!

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 Conversational Goals 47

(cont.)

Figure 4.2 Children wearing left-hemisphere headbands after participating in

the language lateralization demo

Strand 2: Celebrate scientific knowledge

Our core message is that spoken language is a processing load for left
hemispheres. But the demo invites exploration of other topics too.
Sometimes people want to talk about differences between right- and
left-handers, or about how to classify people who are ambidextrous.
Sometimes they want to talk about sex differences, or differences between
children and adults. Sometimes they want to talk about different parts of
language or about whether music and language work the same. We bring
a collection of talking points with us so we’re prepared to address different
dimensions of brain organization and development.

Strand 3: Foster observations, explorations, and questions

The tap totals we put on the poster encourage observations and questions.
We invite people to compare the averages in each of the cells on the poster
and talk with them as they interpret the differences that they notice. For
example, our data will typically show that the difference between the
silent and talking cells is bigger for right-handers than for left-handers.
And that can bring us to a larger conversation about variation in degrees
of lateralization. It can also bring us to discuss the limits of using this kind
of task (and see Strand 4).

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 48 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
People also have lots of ideas about variations on our task that might
change the results. Would tappers get better if they could repeat the task in
a quiet place? What about if they did the task with their other hand? If
they are multilingual, they might ask how their data would look if they
talked in different languages. Some of these ideas can even be explored
right there on the spot! In addition, many people share stories of stroke
patients in their own families, easily making connections between the
demo and their own funds of knowledge.

Strand 4: Invite people to reflect on science as a process

When we write an individual’s tap total on the poster, we explain
that this activity is not a research study – that is, we’re not collecting
data as part of some ongoing investigation. This comment sometimes
leads to interesting discussions about science in general. Why isn’t
this demo real research? In this context, people often note the noisy
environment, the broad range of people who do the task (and we
combine all their data), and some of the questions and comments noted
above. In other words, they come up with the idea that scientists need
to control their variables. How you get your data is a critical part of the
scientific process!

Strand 5: Collaborate in using the tools of science

Our finger tapper doesn’t look like a classic piece of scientific equipment.
It’s just a small mechanical gizmo that flips to a higher number every time
you tap a tiny paddle. Modern researchers use much more impressive tools
for questions about the brain (MRIs, ERPs, fNIRS, etc.). But gizmos like this
simple tapper are still used in some research and clinical situations.
Another tool we use is statistics. We calculate the means, and people are
doing (informal) inferential statistical tests when they compare the
numbers across the cells.

Strand 6: Encourage people to think of themselves as science

learners and potential scientists
This activity actually asks people to do something that scientists really do:
Look at patterns of data and draw inferences about them. It gives people a
taste of that magic moment when you figure out what a pattern means. It’s
the feeling of scientific discovery!
Also, this activity is interdisciplinary: It is about both how the brain
works and how language works. Because it is so broad, we often get

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 Conversational Goals 49

(cont.)
questions that we don’t know the answers to. We are always happy to
admit when we don’t know something (see Chapters 2 and 8) and talk
about how we – or the people we’re talking with! – might go about
learning more about it.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Remind yourself of the topic you selected for your doable demo (see the
Closing Worksheet in Chapter 2).
What funds of knowledge do people bring to your topic area?
Write down some general funds of knowledge that just about every
person who you talk with would have about your topic.
Now consider some special groups of people who would bring specific
funds of knowledge that might influence how you do your demo. For
example, what would a parent bring? Or a multilingual person? Or a poet?
Identify two special groups and write down the specific funds of know-
ledge they have, and also write down at least one idea about how you’d
adjust your demo to make use of those funds.
Review the six strands of science learning. Pick two of them and write
down an idea for how your doable demo topic might address them.

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 Deficit model
References to the “information deficit model” originated in studies of public
communication of science. The term referred to a perspective that motivated
and colored much of the work in that area – namely, that a lack of knowledge
about science and technology made the public skeptical toward things like climate
change and vaccinations. On this view, communicators who could fill these
deficits would help change public perceptions so that people would see the benefits
of science and technology. The deficit model matters in formal education as
well, where students’ failures have sometimes been attributed to their individual
deficiencies or to disadvantages in their family or community rather than to
problems in the education system.
The deficit model approach represents a top-down perspective. It assumes that “to
know science is to love it” (Allum et al., 2008, p. 35). While this may be true to some
extent, there are many factors that contribute to people’s acceptance of and affection

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 50 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

toward science. More important in the context of this book, a deficit approach
ignores the role of trust in communication between experts and others. We urge
replacing a presentation-based approach that reflects the deficit model with a
conversation-based approach that sparks people’s interest in a phenomenon, draws
out the knowledge that they already have (i.e., their “funds of knowledge,” González
et al., 2005), and enhances their understanding (at whatever level it is) through
asking juicy questions and listening to answers.
In the context of studying US-based scientists’ communication objectives, Besley
et al. (2018) overviewed possibilities that may help you think about what you are
trying to do. A typical objective relates to conveying knowledge, but this often rests
on a view of the audience as having a knowledge deficit. Another objective is
sparking interest in science, which we emphasized above. Six other objectives that
Besley et al. studied are: showing scientists’ expertise; hearing what other people
think about scientific issues; showing that scientists care about society’s well-being;
showing scientists’ openness and transparency; showing that scientists share com-
munity values; and framing science so that it resonates with a community’s values.
You will see these ideas recurring through several chapters in this book as they relate
to things like relevance and credibility.

2 Funds of knowledge approach

As several chapters note, we recommend consciously basing your public engagement
on the funds of knowledge framework. This framework originated in research by
anthropologists James Greenberg and Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez. After documenting the
rich cultural backgrounds of children in the United States–Mexico borderlands, they
argued for reforming educational systems that underestimate what these children
know (Greenberg, 1989; Vélez-Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992). Educator Luis Moll and
colleagues developed the framework into a broader educational philosophy that
emphasizes cooperative learning and explicitly addresses the assumptions of deficit
or dysfunctionality that can hamper students from poor and minority families
(González et al., 2005; Moll & Greenberg, 1990). The funds of knowledge framework
asks educators and mentors to find and use the knowledge assets that may be hidden
in people’s everyday, real-world lives.
This framework is influential in a broad range of areas. For example, Cowie et al.
(2011) describes research on multi-year science programming that supports Māori
and Pasifika students in New Zealand. Another example is found in the office of the
Superintendent of Public Instruction in the US state of Washington, which contains
state-level guidance for classrooms with bilingual students. Also, Stevens et al.
(2016) describes a mentoring program for young Native American girls and women
in third to eighth grade.

3 People have a rich personal history with language

One situation where the people you’re talking with have rich funds of knowledge
to draw on is when you’re interacting with people from a different cultural or
linguistic group from your own. Their knowledge of a different language, a different
communication style, and different cultural practices is information that can help
you understand your science better. But of course, cross-cultural communication

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 Conversational Goals 51

poses its own challenges. For example, in some cultures (e.g., some Hispanic and
Native American cultures), there are wide differences in terms of history, cultural
beliefs, social interaction style, and definitions of science from what dominates in
Western cultures (Baez & Boyles, 2009). Both of us come from a Western perspective,
and we find that it is important for us to adopt a conscious funds of knowledge
mindset when engaging with individuals from other cultures. Learning is a mutual
activity for us.

4 A child learning to read English

Seymour et al. (2003) makes this point with a fascinating study of literacy develop-
ment in thirteen European countries. This research compared decoding skills in
young children learning to read English and twelve other orthographies. The lan-
guages varied in syllabic complexity, and the orthographies varied in so-called depth
(i.e., the transparency of relations between the phonology and the writing system).
Examples at the extremes include Finnish and Spanish, which use relatively simpler
syllable structures and are written with shallower orthographies; and Danish and
English, which use relatively more complex syllable structures and are written with
deeper orthographies. The children learning most of these orthographies did well by
the end of their first year in school. But English was an outlier, with a much slower
rate of literacy development. Seymour et al. suggests that readers of deep orthogra-
phies start out using both a logographic approach (i.e., learning to read frequently
occurring words as wholes) and an alphabetic approach (i.e., learning letter-sound
correspondences). This is harder than learning to read a shallow orthography, where
an alphabetic approach works well from the start and for all words.
When parents watch their children do the IPA activity mentioned in the main text,
we sometimes have conversations about reading, and some parents will want to
discuss their children’s challenges. One of us (CM) often follows up such conversa-
tions by offering to discuss the Seymour et al. study. Another resource that we
recommend if you are interested in talking with people about writing systems is
Omniglot: www.omniglot.com/.

5 Strands of science
If you’d like to find out more about the field that studies how people learn in informal
settings, Fenichel and Schweingruber (2010) is an excellent place to start. This is a
summary of the six strands, as well as the research behind them. The original Strands
2–5 were developed for elementary and middle school education and framed as
learning outcomes for students, rather than as advice for how to teach students.
Strands 1 and 6 were added especially for the kinds of environments that this book
concerns. All six emphasize the importance of a learner’s active engagement in
science, and they are intertwined so that each strand supports a learner’s progress
on the other strands. As noted in Chapter 1, informal learning settings give learners
considerable choice. This contrasts with formal settings. For example, classrooms
usually have places where students are expected to sit while working, and students’
tasks are usually designed for them, including how much time they spend at each
task. By contrast, visitors to museums or festivals usually wander around on their
own, stopping only at exhibits or doing activities that interest them and staying as

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 52 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

long as they want. Thus, educators in informal settings need to be especially

committed to learners’ interests and motivations. People will be motivated to learn
if exhibits and activities generate wonder, surprise, and curiosity. Learning and
motivation to learn more are enhanced by emotional engagement and sometimes
also by social connections.

6 Listing of the strands of science

We have recast the strands into our own words. We haven’t changed their core
meanings in any way, but we peeled them away from the physical science vibe that
their original wording suggests. We also recast them to be more about what the
educator does as opposed to what the learner receives, which fits better with what this
book is all about.

7 Finger tapper in the language lateralization demo

The device that we use in this demo is part of the Halstead–Reitan
Neuropsychological Test Battery. Factors like handedness, age, sex, education, and
duration and repetition of tapping trials are of course controlled in research and
clinical applications. The test battery is still used today, in part because it is easy to
customize. It is often combined with measures of intelligence or of personality and
supplements other assessments. See Schatz (2011) for more information.

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 5 Know Your Audience

OPENING WORKSHEET

What kinds of people do you think you will encounter while engaging with
the public? Imagine people of different ages (e.g., a young child, a teenager,
a middle-aged parent, a grandparent), people with different jobs (e.g., a
teacher, an architect, a car mechanic, a nurse), people with different inter-
ests (e.g., a girl who loves dinosaurs, a boy who enjoys reading, a college
student from a related discipline, a young couple who are interested in each
other), and different group configurations (e.g., a family, a school outing, a
single parent with several children, older adults on their own).
Pick two individuals to focus on and think about what each one of
them wants from their interaction with you. Write down two aspects of
your chosen topic area that would most appeal to these people.

A conversation is something you do with someone else. A good conversation

requires at least two participants to contribute to the effort. When you first
start out, you might feel like people don’t get what you’re trying to say. And
your reaction to that feeling might be that those people should pay more
attention, listen to you more carefully, or be better informed. That is, you
might feel like it is their responsibility to do more work so that they can
benefit from your wisdom and knowledge. That isn’t how talking to people in
a free-choice learning setting works.
As one of our mentors liked to say, “If people don’t understand you, that’s
your problem, not theirs.” It’s not on them to pay more attention – it’s on you
to get and keep their attention. It’s not on them to be well informed – it’s on
you to make your explanations understandable to someone who has a
different background than you do. Whether you like it or not, you are the
person responsible for making sure that your conversation is a good one.
After all, you are the person who is there to share your love of language
science and promote broader understanding of your favorite angle on

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 54 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

language. If you want to accomplish such things, then you need to take the
steps necessary to make it happen. Activities in free-choice environments are
like TV shows, and the visitors who stop by to see you are the ones with the
remote control. If your program isn’t worth watching, they have plenty of
other options and they will surely change the channel.
Everybody in the conversation brings something of themselves to the
situation, and good audience design considers all the people involved.
We’ll start with you: Why are you there? What do you bring to your
conversation? What are you trying to take away from your conversation?

Where Are You Coming From?

First, you’re probably bringing to your own public engagement a certain
amount of knowledge about how language works. Even if you’ve only taken
one course or read one book on this, you probably have more technical
knowledge than you realize. For example, you might know that languages
can have different basic word orders; you might know that all languages
change over time; you might know that people study language using experi-
mental techniques; you might know that the position of the tongue affects
which speech sound you’re making. Keep in mind that your knowing these
things doesn’t mean that everybody knows them.
Even if you don’t feel like you’re an expert about all parts of language, one
important thing you have learned how to do is to think analytically about
language. You know that language can be an object of scientific study, and
you know a little bit about how people do that. In Chapter 12, we’ll talk more
about how hard it is to remember what it felt like to not know such things.
For now, though, it’s important to just acknowledge that you do
know something.
Of course, depending on who you are, you might be very aware that you
know a lot about your topic area. If you’re majoring in a language-related
field, or you’re a graduate student going after an advanced degree in linguis-
tics, or you’re someone who already has that degree, then you have a lot of
technical knowledge about how language works. You’re probably already
fairly comfortable thinking of yourself as a language expert, and it’s just
good to keep in mind that part of what that means is that you have mastered
specialized information.
But beyond your knowledge about language, the biggest assumption you
are probably bringing to the conversation is the idea that language is worth
talking about. You wouldn’t be planning on talking with the general public

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 Know Your Audience 55

about language if you didn’t think language was fundamentally both inter-
esting and important. Even more than the technical knowledge that you
have, this assumption is what will make your conversations effective,
because it is the key to interacting with others in a positive way.

Where Is Your Audience Coming From?

Now we consider the other half of the equation: the people who you’re
talking with. Why are they there? What do they bring to these conversations?
What are they trying to take away from these conversations?
Your audience isn’t a bunch of linguistics majors eager to take the hot new
seminar on your favorite topic. But just because the public isn’t coming to
you with a technical mindset about language doesn’t mean that they have no
experience with language. For example, everybody you engage with is going
to speak (or sign) at least one language, so they all have their personal
language skills to draw on.
In addition, there are several common ways that people are likely to have
encountered more formal study of language. Although it’s often embedded in
so-called language arts, schools are full of language science. Lots of people
take foreign language classes and have received explicit instruction about
the grammars of those languages. Just about everybody has received explicit
instruction on writing in their native language. Of course, what people take
away from their seventh-grade English class about grammar and spelling
isn’t always in line with the scientific perspective on language, but it does
form an important part of what people know about how language works.
People are more likely to have encountered a scientific point of view on
language if they have encountered it through a health profession. Many
people have had experiences with speech language pathologists (SLPs) helping
them with problems large and small. SLPs help children with articulation
problems to improve the clarity of their speech, with reading challenges
including dyslexia, and with more general language impairments. In fact,
getting screened by an SLP in a school setting is a fairly common event for
children. In addition, many people have had problems with their hearing,
which often connects to language issues. Hearing aids and cochlear implants
are increasingly common – not only among older adults but also among
children and young adults with hearing loss. Adjusting to using these assistive
devices requires people to adjust how they process language, a fact that is well
known to the audiologists who help people get them. Or, people who you meet
might know athletes who experienced language impairments after concus-
sions. Language also interacts more generally with the aging process. Almost

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 56 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

everybody will experience word-finding problems, and some adults may have
experienced more dramatic issues, such as aphasias resulting from strokes.
A somewhat less formal place where people have a lot of language experi-
ence involves their own personal histories. Multilingualism is common
across the world, including in the United States. Many people have therefore
had lots of experience communicating in multiple languages themselves and
with others who speak multiple languages in different contexts and with
different degrees of fluency. It’s worth thinking about the language land-
scape where you’re going to be engaging with the public. Does it have a large
population of people originally from somewhere else? One of us (CM) lives in
the southwest United States where lots of people speak Spanish, as well as
several Native American languages such as Navajo, Tohono O’odham, and
Pascua Yaqui. The other one (LW) lives in the middle of the country, but in a
city that happens to have a large Somali-speaking population. The language
landscape of every place is different, but it’s worth finding out what the
landscape looks like where you are. Adding a few examples from the local
language landscape will help make your demo relevant and interesting to
your specific audience. It will also serve a broader goal of making people who
speak these languages feel included. Not everybody feels equally comfortable
in informal science learning settings, but reaching out to someone using their
own language is a great way to make them feel more welcome.
And that’s not all. Language is around us all the time and language science
issues are everywhere. Parents are always interested in how their children
learn to talk, and to read. Ever wondered how your phone talks with you? Or
how Google finds what you’re looking for even when you misspell your
search terms? Those are language science questions. Word puzzles like
Wordle and language games like Pig Latin are full of language science data.
Language science also crops up in news stories and in popular culture on a
regular basis. It’s worth paying attention to the local news and movie reviews
to find out what people are thinking about right now, whether it’s vocal fry
or Ebonics, or the movies Arrival or The King’s Speech.

Who Is Your Audience?

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, institutions devoted to free-choice learning
are well attended by the general public. Add in events that bring people
together for just a few days (festivals and conventions of all kinds, library
events), and there are even more people to consider. Each specific location is
different, of course, and will attract a slightly different crowd. But there are
some general types of people you will run across frequently.

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 Know Your Audience 57

Figure 5.1 Events like the AAAS Family Science Days festival attract a diverse audience

The first general type of person you’ll encounter is people who are there to
learn something. Some locations are basically designed for these kinds of
people – science museums and science festivals advertise themselves as
places where you can learn new things. But there are different motivations
within this category. In a study from 2010, science education researchers
John Falk and Martin Storksdieck interviewed hundreds of people who went
to a science center about how they approached their visit. One of the most
common approaches was taken by what the researchers called “Explorers.”
These were people who were generally interested in science and were looking
for experiences that would feed their curiosity and spur more learning.
A related approach was taken by the “Hobbyists.” These were people who
were hoping to learn more about a specific part of science that they already
cared about. Both kinds of people came into the science center with some
background knowledge (though the Hobbyists usually had more than the
Explorers) and a desire to learn. But they differed a bit in how open they were
to learning a wide range of things – the Hobbyists came in with more focus
than the Explorers.
When it comes to language science, you’re not very likely to be where
people are expecting to learn about language. Outside of some library events,
some special exhibitions, and a few very special museums, language science
isn’t a common focus for informal learning institutions or events. That won’t
cause any problems if you encounter an Explorer – Explorers are up for
learning lots of things, and all you’ll need to do is create some connection
between language and whatever the main focus of your location is. For
example, in the science museum where one of us (LW) works, there is a big

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 58 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

exhibit about dinosaurs that visitors love. We don’t know much about the
language of dinosaurs, but we did create an activity that used dinosaur
names to talk about compositional morphology: It turns out that all those
complicated dino names break down into meaningful parts and language
science helps you analyze them!
The Hobbyists that the researchers identified sometimes don’t want to
engage with an activity that’s too far outside their area of interest. If you’ve
come to a science center because you like astronomy, learning about the
human vocal tract may not inspire you. But it turns out that language science
has hobbyists of its own who are happy to discover that they are finally in a
place that speaks directly to them! Parents who are interested in their
children’s language development, amateur dialectologists, and sci-fi conlan-
gers are just a few of the types of people who get passionate about language.
People who know more than one language count here as well – they have
lots of experience navigating complex language situations; they aren’t
hobbyists so much as language professionals. If you’re doing an enjoyable
language activity of almost any type, these people will find you.
Another type of person you will encounter is people who are at your
location to help others learn something. Falk and Storksdieck called these
people “Facilitators” and found that they are among the most common types
of visitors to a museum. These are people who are primarily motivated by a
desire to help someone else get a good learning experience. They might be
teachers bringing groups of students to an event, or they might be parents
trying to make sure their children learn something important. Sometimes
Facilitators accompany people who are delighted to be there – natural
Explorers or Hobbyists. But sometimes Facilitators are with people who would
rather be somewhere else, whether that’s a kid in a bad mood, a teenager who is
too cool to be there, or someone who just likes other things a lot more.
Working with a group that has a Facilitator adult in the mix can make
things easier for you. Facilitators will encourage their charges to listen to you
and ask and answer questions. They may also be willing to play along if you
need someone to demonstrate how a game works or someone to break the ice
with a first guess. As for the people getting facilitated, the best way to reach
someone – whether they want to hear from you or not – is to be interesting.
As we’ll say in Chapters 6 and 7, it’s important to make your activity relevant
for people. You want to capture their interest right from the beginning and
make connections to what they care about. Just do your activity as well as
you can and trust that your language science is awesome enough to reach
even the most distracted teenager.
The last general type of people you may encounter is those who aren’t
really there to learn; they are there to have fun. This type of person was less

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 Know Your Audience 59

frequent than the other types, but there were enough for the researchers to
identify two subtypes, who they called “Experience Seekers” and “Spiritual
Pilgrims.” Experience Seekers are just looking to see what you’ve got to offer.
They’ll actually try just about any activity you’ve got, if only to say that they
tried it. Spiritual Pilgrims are looking for an experience that takes them
outside their normal life and gives them a chance to contemplate something
new. For most people, even the core phenomena of language science are new,
so it is easy to hook these people in.
Regardless of the general type of person you’re talking with, one thing that
many visitors are looking for in these settings is access to real scientists. For
example, the educator Eric Jensen and the director of the Centre of Science
and Policy Nicola Buckley asked almost a thousand visitors to a science
festival in Great Britain what they liked (and didn’t like) about their experi-
ence (Jensen & Buckley, 2014). The festival-goers said they appreciated
learning how science works and about new sciences; they also said they
liked chatting with practitioners. In fact, one of the rare complaints that the
festival-goers had was about scientists who didn’t leave enough time for
visitors to ask questions. If you’re used to the academic environment, you
may feel like you always have experts in the field around, and many of them
are paid to answer questions. But outside the ivory tower, people are looking
for access: They want to talk with people who know their stuff!

Embrace the Advantages of Difference

You might be wondering how you’re going to make a single doable demo that
will work with people of different ages who have different motivations and who
come from different backgrounds. The trick is not to change the core activity but
instead to have a variety of messages that you can illustrate with the same
activity. It’s useful to have three or four different angles that you could take so
that you can flexibly respond to the specific person you’re talking with.
For example, we mentioned above a dinosaur names activity one of us
(LW) has used as a way to engage people about morphological analysis. Our
critical take-home message for this activity is that language is compos-
itional: If you know what the meanings of the small parts are and you know
the rules for putting them together, you can figure out (or even create!) larger
pieces of language. So we always talk about how to break down the long
words into parts.
But for Explorers who have just visited the dinosaur exhibit, we focus
more on the semantic content of the actual morphemes and the way they
provide you with information about the dinosaur’s properties. For example,

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 60 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

the dinosaur name Triceratops actually describes that animal’s head pretty
well: tri = three; cerat = horned; ops = face. Our language science helps these
Explorers see connections among the dinosaurs.
On the other hand, if we are talking with a Hobbyist who happens to be
familiar with other languages, we are more likely to focus on the fact that most of
the pieces in dinosaur names come from other languages (usually Latin or Greek).
We might talk about how language borrowing occurs and how different lan-
guages become historically linked to special tasks, like scientific naming.
For Experience Seekers and Spiritual Pilgrims who seem like they just want
to know something fascinating, we might talk about the metaphoric ways that
dinosaur names describe properties. Elements such as rex (king) and raptor
(robber) embody stories about the behavior and interactions of the animals.
This point can lead to a nice discussion about how scientists often have a
poetic side to them – even paleontologists like to play around with language!
The best way to do a demo is the way that keeps your audience engaged.
Each time you do an activity, you are having a new conversation. It’s great if
each conversation is different and reflects the person who you are talking
with. One of the wonderful things about supporting informal learning is that
you’re not giving a single speech to a unified audience; you’re talking about
your activity over and over again to specific individuals and small groups.
Each conversation can be different.

Audience Inclusivity
The joy of language science is for everyone: It shouldn’t be privileged infor-
mation that is just for a select few. Depending on who you are, this point may
seem so obvious that it is hard to imagine that it could be otherwise. After all,
nobody is trying to keep language science a secret, and anybody who wants
to learn about it is welcome to go and find out about it. You are developing
an activity for the very purpose of promoting a general understanding of
language science, right?
Unfortunately, science has a long history of exclusion, and so do informal
science learning venues. Sociologist Emily Dawson has investigated how a
wide range of people interact with informal learning institutions such as
science museums (Dawson, 2014, 2019). She interviews people individually
and in groups, and sometimes she even accompanies them as they visit these
places. What she has found is that not everybody feels welcome in these
environments or even that they have an equal right to partake in activities
like what you are developing. In particular, people who are from low-income
backgrounds or from minority communities often feel like these spaces are
“not for them.” As someone starting out with your activity, you’re probably

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 Know Your Audience 61

not in a position to influence who does and does not attend your venue. But
what you can do is respect every single person who is there and make them
feel welcome to do your activity.
Ideally, you’ll be open to having a conversation about your science with
everybody – old people, young people, people who look like you, people who
don’t look like you, people wearing religious clothing, people with purple hair,
people in wheelchairs, people who wear novelty sweatshirts, people in three-
piece suits. If someone is at your venue, then they are open to interacting with
you. So you need to be open to interacting with them. As we mentioned in
Chapter 2, you also bring distinctive attributes to the interaction. So also be
open to the idea that everyone you talk with will be willing to interact with
someone who looks like you. And once you are talking with someone, be sure
to listen to them! In Chapter 10, we’ll talk about how hard it can be to really
listen to other people, but the more different someone is from you, the more
important it is to pay attention to what they are saying.
And if you’re working on language science, you should be aware that
you have something special that can be very effective at fostering respect:
Your science explicitly values people who speak different languages. In
Emily Dawson’s investigations, one of the reasons that non-native
speakers often feel excluded at places like science museums and science
festivals is because their language is not represented in the space.
Moreover, their skill with the dominant language may make it more
difficult for them to read signs or understand detailed explanations. But
the presence of other languages in these spaces can make non-native
speakers feel more welcome and encourage greater participation. The
applied linguistic anthropologist Leslie Moore and her students followed
families around in a science museum, focusing on ones who were not
native English speakers (English being the dominant language of the
region). They reported an anecdote about one Spanish-speaking family
who dramatically changed their interaction style when they encountered
an exhibit that had signs and instructions not only in English but also in
Vietnamese and Spanish. The father in the group, who had been pretty
hands-off until that point, became much more engaged with his children –
reading the instructions and helping them do the activities. The mother in
the group explicitly mentioned the Spanish signs as the reason for his
change (Moore et al., 2019).
You can’t control the signage where you are doing your demo, but many
language science activities make a person’s access to another language a
particular asset. The funds of knowledge for a non-native speaker are differ-
ent than those of a monolingual speaker of the dominant language; for a
language science activity, those funds are valuable. Your science grants you
an opportunity to make your setting more inclusive. Take advantage of that!

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 62 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

People have many different motivations for coming to informal learning
locations, and they also bring along a variety of different kinds of experiences
with language. Everyone will respond well to an activity that is interesting and
engaging, and you can and should tailor your messages to reflect the special
properties of each conversation. Knowing your audience helps you do this.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

One dimension of audience design that we try to be sensitive to is the fact

that some people we interact with speak languages different from the ones
we speak. For example, one of us (CM) lives in the US Southwest. English
is only one of several languages that people in this area speak. Our team
typically meets many Spanish speakers in the festivals where we work. So
we have a few demos that we can do in either English or Spanish, and we
schedule volunteers to make sure there is always at least one native
speaker of Spanish in our booth.
A demo that we designed specifically for young Spanish-speaking
children combines lexical stress with the visualization of the speech
signal that we can see in wave forms. This demo is in the form of a very
simple game. We show a child something like this:
A Spanish-speaking volunteer explains two pictures on a page: One
picture in Figure 5.2 shows tacos de papa (potato) and the other shows

Figure 5.2 Lexical stress demo

Note. A page from the booklet used in the lexical stress demo showing a wave form for tacos
de papá (tacos of father).

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 Know Your Audience 63

(cont.)
tacos de papá (father). We then point to the wave form at the top of the
page and ask children to figure out which of the two pictures goes with that
image. (The wave form shows stressed syllables as bigger and darker than
unstressed syllables.) Spanish-speaking children easily get that the differ-
ence between papa and papá has to do with where the stress goes. Once
children make this connection between the wave form and the stressed
syllable, they often want to flip through the booklet and ‘read’ it on
their own! The task is so easy that children as young as three sometimes
take the booklet and run the demo with other people in their group.
The core messages for this activity are that small differences can
distinguish similar sounding words, and that we can see those differences
in special images of speech. These messages are well understood by
people who speak any language. But for Spanish speakers, this activity
has special value. The small differences that the activity highlights are
small differences in their own language!
You may have noticed that most of the activities we describe in this book
use English-language examples. That reflects the fact that both of us are
native speakers of English, and we often work in places where English is the
most common language. But this activity explicitly draws on the funds of
knowledge possessed by Spanish speakers. It creates a welcoming environ-
ment for Spanish speakers. And even better, it gives the youngest Spanish
speakers who we engage with a chance to demonstrate their knowledge.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Remind yourself of the topic you selected for your doable demo (see the
Closing Worksheet in Chapter 2).
Think about how your topic could be used to engage someone who is
an Explorer. Ideally, that is going to mean that your doable demo will be
highly interactive, it will encourage exploration, and it will be fun to do.
Write down two ideas for ways that someone could do something
interactive based on your topic. For each idea, what dimension of your
topic would they be exploring? How much fun would it be to do your
interactive activity?
Now think about how the interaction could be shifted to make it work
better with a Hobbyist and an Experience Seeker. Write down one change
you would make to adjust your interaction for each of these other kinds
of visitors.

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 64 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Audience design considers all the people involved
Audience design refers to various ways that speakers modify their speech to accommodate
to those they are addressing. Some research that helped launch the field that studies this
includes Bell (1984), Clark (1992, 1996), and Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986). For more
recent research, see Ferreira (2019) and Gann and Barr (2014). Many studies of audience
design are concerned with automatic adjustments that speakers do or do not make for their
conversational partners, such as changing how they repeat references to the same object
or idea (e.g., “the governor” for a first reference and “she” for a second one). Speakers are
rarely conscious that they make these adjustments: Some amount of audience design
appears to be an intrinsic part of our language use. However, in addition to these
automatic processes, it is also possible to consciously change how you express yourself
in response to the communicative needs of your audience. It is this kind of purposeful and
thoughtful process that we are concerned with here. And see Chapter 15, especially, for
concrete advice about how to tailor your message for different kinds of people.

2 The language landscape of every place is different

Sometimes you may be surprised at how complicated the local language landscape is
where you are! In central Ohio, where LW works, the local environment is sometimes
classified as “superdiverse” linguistically (Moore et al., 2019). That is, the area is
undergoing rapid demographic shifts, which has led to many different languages
being spoken in the area, although from year to year, which languages have the most
speakers locally can change fairly dramatically.
If you’re interested in learning more about these landscapes, the terms language
landscape and linguistic landscape are sometimes used interchangeably. But some
scholars distinguish these terms. As the main text suggests, a language landscape usually
emphasizes the languages that are used in a particular area (as you can get a sense of from
maps like at this website: http://langscape.umd.edu/map.php). A linguistic landscape
usually emphasizes language displayed in a particular place (Carr, 2019; Shohamy &
Gorter, 2009). For example, a study of a linguistic landscape in a multilingual environ-
ment might analyze identity through billboards, road signs, and place names.

3 Language crops up in popular culture

There are lots of websites where you can find out the latest linguistics buzz. If you
want to read academic linguists talking about current language-related issues, try the
Language Log (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/). But there are also many lan-
guage experts outside the academy who are writing for a popular audience. If you
want to read a real popular pro talking about language, try Gretchen McCulloch’s
site, All Things Linguistic (https://allthingslinguistic.com/). And many of the non-
academic popular language writers have content in many places, so it’s often easiest
to just search for your favorite people. Some of our favorites are Arika Okrent,
Michael Erard, Ben Zimmer, Lane Greene, and Julie Sedivy.

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 Know Your Audience 65

4 Very special museums

Full disclosure: Both authors of this book are on the advisory board of one museum
devoted to language, Planet Word (https://planetwordmuseum.org/). So naturally we
like that one! But there are other museums that center on language, like
Mundolingua (www.mundolingua.org/en/).

5 Sci-fi conlangers
Artificial, or constructed languages (conlangs) have a long history that includes
philosophically minded individuals trying to perfect a theory of concepts all the
way to science-fiction enthusiasts trying to create a culture for Klingons. Arika
Okrent’s 2009 book, In the Land of Invented Languages, is an outstanding tour of
these creations.

6 Paleontologists like to play around with language

Apparently, paleontologists also like classic rock, as they named a species of dinosaur
they discovered in 2001 after the guitarist of Dire Straits: https://www.science.org/
content/article/dire-straits-dinosaurs.

7 Lexical stress demo

Because the lexical stress demo is designed for Spanish speakers, it contrasts papa
(potato) with papá (father), and sabana (savanna) with sábana (sheet). If you don’t
know Spanish, where the stress falls in each word affects the meaning. Roughly
comparable examples from English include contract (legal agreement) – contract (to
reduce) and produce (fruit and vegetables) – produce (to manufacture). Naturally,
signed languages also use small differences to distinguish words even though their
phonology rests on elements like handshape, hand movement, and location of the
sign rather than manipulations of the vocal tract. Some noun–verb pairs in ASL differ
only in movement. For example, the noun CHAIR is made with repeated short
movements while the verb SIT is made with one big movement; the handshape and
the location of these two signs are the same though. To truly appreciate this and
several other ASL examples, watch this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=
4gc6fwXwFV0.

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 Creating Relevance by
6 Generating Interest

OPENING WORKSHEET

Write down a brief description of a time when you were blown away by
something you learned about the workings of your topic area.
Write down your answers to a few of the questions below.
What was the phenomenon? Was it dramatic? Did it make you smile?
What was it that especially caught your attention?
Where did you encounter the phenomenon? Was it something you
learned in class? Something that happened in real life? Something you
read about in a book or heard about on a podcast? Something you noticed
in a movie?
Why did this grab you in particular? Was it a puzzle that you solved?
Was it completely unexpected? Was it unlike other things you had learned
before? Was it funny? Was it relevant for your daily life?

If you have some experience with college classrooms, then you surely have
encountered (or maybe been) the students who are taking the class because it
satisfies a requirement, or just because it fits into their schedule. These
students aren’t there because they are passionate about the topic; instead,
they are there because they have to be. In a school setting, these students will
stay – and will often even pay attention and do the work – because the
teacher is grading their performance. The teacher doesn’t have to do any-
thing special to convince these students that it’s worth staying in the class.
The grade and the credit are motivation enough.
Talking with the public in a free-choice environment is nothing like that!
If you’re talking with people at a museum, or at a festival, or in any kind of
open public space, you’re talking with people who don’t have to be there.
They can choose something else at any time. Either people choose to engage
with you, or they choose not to. If your goal is to inspire and educate people

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 67

about language science, then it is up to you to motivate people to want to

talk with you.
Giving a lecture is one way that teachers educate adolescent and
adult students in classrooms – and you may even have had great experi-
ences with really inspiring lectures. But this approach just will not fly in a
free-choice setting. Even if you give the best lecture in the world, a
festival booth or a roving museum cart is not in a place that is friendly
to any kind of lecture. It will likely be noisy, and crowded, and full of all
kinds of distracting things (other booths to visit, cotton candy, school
groups, fireworks, science cheerleaders). Your interactions will be shorter
than a lecture, and they need to adapt to the people you are talking with
and their immediate circumstances. What you need is a conversation, not
a lecture.
To get started, you need to give people a reason to want to have a
conversation with you. We know from Chapter 2 that a good conversation
is cooperative and that one of the fundamental rules for maintaining
cooperation is being relevant. We’re going to talk about two big ways that
you can make your conversations relevant to broader audiences. In
Chapter 7, we’ll talk about how to connect your language topic to the real
world: How can you take what others care about and connect it to your
topic? But in this chapter, we’ll start with you. How can you take what you
care about and make it seem relevant for someone else?

Generating Interest and Excitement

The best way to get people to want to talk with you is to show them that your
science is interesting – it’s something worth being excited about. In principle,
this shouldn’t be hard! After all, you must think your science is pretty
interesting or you wouldn’t want to share it with other people. You need to
use your own excitement to encourage others to have a conversation
with you.
The idea that the first step in this kind of engagement is getting people
excited might sound familiar. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, when the
National Research Council put together their guidelines for teaching people
about science in informal learning settings, their number one strand was to
“generate interest and excitement.” Excitement is critical because it’s what
keeps people choosing you in the free-choice environment. The basic
principle is familiar from the advertising world. Before you can sell your
wares, you need to get your buyers in the door! Without the structures of a

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 68 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

formal classroom, you need to offer a reason for people to come talk with
you. You’re proposing a topic of conversation; you have to make it a topic
worthy of their cooperation.
For example, one demo that one of us (CM) has used to get a conversation
started involves an ultrasound machine. Ultrasound imaging is a noninva-
sive tool that can record cross-sectional images of the moving vocal tract.
Many people are familiar with these images because they are used to monitor
the progress of pregnancies. Imagine visitors to a festival walking by your
booth and seeing such a machine in use. The moving images are cool! The gel
is yucky! You’ve just accomplished Strand 1 of the six strands of science
learning: generate interest and excitement. One of the other reasons we like
this demo is because it is also a great way to address Strand 5: Collaborate in
using the tools of science. Tools can be a great way to capture attention and
start the ball rolling. People will ask what this machine could possibly have
to do with language. Many people think yucky = fun! and are not just willing
but eager to have ultrasound gel under their chins and see the tool in action.
If you have people produce words like bar, door, and fur, they can compare
the ways their tongues make the /r/ sound in different phonological
environments. From here, your conversation might go to the biology of
making speech sounds, or why the /r/ sound can be especially hard to
produce for some people, or the linguistics of coarticulation effects. Once
people are interested, you have lots of choices for what to talk about.

Figure 6.1 A child using an ultrasound machine at the Tucson Festival of Books

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 69

But interest and excitement don’t just attract people to your demo. The
psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Christine Branigan found that when
college students experienced positive emotions (rather than negative ones),
they were more open to exploration and better able to integrate information
(Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). These researchers used nature videos to
make people feel good, and even just a few minutes of watching a waddling
penguin helped students do better global visual processing and come up with
more ideas for activities they would like to do. Making people feel good will
help them learn better from you.
What’s more, those positive emotions are also part of your long-term
strategy. Most conversations in a free-choice learning setting aren’t very
long. Long chats will probably be no longer than fifteen minutes, and
short ones may be under five minutes. There’s a real limit to how much
people can learn in such a short time, even if you are making them happy.
But when people create positive memories of an event, they hold on to
those feelings.
Our memories aren’t like newsreels: We don’t just record our lives and
then rewatch key parts when we want. Instead, we hold on to our experi-
ences in bits and pieces, and when we remember something, we have to
reassemble the bits and pieces. When you are engaged emotionally by an
event, you will remember it more vividly. But it turns out that you’re not
necessarily remembering all the specific details better. People use the emo-
tional content as an anchor, and they hold on to that firmly, even as the
fine-grained details can become hazy. Think of a favorite vacation, or a
recent birthday party. You can probably remember whether you liked the
event or not, and you might recall the general way things happened. But for
most of us, for most events, the moment-to-moment details fade away.
Could you ace a test about everything that happened at your last birthday
party? The fact that we often forget the specifics doesn’t make the experi-
ences unimportant. If you remember that you had a blast at last year’s
party, you might be inclined to have another such party this year.
A positive emotion can encourage us, even if we don’t remember all of
the exact elements that created it.
If you create positive emotions around language science, it will matter.
People may not remember the exact details that you talked about, but if they
walk away with the general impression that language science is exciting and
interesting, then they are more likely to want to engage with it in the future.
Maybe that means they’ll notice language phenomena that they missed
before interacting with you. Maybe that means they will talk with the next
language science expert they encounter at a free-choice location. Maybe it
means they will pick up a book on the topic. Maybe it means they will go

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 70 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Figure 6.2 Ohio State University students having fun at the COSI Science Festival

home and check out language science information on the Internet. Maybe it
means they will take a class on linguistics or even end up pursuing an
advanced degree in a related science. You never know how big the tree will
grow when you plant the seed!
And the reverse is also true. If people walk away from your conversation
feeling like your science is boring, judgmental, totally incoherent, or irrele-
vant, then they will be less likely to want to engage with it going forward.
When you’re talking with the public, you’re representing the field. Represent
it as a field that is worthy of their time and attention.
One worry that people new to this kind of work sometimes have is that the
activities they design aren’t actually fun. So they think that they will be a
disappointment to people who are looking for entertainment. Taking a
negative attitude like that is probably the best way to make sure that your
activity is boring. Instead, try to remember why you think the topic of your
demo is interesting. If you’re having fun with your activity, then you’ll
dramatically increase the chances that others will have fun with it as well.
So much for why it’s important to generate excitement. How exactly do
you actually do this? We recommend two main techniques: (1) Give people
an Aha! moment about language, and (2) Go back to the basics of how
language works.

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 71

Aha! Moments
One of the easiest ways to get people interested in a topic is to show them
something new or unexpected. Language is complex: It is full of amazing
phenomena, and most of them are almost completely unfamiliar to the
general public. People may use language all the time, but rarely think about
how language actually works, and think about it least of all for the language
they themselves speak. You can give an Aha! moment either by showing
people something they had absolutely no idea was true, or by showing them
something that they absolutely did know was true but had never
considered before.
If you’ve taken an introductory linguistics class, you’ve probably had
many Aha! moments yourself. For example, you may be familiar with this
demonstration about allophonic variation. You hold a piece of paper in front
of your mouth as you say words containing [p]. (If you had an adventurous
instructor, she might have used a lit candle instead of a piece of paper.) First
you say words that start with [p] like pit, pot, and pat. The paper (or the
flame) will waver for each word. Next, you say words that start with [sp] like
spit, spot, and spat. This time, the paper (or the flame) won’t move at all.
What’s going on? When this consonant is at the beginning of the word, we
say it differently (with a puff of air) from when it comes after [s] (where we
don’t really let the air go in the same way). The technical term for that puff of
air is aspiration, and in English, whether or not we aspirate a sound depends
on its surrounding sounds.
For most language scientists, this phenomenon, and even this specific
demonstration, is pretty familiar. But most people have given very little
thought to phonetic variability and coarticulation effects, and they tend to
think about sounds in terms of the letters we use to represent them. Taken
together, that means people are genuinely surprised to find out that they
pronounce their [p] differently in different words. Plus, the fact that you can
predict just how they will shift their pronunciation shows that you know
something unexpected.
To show you how broadly you can think about Aha! moments, here’s a
completely different example drawn from syntax. Ask people to say which of
the following mini-conversations is weird:

(1) Did Mary eat a sandwich yet? Yes, she ate already.
(2) Did Susan eat a shoe yet? Yes, she ate already.

This example asks people to make an acceptability judgment of a kind that is

common in language science. It’s just that most people haven’t ever thought

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 72 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Figure 6.3 Sometimes, you really want to talk about eating a shoe!
Note. This photograph is used with permission of Getty Images. Photo credit: Yoann JEZEQUEL.

about language this way. People don’t usually think about how good or how
weird a sentence sounds relative to a context, and they don’t usually think
about how they can change that context to make a sentence sound better
(or weirder).
In this case, conversation (2) is weirder than (1) because it breaks a
convention about when you’re allowed to drop a word in English. Both
of these conversations have the same second sentence (the answer to a
question), and that sentence has a distinctive property: It leaves out the
direct object of the verb. English does let you leave out words like that, but
you’re not allowed to do it whenever you want. It’s OK to leave out the
“sandwich” in conversation (1) because sandwiches are things that people
often eat. And, in English, missing words usually have to refer to something
that would typically belong in that spot in the sentence. You fill in the
sandwich with pretty much no thought at all. But in conversation (2), the
missing word that you’re supposed to fill in refers to an unusual thing to
eat. People don’t generally eat their shoes. There’s nothing wrong about
saying the full sentence (“she ate a shoe already”), especially if that’s
really what Susan did. There’s also nothing wrong with leaving out the
direct object – after all, conversation (1) sounds just fine. But if you want to
talk about something unusual, like eating a shoe, you need to spell it out
with all the words. Most people haven’t thought about how the rules of

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 73

linguistic communication (pragmatics) constrains how we interpret missing

information. This example shows people that they are bound by rules they
didn’t even know they were using!
For both the example of aspiration and the example of word dropping,
a big part of what creates the Aha! moment is finding out that you’re
always doing more when you talk than you realized. You’re shifting your
pronunciations without thinking about it. You’re filling in empty words in
systematic ways without consciously pondering the alternatives. Our lan-
guage use is so effortless most of the time that it is easy to overlook just
how much goes into every little piece of it. Giving people a glimpse of the
complexity that they are pulling off all the time provides just the kind of
moment that grabs people’s interest and can get them excited about what’s
going on.

Go Back to Basics
Like any science, language science has its share of theoretical disputes, and if
you are doing cutting-edge research, theory is really important for making
progress in the field. But, also like any science, there is a large stockpile of
facts that all language scientists agree on. For many aspects of language,
advanced researchers aren’t arguing over the basic facts that need to be
explained; they are debating what the right explanation is. If you can
describe your topic in a way that is theory-neutral, then you are definitely
on the right track. The general public doesn’t usually care about academic
arguments. What is the phenomenon that is so exciting to researchers that
it’s worth arguing about? Focus on that phenomenon – that’s what the
general public will find interesting to talk about!
So, take a step back from the details of any specific science problem and let
yourself be awestruck by the big picture. If you’re writing a research paper,
your goal is to make your question precise enough that you can explain the
details and make progress on a tractable problem. But you’re not trying to
defend a research paper to the general public. The general public wants to
understand why someone would bother to look into the topic area in the first
place. What are the background assumptions that your detailed question is
building on?
In the case of allophonic variation (where blowing on a piece of paper
provided an Aha! moment), you can go back to basics by describing some
underlying premises of phonology. We change how we pronounce even simple
sounds (like [p]) depending on the other sounds around them. But we count the

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 74 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

different pronunciations as the same sound so long as they don’t change the
meaning of the word. You can have people test that part out by asking
them to compare a word like pit without the puff of air and a word like spit
with the puff of air. Both of those utterances will sound a little odd,
but neither one will create a new English word. And if you want to go
further with someone, you can pull out examples from a different language
where that difference in pronunciation does create a new word. How
remarkable that different languages organize tiny differences in pronunci-
ation in different ways!
In the case of leaving out the direct object from a sentence (where judging
a conversation’s weirdness provided an Aha! moment), you can go back to
basics by describing some underlying premises of pragmatics. Language
communicates meaning not only through what we say but also through
what we don’t say. One of the critical tools we use to understand what’s
not there is context – sometimes that context comes from other sentences
and sometimes it comes from what we know about the world. When you
want to talk about very common things, context can do a lot of work. But the
more unusual the thing is that you want to talk about, the more you have to
say because our background knowledge won’t help as much. And if you want
to go further with someone, you can again pull out examples from other
languages where there are different expectations about what words
people will drop. How remarkable that we are able to understand what people
don’t say!
One big advantage in going back to the basics is that it can help you
deal with a common worry about talking with the public, namely that
you’re not being fully responsible about all the theoretical complexities
of the field. (We’ll talk more about that in Chapter 9.) The more advanced
you are in a science, the more likely you are to have a distinct theoretical
point of view about how its focus works. Perhaps you subscribe to a
particular theory about where the line between phonology and phonetics
should be drawn. Perhaps you are embroiled in debates about the syntactic
representation of omitted words. In order for someone to really understand
your position, they would need to know a lot of details so they can
appreciate your theoretical perspective (and agree with you on its
correctness).
But your goal here isn’t to convert a colleague to your point of view. And
when it comes to most of the basics, pretty much all theoretical positions
actually agree with each other. Do you lean toward the nativist or construct-
ivist view of language acquisition? Well, both positions agree that children
learn language without explicit instruction. Do you subscribe to the
Minimalist program of syntax, or are you more of a Tree Adjoining

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 75

Grammar type of person? Well, both positions agree that sentences have
hierarchical structure. Do you believe that phonemes emerge from exemplar
structures or is Optimality Theory the way to go? Well, both positions agree
that different languages have different sound inventories. One way to move
yourself toward being theory-neutral is to pretend that your favorite theory
is completely wrong. What’s left of your phenomenon if your analysis is
wrong? If the bare facts of the phenomenon would still be interesting, then
you’ve got something worth talking about.
If you’ve been working on language for a while, many of these back-
ground assumptions may seem so obvious that they’re kind of boring. But
most people haven’t thought about these things before. Once you start
viewing language from a somewhat more naïve perspective, all kinds of
things will start to seem remarkable. Do you know how fast your tongue
has to move in order for you to speak at even a pretty slow speech rate? It’s
like our tongues are all virtuoso pianists! Do you know that if you change
the way you pronounce just a few vowels, people will actually think you’re
from a different part of the country? How can a tiny acoustic difference
reveal where someone was raised? Learning a foreign language is super
hard, so how come babies can learn a language without even taking any
classes? These are the kinds of fundamental facts about language that keep
researchers working for years, and they will help you connect with
the public.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

To attract people and keep them in a conversation with you, you need to
show them why your topic is interesting! Introduce them to core phenom-
ena of language and help them think about language in a new way. If you
can get people excited, they will be more likely to talk with you in the short
term and more likely to stay interested in language in the long term.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Research journals are full of interesting language phenomena to talk

about. But most journals are written for a scholarly audience, and they
tend to be full of special terms and fine-grained details. Here, we show
how you can take a recent article and find the Aha! moment within it and
identify the basics that underlie the latest research.

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 76 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
We went to the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America,
Language. In 2018, the linguists Lauren Clemens and Jessica Coon
published an article there titled “Deriving Verb-Initial Word Order in
Mayan.” This paper was definitely not written for the general public –
it’s a highly technical piece about the right way to analyze the VSO/VOS
word orders common to Mayan languages, and it argues that the VOS
word order can be generated in three distinctive ways. How can we turn
the core elements of this paper into an engaging demonstration?
In this case, we start by figuring out how to go back to basics. What’s
the deep language-related fact that underlies this whole paper? Word
order. In fact, we find three distinct word order basics here that matter.
The first basic is that languages generally have a dominant word order. For
example, in English, most sentences, most of the time, put the subject before
the verb and the verb before the direct object. We might even want to introduce
a bit of jargon to describe this general fact – the letters S, V, and O are used to
stand for subject, verb, and object; and the order we put the letters in represents
the order of those three elements in a language’s typical sentence. The idea that
you can describe a language in this way makes intuitive sense to people, but it
isn’t necessarily something they’ve thought of before.
The second basic fact here is that different languages have different
dominant word orders. English is SVO, but Japanese is SOV. And, as it
happens, Mayan languages (such as Yucatec, Ch’ol, and K’iche’) are either
VOS or VSO. The Language paper itself contains many examples from
various Mayan languages, and you can use those to illustrate this second
basic fact.
For instance, you could write out these words from the Mayan language
Q’anjob’al on different cards along with their English translations (if
you’re fancy, you might illustrate each word with a picture):

(1) max y-il = saw

(2) no’ tx’I’ = dog
(3) naqLwin = Pedro
How would you put these pieces together to say “The dog saw Pedro”? The
correct answer is 1–2–3, just as they are listed here. You just showed off a
word order that is probably very different from what people are familiar
with. If your audience is composed of monolingual English speakers, this
very well may lead to an Aha! moment for them.
One possible way to develop this activity would simply be to make more
examples – either by using more sentences from the Mayan languages

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 77

(cont.)
described in the paper or with sentences from other languages. You’re
helping people appreciate that there’s not one right way for all languages
to organize their words – different languages do it differently and speakers
of those languages understand each other just fine.
But maybe you want to go in a different direction. Another word order
basic that is integral to this article is the idea that not every sentence in a
language shows off that language’s dominant word order. One example
from this paper involved the process of leaving out different words in the
sentence. In some Mayan languages (e.g., Itzaj), you can either leave out
the direct object (as in the English example we discussed in the main text),
or leave out the subject of the sentence. So, if you only see a verb and one
noun, for example kill and jaguar the sentence could either be VS (“the
jaguar killed [someone]”) or VO (“[someone] killed the jaguar”).
Ambiguous sentences like this can make it harder to figure out what the
dominant word order is overall.
In fact, you can find examples in just about every language that will
illustrate nondominant word orders. In English, for example, we can use a
different order if we want to emphasize something. This sentence more or
less has the order OSV: “It was Italian food I really liked.” An example that
many people are familiar with is the distinctive way that talks the charac-
ter Yoda (from the Star Wars universe). Yoda uses VOS ordering when he
says things like “Killed a jaguar, he did.” But because Yoda has some other
idiosyncrasies as well, you’d want to choose examples carefully if using
him in a demo of VOS sentences.
Depending on how you want to spin these basics, you could be helping
people understand what linguists do when they analyze a language (they
have to sift through complicated and ambiguous sentences to find
dominant patterns). Or you could be helping people appreciate that their
own language isn’t quite as simple as they might have thought – and it
might even share some properties with a language they didn’t know
much about!
At this point, you may have realized that our activity is barely scratch-
ing the surface of what the original paper was really all about. That’s OK!
Most members of the general public – or even most faculty in a linguistics
department – aren’t interested enough in the details of word order deriv-
ations in Mayan to want to hear about the advanced points in the paper.
But for the few people who really are that interested, this back-to-basics
approach will help them get there.

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 78 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

CLOSING WORKSHEET

In Chapter 5, we asked you to think about two ways that would allow
different kinds of people to engage with your topic, focusing on interactivity
and having fun. Review what you wrote for that worksheet.
Do your earlier ideas involve providing people with an Aha! moment?
Do they involve going back to basics and helping people appreciate some
foundational background? Do they sound like they would be fun to do?
Now revise your interaction! No matter what you thought of before,
you can make it better – more interactive, more awe-inspiring, more fun.
Write down new and improved versions of your original ideas
for interaction.

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Science cheerleaders
Yes, Science Cheerleaders are a real thing! It’s a group of former cheerleaders (for
sports like the United States National Basketball Association) who have STEM
degrees. They aim to break down stereotypes about what a scientist should look like.
You can read more about them on their website: https://sciencecheerleaders.org/.

2 Making /r/ sounds

Describing experimental research on tongue shape, position, and movement to an
academic audience might refer to rhotic misarticulation, biofeedback as treatment, or
allophony. For examples of ultrasound imaging in such research, see Byun et al.
(2014) and Mielke et al. (2010). For the kind of audience we’re describing here, a very
different tack will be critical to maintaining their interest.

3 Making people feel good will help them learn better from you
There is a large literature on memory and how emotions affect it. For a good review
of the basics, we recommend Kensinger (2009). One set of details that we glossed over
in the main text is the difference between negative and positive emotions. Both kinds
of emotions lead to more vivid memories, but the two differ along other dimensions.
One difference is that the cognitive broadening we mentioned in the text as an effect
of positive emotions extends from the learning phase into memory recognition and
recall. When people recognize positive pictures (Yegiyan & Yonelinas, 2011) or recall
positive autobiographical memories (Schaefer & Philpot, 2005), they are more sensi-
tive to peripheral or broader situational properties than when they do the same tasks
with negative pictures or negative memories. Negative emotions have the general

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 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest 79

effect of narrowing people’s representations, while positive emotions seem to make

them more diffuse and expansive. Another relevant impact of positive emotions is
that they improve your prospective memory. That is, people do a better job of
remembering to do planned tasks in the future when those tasks evoke positive
rather than negative emotions (Rendell et al., 2011). You’ll remember to feed the
cat but maybe not to clean her litter box.

4 Yoda’s distinctive way of talking

It’s likely that Yoda speaks English. But he does use quite a mix of word orders,
possibly because he was scripted by different screenwriters (Kaminsky, 2008; see
also http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/
yodaspeak.html). Maybe Hollywood should employ more linguists? For example,
many of his sentences show English constructions that are rare but generally
acceptable. As historical linguist George Walkden argues, Yoda ‘fronts’ his verb
phrases more loosely than is typical in modern English (Walkden, 2012). “Stay and
help you, I will” is an example of this moving of the verbs stay and help to the front
of the sentence. You can read more about Yoda’s syntax in the Language Log (e.g.,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002173.html). Somewhat less
technical commentary can be found on Grammar Girl (www.quickanddirtytips
.com/education/grammar/yoda-grammar) and The Week (https://theweek.com/art
icles/442256/why-strangely-yoda-speaks).

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 Creating Relevance by
7 Making Connections

OPENING WORKSHEET

We’ve met a lot of different people while working in informal learning

settings, including a toddler, a fourth grader, a nurse, a car enthusiast, a
math teacher, a devotee of singing shows, a basketball fan, a bookworm,
a political junkie, an electrical engineer, an astronaut, a neurosurgeon, and
a ninety-year-old Japanese immigrant to the United States.
Think about two kinds of people who you might encounter – you can
pick one from the list above of people we’ve met, or come up with other
kinds of people. For each of your two kinds of people, write down the
following things:

• Why does language matter to them?

• What aspects of language are likely to be familiar to them?
• Would they be likely to have special knowledge about any dimensions
of language?
• Where would they encounter language in their everyday life?

In Chapter 6, we talked about how to make your language phenomenon

relevant to people by making it interesting. In that case, the starting point is
you: You’re trying to attract people by showing off something you care about
and putting it in its best (and most interesting) light. You were creating the
best sales pitch for a product that you really believe in. In this chapter, we’re
talking about how to make your work relevant by focusing on the other
participants in the conversation. Instead of starting with what you think is
interesting, think now about what other people find interesting. What
matters to them and why? In Chapter 10, we’re going to encourage you to
really listen to what people say. That’s by far the best way to find out what
individuals care about. The current chapter offers some useful ways to
connect our work for many people.

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 Creating Relevance by Making Connections 81

The Real World Is Relevant

People live in the real world, not on a university campus, and their back-
ground context isn’t the previous literature, or the history of the field, or
academic debates about theory. Their context is what happens in real life.
Their real life. As Chapter 5 notes, people’s own lives include a lot of
language experiences – in school, at the doctor’s office, when traveling,
when talking to their families. What happens in your own life is relevant
to you; if you can connect your topic to something in people’s everyday lives,
then you instantly make it relevant.
What’s more, the real world is something that people know about already.
People have funds of knowledge about how it works. Moreover, in
Chapters 11 and 12, we’ll talk about how to structure information to help
people remember it better. The key to doing that well is to provide familiar
information before you introduce unfamiliar information. This is because
people learn better when they have an established base to work from.
Providing a relevant context will make your facts more meaningful.
Connecting your work to the real world will therefore not only make it
relevant for people; it will also help them understand it better.

The Real World Is Bigger Than You Think

When academics write grant proposals, they are always asked to explain the
broader impacts or social relevance of their work. How will broader society
benefit if your proposal is funded? If your topic area has medical or educa-
tional applications, you probably feel pretty good about this kind of question.
Improving the technology behind hearing aids so that people can understand
the speech they hear is a tangible societal benefit. Improving our techniques
for teaching individuals with a dyslexia how to read also has broad positive
impacts on society. But if your demo is on a more theoretical topic – say, how
children learn the meanings of aspectual morphology or how they master the
rules of pronoun reference – you have to work a little bit harder to explain
why the answer to your research question matters.
But when you’re talking with the general public, you don’t have to meet
the standards of a grant review! The people you’re talking with aren’t
deciding whether or not to fund your research. They are only deciding
whether or not to give you a few minutes of their time. Your topic area
doesn’t have to hold the key to curing cancer or solving world peace; it just
has to be relevant enough to justify spending the time to have a conversation
with you!
So, how do you link to their real world? The trick is to find someplace –
anyplace – where your topic makes contact with people’s everyday lives. It
isn’t actually hard to do this: Remember, language is all around us and

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 82 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

people use it and interact with it every day. You just need to be open to how
your topic connects with people’s everyday experiences. In Chapter 5, we
covered a range of life experiences where people connect with language:
learning to spell, learning a foreign language, children learning to talk,
getting older and losing your hearing, having a speech disorder, having
multilingual family members. If you can connect your work to any of these
topics, you are well on your way to making it relevant for lots of
other people.
But you can think even more broadly than that! Language is something
that is interwoven into our everyday lives in a constant, casual way. It’s also
OK to think about areas where language is playful and fun! We’ve high-
lighted three areas below that create great language connections for people –
even for people who don’t see themselves as “language people.”

Advertising
Advertising is often all about language. It is something people encounter
regularly as consumers, and some people also produce it as creators.
Advertising slogans, company names, company icons, and acronyms are
all rich with language content. Anything related to semantics and word
combinations will likely have a good advertising link. Thinking about how
advertising elements translate from language to language is also a great way
to think about cross-linguistic differences. In addition, there’s the way that
ads play on the social uses of language, using different voices and dialects to
evoke different emotions and associations.
For example, suppose you’re interested in deverbal nouns and rules that
make those productive in English. A quick Google search reveals that the
slogan for Bounty paper towels is “the quicker picker-upper.” That’s a fun
turn of phrase and it centers on a verb (pick up) turned into a noun; plus,
it involves a verb-particle construction (the difference between pick and
pick up). If your audience is from the United States, they will likely have
heard the slogan before. Even if they aren’t, a native speaker of English will
have the intuition that the Bounty slogan is a reasonable – if clever – phrase
to say. As a language scientist, you can probe that intuition: What makes the
slogan acceptable? What happens if you rearrange the words? If you drop the
-er on picker or on upper? How is this phrase noun-y and how is it verb-y?
What other phrases work this way? Talking about deverbal nouns is a very
academic thing to do. Talking about why the Bounty slogan works is
something people can relate to.
In fact, one option is to start with your favorite advertising slogan and
then figure out how to describe the language science behind it. For example,
how would you explain why calling 7-Up the “Uncola” is effective? How

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 Creating Relevance by Making Connections 83

would you explain how we know who is eating something in the Campbell’s
soup slogan “The soup that eats like a meal”? What kind of conversation
might you have based on the old Sara Lee cake slogan “Nobody doesn’t like
Sara Lee”? The world of advertising covers a wide area and offers a wealth of
example sentences that can start interesting conversations.

Cell Phones
Pretty much any topic related to speech perception can be easily connected to
your phone. There are the old-fashioned kinds of connections that have been
true of phones forever. For example, it’s harder to understand people when
you can’t see them; on the other hand, we do reliably recognize the voices of
specific people when they call us. Then there are the newfangled kinds of
connections that have arisen from modern cell phones. For example, what
are we really communicating with emoji – tone of voice? gestures? some-
thing else entirely?
Or think about the way that your phone suggests the next word in your
texts – that’s a form of predictive parsing. We’ve done a very simple activity
with people where we ask them to start typing into their phones (or into one
of our tablets) and see if they agree on what the computer auto-suggests for
them. There are some easy ways to trick the programming to offer weird
linguistic structures – try inserting lots of adjectives and see what happens,
or try using conjoined subjects like “the boy and the girl” and see what it
picks for the verb. Or you can demonstrate other kinds of association biases
embedded in the program by seeing what pronouns it suggests for different
professional titles.
Or consider how you can make your phone do things by talking to it.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is now fully embedded not only into cell
phones, but also many other devices and services. If you are interested in any
dimension of speech production or perception, you should be able to make a
connection to that kind of technology. And the mistakes these systems make
are often as interesting as their successes. Currently (as of 2022, when we are
writing this book), ASR systems don’t recognize all kinds of speech equally
well. For example, in a 2017 study, the computational sociolinguist Rachael
Tatman put YouTube’s auto-captioning software through a dialect test. She
had YouTube caption a series of videos in which individuals who spoke
different dialects of English read the same list of words. The individuals
came from many different places, including California, New Zealand, and
Scotland. So they pronounced the words as you’d expect people from those
places to do. Human beings have little trouble understanding all these people,
but YouTube did a lot worse at captioning the Scottish English speaker
compared to the California English speaker. On top of that, YouTube also

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 84 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Figure 7.1 Everybody enjoys their phone!

Note. This picture is used with permission from Getty Images. Photo credit: Tim Robberts.

did a lot worse captioning women than it did men. And when the women
spoke non-California dialects, YouTube did worst of all. Many people have
actually experienced these kinds of problems with ASR for themselves, and
it’s pretty easy to recreate them: Rachael Tatman’s research could be done
with just a laptop! If your favorite topic area is differences in linguistic
dialect or style or gender, then it is easy to make that relevant by asking
people to think about how computers can – and how they should – process
those kinds of speech differences.

Popular Songs
Song lyrics would never cut it as a kind of broader impact in a grant, but
people do know lots of them! Lyrics are just poetry set to music, and you can
connect to both dimensions. On the poetry side, lyrics offer interesting ways
to talk about things like alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, as well as just
about every kind of wordplay. If you’re interested in rap music, try color-
coding some rap lyrics to show off what words and phrases are being rhymed
and which words are linked by alliteration. This can be a fun way to get
people to focus on what language sounds like compared to how it is written.
Or you could think about how the musical element of a song influences how
you hear and remember the lyrics. Mishearings of lyrics are common enough
to have a name – mondegreens – and they can be pretty funny. Whether it’s

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 Creating Relevance by Making Connections 85

Jimi Hendrix kissing this guy or Taylor Swift and her lonely Starbucks lovers,
people will have experienced this phenomenon. And if your chosen topic area
involves things like phonotactic regularities or coarticulation effects, these
misperceptions are great ways to show off your science.

Making Long-Distance Connections:

Conversational Digressions

One important feature of the real world is that people are familiar with it and
can talk with you about it. Ideally, your conversation is something you’re
doing with some sense of equality: You’re not talking at people. You’re
talking with them. But a potential side effect of that equality is that the
people you’re talking with may take the conversation in a direction that you
weren’t expecting. What to do?
Here’s an example from a conversation one of us (CM) had with a visitor to
the USA Science and Engineering Festival back in 2014 who was asking about
a demo using spectrograms of people’s speech. Before we get to the conversa-
tional surprise, you can see in spectrograms a lot of detail about speakers and
their speech. People who do a spectrogram demo might sit in front of a laptop
that is running a program like Praat to record themselves saying their own
names in their own voices. We then show images of their speech. It’s easy for
them to find vowels in these images when we ask them to consider which
sounds last longer; or to find stop consonants (e.g., in a name like Peter) when
we ask where they see breaks; or to find stressed syllables when we ask which
parts of their names are louder. (We adjust our juicy questions to whatever
they record.) Conversations about such phonological elements are easy to get
going like this, and we often end this demo by printing out wave forms for
people to take home. Figure 7.2 illustrates two kinds of images that this demo

Figure 7.2 A wave form (top) and a spectrogram (bottom) showing the words see, sue, and saw

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 86 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

can show; because we mentioned vowels earlier, this figure shows three
words – each starting with the consonant [s] and ending with the consonant
[w] and distinguished by the vowels [i], [u], and [ɔ].
Back to our visitor who was unusually inquisitive about spectrograms of
speech. It turned out he wanted to know whether spectrographic analyses
might have forensic uses. He was animated by the case of the then-owner of
the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling. (The Clippers are a professional
basketball team in the United States.) A recording of racist comments had
come out, and Sterling was denying that he was the speaker on the recording.
The conversation went far beyond the consonants and vowels in the names we
were recording – on to what kinds of information spectrographic analyses can
show, how one would need some basis for comparison to see whether Sterling
was the speaker, and about the use of science in the courts more generally. We
hadn’t originally thought about this activity as relating to voice recognition for
a court case related to racism, but that’s the direction the conversation took.
Making a connection to what someone else is interested in requires
attending to their interests. In this case, we connected a sports fan who
cared about sports-related news to the science of speech production and
perception. In Chapter 10, we’ll add more on the theme of listening to other
people. Only through good listening will you be able to make these kinds of
unexpected connections.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

You can make your topic relevant to other people by connecting it to
something that people already care about in the real world. There are many
types of real-world connections you can make. Be open to thinking about
contexts where your topic matters for people.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

In Chapter 6, we talked about some ways to make topics like allophonic

variation interesting for people. Here, we want to suggest some ways that
you could make that topic relevant as well!

Allophones in song lyrics

Have you ever noticed that singers sometimes pronounce words in weird
ways when they sing? Pop stars like Alanis Morissette and Selena Gomez

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 Creating Relevance by Making Connections 87

(cont.)

have gotten some internet attention on this topic: You can hear some clips
of this through Reggie Ugwu’s 2015 BuzzFeed posting, or read about it on
Siu-Lan Tan’s 2015 posting on Psychology Today.
What are they doing? Sometimes they are extending their vowels and
turning them into diphthongs. That is, they are pronouncing sounds in a
word like bow (as in, tie a bow) more like it’s boy. They also sometimes
pronounce consonants at the end of words without fully releasing them.
That is, when they say a word like fight, they swallow the end of the last [t]
sound so the word sounds more like fie.
Why are they doing this? One reason seems to be that singing things in
a distinctive way helps the singers stand out. And that makes sense from a
language science perspective! Regional dialect differences often depend
on pronunciation differences similar to the ones these singers are using.
For example, in the United States, extending vowels in different ways is a
hallmark between Northern and Southern English: Northerners use the
diphthong vowel [ai] when they say pie, but Southerners just use the
single vowel [a] in the same word.
Another reason probably has to do with the fact that lyrics have to fit
inside of songs, which have their own rhythms and tempos. It’s easy to
extend a note over a very long vowel, and swallowing a consonant can
help you connect words and stay on beat. A related reason has to do with
the fact that lyrics are a form of poetry, and poets have always played
around with lengthening and shortening words to fit the poetic structure
and to create desired rhyming and timing schemes. So there are lots of
good reasons for singers to modify their pronunciations.
What does this all have to do with allophones? An allophone is a
variant of a sound that doesn’t change the meaning of a word. In
Chapter 6, we used the example of the [p] sound – you pronounce it
differently at the beginning of a word like pot than you do in spot. Even
though the singers are changing the way they pronounce these sounds,
you can still understand the meanings of the lyrics! They usually aren’t
shifting their pronunciations so much that they cross over into creating
new words. We modify our speech sounds all the time so they fit together
better in our regular spoken speech; the singers are just doing something a
bit more extreme as they are fitting their sounds into a song.
So why do people think these words sound weird? Even though the
singers aren’t shifting things too far, they are shifting them away from
standard spoken pronunciation. And we are so sensitive to even mild
variations in how people say things that we notice the singers have done

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 88 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
something unusual. And all of this could be part of the reason that
musicologists Nat Condit-Schultze and David Huron have found that it
is harder to understand words when they are being sung than when they
are being spoken (Condit-Schultze & Huron, 2017).

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Think about the topic area of your doable demo. In Chapters 5 and 6, you
worked on turning that topic into an interactive activity. Now think about
how you can make your topic area relevant to other people’s lives.
Write down two ways that people might encounter your topic area in
their everyday life. In addition, see if you can write down one way that the
specific activity you came up with can be connected to people’s real lives.

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Broader impacts in research grants
Funding agencies across the world have different ways of encouraging researchers to
think about how to make their work benefit the broader society. In the United States,
for example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) values projects that accomplish
what it calls “societally relevant outcomes.” These could include results like improv-
ing hearing aid technology, broadening the kinds of people who are trained to do
some kind of research, or changing the public’s understanding of some research –
exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about in this book. You can read more about
NSF’s broader vision here: www.nsf.gov/od/oia/special/broaderimpacts/.
Similar considerations matter for other funding agencies, including the Australian
Research Council (www.arc.gov.au/engagement-and-impact-assessment) and UK
Research and Innovation (www.ukri.org/), which advocates giving “everyone the oppor-
tunity to contribute and to benefit, enriching lives locally, nationally, and internationally.”

2 Language is in our everyday lives

For more examples of how language is woven into our daily lives, we highly
recommend Dan Jurafsky’s delightful book, The Language of Food: A Linguist
Reads the Menu (Jurafsky, 2014) (https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/

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 Creating Relevance by Making Connections 89

thelanguageoffood.html). This book is chock-full of interesting cases that could be

turned into doable demos. Another great book for source material for demos is Sold
on Language (Sedivy & Carlson, 2011).

3 Advertising slogans
You can find many old commercials featuring classic advertising slogans
on YouTube. For the ones we mentioned in the main text, here is a bit of what we
found!

• Bounty is the quicker-picker-upper. This article has a brief overview of

the classic Bounty ads (including links to videos): www.doitbest.com/
resources/manufacturers/bounty-the-quicker-picker-upper.
It turns out that Bounty isn’t completely consistent with its own
slogan – if you watch through all the ads, you’ll notice that sometimes
it’s just the “quick” picker-upper. There’s a neat activity to be made about
comparing these versions!
• 7-up is the Uncola. Here is a classic add from the 1980s: www.youtube
.com/watch?v=AXmc7DG4uu8.
• The soup that eats like a meal. Here’s an example of this classic
Campbell’s ad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtCds8aQCKY.
• Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee. To see this slogan in action, check out this
ad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvR9T0rk3go.
To see just how far Sara Lee is willing to go to play around with
unusual quantification, check out this one, which claims that “everybody
doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”: www.youtube
.com/watch?v=Iirw147LHkQ.
4 What are we using emoji to communicate?
For a wonderful tour of language use in the internet age (including emoji), we recom-
mend Gretchen McCulloch’s book, Because Internet (McCulloch, 2020). We are also fond
of Michelle McSweeney’s work in this area: http://michelleamcsweeney.com/.

5 Research on ASR
As Tatman (2017) notes, YouTube uses Google’s popular ASR. So we can expect these
results extend to lots of other domains. But, as she also notes, the fact that captioning
is bad in YouTube is particularly frustrating to individuals who are deaf and must
rely on these captions frequently.
If you’re interested in learning about racial disparities in ASR, see Koenecke et al.
(2020). For a popular overview of problems that ASR has with different varieties of
speech, this New York Times article by Cade Metz is a good starting place (Metz,
2020): www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/speech-recognition-bias-apple-
amazon-google.html. (Fair warning: The New York Times has a paywall and only
allows you to read a limited number of articles for free.)

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 90 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

6 Analysis of rap lyrics

For a crash course in how linguistically interesting rap music is, see this article and
video from Estelle Caswell (Caswell, 2016): www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11701976/rap
ping-deconstructed-best-rhymers-of-all-time.

7 Mondegreens
This term for misinterpretations that happen when we mishear lyrics has a lovely
back story. Or, as the magnificent Oxford English Dictionary (2013) puts it, the word’s
etymology is thus: “the name Lady Mondegreen, a misinterpretation of the phrase
laid him on the green in the ballad ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray.’” Sylvia Wright coined
the term as she described this childhood mishearing; apparently, her mother read old
English poetry aloud to her, and this ballad was one of her favorites (Wright, 1954).
As she and others have noted, mondegreens can be better in some ways than the
original wording – funnier, more plausible.
The Taylor Swift mondegreen mentioned in the main text was written about by
Melissa Dahl: www.thecut.com/2014/11/why-you-keep-mishearing-that-taylor-
swift-lyric.html. And her analysis was augmented by Mark Liberman in the
Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16169.
Andrew Nevins has put together a series of videos about mondegreens that discuss
some great examples: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnhkwRmYuQ.
And Nordquist’s (2020) piece on mondegreens lists many more examples, includ-
ing a set of historical mondegreens suggesting intriguing links to language change.

8 Was Sterling the speaker on the recording?

Here’s an article if you want to read more details about Donald Sterling: www.tmz
.com/2014/04/26/donald-sterling-clippers-owner-black-people-racist-audio-magic-
johnson/.

9 Allophones in song lyrics

Here are the links to these popular articles on song lyrics:

• Reggie Ugwu: www.buzzfeednews.com/article/reggieugwu/what-is-

indie-pop-voice#.biXnELLoX
• Siu Lin Tan: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-shapes-film/
201510/six-reasons-pop-singers-pronounce-some-lyrics-in-odd-ways

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 8 Quality and Credibility

OPENING WORKSHEET

Write down the name of someone who you find to be trustworthy and
believable. It could be a government official; it could be a teacher; it could
be a local authority, such as a zookeeper or a museum docent; it could be
someone providing a service to you, such as a mechanic or a nurse; it could
be a friend or a family member.
Write down the answers to the following questions:

• What kinds of things does this person know about? What topic areas
would you trust this person to explain accurately?
• What makes this person believable about those topic areas? Why do you
find this person credible?
• Would you find this person equally believable if they talked to you about
a different topic? What are the limits of this person’s credibility?

When you engage with people through your doable demo, you will automat-
ically be granted a certain kind of authority: You’re the person with the
activity that people want to do! In Chapter 2, we encouraged you to think of
yourself as a scientist while doing your demo since it is based in real
language science. But being a scientific authority carries some special
responsibilities. In Chapter 3, we talked about Grice’s Maxim of Quality
(i.e., tell the truth). Recall that most people tell the truth most of the time;
further, most people believe that you are telling the truth most of the time.
But in these days of scientific mistrust, not all authorities are automatically
granted the grace that we offer a typical conversational partner. You will
need to earn people’s trust that you are, indeed, telling the truth. So what can
you do to strengthen people’s belief in you?

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 92 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Present Yourself as Someone to Believe

If you wanted to know about space travel, who would you rather ask: an
astronaut or some guy on the corner who claimed to have been abducted by
aliens? What about someone selling tickets for Virgin Galactic? Which of
these three people seems most credible as an expert on space travel?

Figure 8.1 Who would you trust about space travel?

Note. Option 1 (left) is used by permission of Getty Images (Photo credit: Marc Dufresne). Option
2 (middle) is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Option 3 (right) is
used by permission of Getty Images (Photo credit: Casper Benson).

It turns out that people have been thinking about credibility for a long
time. In fact, this goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks: The philoso-
pher Aristotle argued that a speaker’s character affects persuasion (see Rapp,
2010). In Rhetoric, Aristotle wrote that a credible person must show (1)
practical intelligence, (2) a virtuous character, and (3) goodwill. More
recently, educational psychologists Frederike Hendriks, Dorothe Kienhues,
and Rainer Bromme studied how we decide whether or not a scientific source
is credible (Hendriks et al., 2015). They showed people a collection of
scientific snippets (of the sort you would see posted in online blog posts)
and asked them to rate a variety of qualities of the person who wrote the
snippets. Were they professional or unprofessional? Helpful or hindering?
Qualified or unqualified? Fair or unfair? Sincere or insincere? Then the
researchers used statistical tools like factor analysis to see how the qualities
grouped together. What they found was that Aristotle’s broad categories of
traits were also contributing to a science writer’s credibility. In modern terms,
they found that a credible expert is one who has (1) expertise, (2) integrity,
and (3) benevolence.
How do you demonstrate your expertise (your practical intelligence)? As
we noted in Chapter 2, you don’t need to know everything about your topic
area in order to support an effective activity. Even so, you should be doing
more than just reading words that you yourself can’t interpret. One critical
component of expertise is competence, so it’s a good idea to make sure you

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 Quality and Credibility 93

know how your activity works: What are the pieces involved? How do you
turn things on? What instructions do people need in order to get the central
experience? Being able to interact with your materials smoothly – and being
able to help others use your materials – will demonstrate your competence.
You should also know the scientific content that you want people to take
away from your activity. If you want people to appreciate hierarchical tree
structure, you should know what that is! If you’re using the IPA, you should
know what that abbreviation stands for! (Knowing what an alphabet is will
also help.) What’s more, it’s helpful to be able to describe the core elements in
your activity in more than one way. Being able to rephrase your ideas with
new words is a good way to show that you understand the ideas and aren’t
just parroting what you’ve heard others say.
Yet another way to show your expertise is by being able to link the topic of
your activity to people’s everyday lives. As we discussed in Chapter 7,
connecting your activity to the real world will make it relevant for people.
Make sure you have several relevance connections at your fingertips. Like
your core scientific points, these should be points that you are well prepared
to talk about with people.
How do you demonstrate integrity (your virtuous character)? In the
research mentioned above, two of the most important components of integ-
rity were honesty and sincerity. Honesty means that you need to do your
homework: When you explain something to someone, make sure that you’re
drawing on legitimate scholarship. You’re not just talking with people about
your personal impressions about how language works; instead, you’re
talking about scientific knowledge that you yourself know to be true. Note,
though, that this honesty issue is something that can trip up experts: They
sometimes worry that if they aren’t covering all the details of their science,
then they are dishonest. In Chapter 9, we’ll talk more about how incomplete
is not the same as incorrect. It is not only possible, but actually desirable, to
focus on broad generalizations about your topic area.
One way to demonstrate your honesty about what you know is to admit
what you don’t know. If somebody asks a question, and you don’t know the
answer, just say so! We discussed this strategy in Chapter 2, where we
pointed out that it won’t make you seem foolish to admit you don’t know
everything. Nobody knows everything. Everybody is aware of that fact. So if
(when!) you have to admit that there are limits to your expertise, people will
respect your honesty and find you all the more credible.
And you don’t have to just leave your “I don’t know” hanging out there all
alone. You could follow it up with some suggestions about how you’d find
out the answer. Is it something that you could explore with the materials you
have with you? Is it something that you could look up in a book or on the

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 94 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Internet? Is it something that nobody knows the answer to and would require
a lifetime of study to figure out? Real scientific progress is propelled by what
we don’t know. That’s not at all a bad thing to admit!
As for sincerity, a great way to express this quality is to commit to doing
your activity with purpose, respect, and thoughtful preparation. What are
you trying to accomplish with your activity? We hope that you’re trying to
show people who you interact with that your science is a fascinating and
exciting area, and that you want to inspire them to learn more about it. If you
sincerely try to do these things, people will appreciate that, and it will
improve their impression of you. But for you to be truly sincere, you do have
to convey that you yourself find your science to be fascinating and exciting.
And if you want to inspire people to learn more, then take the core lessons of
this book to heart. Seriously listen to people and try to have good
conversations with them. Your sincere efforts to connect through listening
will also make you more credible.
How do you demonstrate benevolence (your goodwill)? A benevolent
expert is not one who is out for personal gain, but is instead trying to share
their knowledge for the greater good. The very fact that you are willing to
take the time to share what you know in a free-choice environment is a sign
of your benevolence. The benefits that you receive from doing your activity
are largely intangible (you’re getting to see people become interested in
language science!), and that lack of explicit reward also enhances your
credibility.
But there is another, more moment-to-moment way that you can demon-
strate benevolence, and that’s by being considerate to the people you are
talking with and showing them respect. Respect is important for effective
conversations of all sorts, but for conversations about scientific knowledge,
it is critical for helping you establish and maintain your credibility.
When it comes to thinking about space travel, we expect you found the
astronaut to be more credible than the alternatives: Astronauts have expert
knowledge about space travel, they sincerely care about what they do, and
they generally aren’t trying to sell you a seat on a space flight. So they score
highly in terms of expertise, integrity, and benevolence. What about when it
comes to thinking about language science?
For many people, the idea of a language expert is someone who wants to
correct their grammar and tell them how to talk. We’re not so sure that most
critics of that sort have genuine expertise (some of what they say about
language is patently wrong), but many of them clearly lack integrity and
benevolence. These so-called language experts often show a lack of respect
for the people they are giving advice to. When you’re doing your demo, you
should present yourself as a different kind of language expert – you’re the

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 Quality and Credibility 95

kind that is being responsible to the science and can be a credible source for
what we know about how language works.

Being Clear Is a Sign of Respect

This book is trying to help you make your science accessible to the general
public so that everybody can understand what you have to say. One big
reason to be understandable is that it will help you keep people’s interest.
And another reason to work on being understandable is that it is a sign of
respect, and ultimately it will be taken as a sign of your credibility. Imagine
taking a class where you don’t understand the material well. Now imagine
that you go to the teacher to ask for some help. How would you feel if the
teacher just kept explaining things exactly the same, confusing way as in
class? Being able to explain something in multiple ways is a sign of good
teaching, and a marker of someone having genuine expertise (or practical
intelligence) about their topic. So when someone can’t understand you, you
raise the possibility that you lack the expertise to talk about it.
You may also raise the possibility that you lack benevolence (or goodwill).
Think again about unhelpful teachers you’ve met. Maybe they really do know
their stuff cold, but they might be unwilling to take their students’ needs into
consideration – who they are, what they already know, where they are
coming from. If a teacher doesn’t care about those things, then what do they
care about? Are they just engaging in a performance of “I’m the smartest
person in the room” with you? That actually doesn’t make a person seem
particularly credible. Making your activity understandable to the specific
people you are talking with demonstrates that you care whether they learn
something. That’s respectful to them, and it will also reflect well on you.

Credibility and Respect

Would you believe someone who didn’t respect you? Would you even want
to be in a conversation with that person? People don’t have to talk with you
in a free-choice environment, so it’s up to you to be someone who they want
to talk with.
One of the clearest ways to show your respect for your conversational
partners is by listening carefully to what they say and responding appropriately.
If someone asks you a question, you should answer it. If someone explains their
reaction to your materials, you should acknowledge their perspective – even if it
wasn’t what you were expecting. Just in general, you should treat the other
person’s contribution to the conversation as relevant and important.

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 96 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

In Chapter 4, we contrasted a deficit model approach with a funds of

knowledge approach. One of the major problems with the deficit model is
that it fundamentally disrespects others. It treats their personal histories,
perspectives, and knowledge base as being inadequate, irrelevant, or unim-
portant. One of the reasons that people don’t respond well to experts who
adopt a deficit approach is that people don’t like to be disrespected.
Moreover, a lack of respect will taint your credibility: If you think little of
the people you are talking with, it raises the possibility that you have an
ulterior motive for the conversation.
By contrast, the funds of knowledge approach puts respect for the other
person front and center. It not only acknowledges that everybody in the
conversation has something useful to contribute, but it also actively encour-
ages you to find out what other people already know. You can then draw on
their established knowledge to help you improve your message. And, as we
mentioned before, language is a topic area where people have ample funds of
knowledge! The people you will interact with have lots of experience using
language in a variety of contexts – they speak it and write it; they may know
more than one; they may have lots of ideas about what it is and how it works.
Respect and even celebrate that knowledge when you talk with them!
One worry that you might have is that someone’s funds of knowledge may
contradict what you see as your core point. For example, one of our activities
is about dialects and how they differ across regions of the country. Most of
the time, people’s personal histories are a huge asset for doing this activity.
People have encountered regional dialect differences before and can come up
with lots of examples or situations from their own lives where dialect has
mattered: They have interesting ideas about how dialect differences come
about. There are usually many opportunities to use a person’s own experi-
ences to illustrate core dialect findings.
But every now and then – and it is actually an uncommon occurrence –
someone will offer up an opinion that embodies an attitude that we don’t
want to endorse. In the case of dialect, there are some harmful societal
attitudes out there about the low character of people who speak in particular
ways. In the United States, where we work, many of these opinions are thinly
disguised racism, although much of it is also a reflection of sexism and
general prejudices against people from certain parts of the country. We don’t
advocate taking these comments on directly: At best, the person you are
talking with will be dismissive of you (and probably of everything else you
said); at worst, you might end up making a scene that will not be appreciated
by your partners in the venue.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to endorse someone’s racist (or sexist,
or homophobic, or otherwise offensive) point of view. You don’t have to be
that polite! One technique that we have used is to say something like this:

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 Quality and Credibility 97

“I know a lot of people think that’s true, but actually scientists have
found that African American English has a richly structured rule system,”
or “I know that’s something many people believe, but actually, scientists
have learned that someone’s regional dialect doesn’t predict their intelli-
gence.” This turn of phrase is also useful for countering language myths that
aren’t quite as pernicious: “I know a lot of people think that’s true, but
actually scientists have found that all languages have different regional
dialects,” or “I’ve heard people say that before, but actually, scientists have
discovered that languages are constantly changing, even in Appalachia.”
This technique is helpful in a few different ways. First, by recognizing that
the person’s point of view is shared by others, you show that person some
respect: It isn’t crazy for someone to believe this thing – it really is out there
in the culture. Second, by explicitly saying that scientists disagree with the
view, you are being clear that neither you, nor the field that you represent,
agrees with this view (regardless of how common it is). You’re unlikely to
change somebody’s mind with just this technique, but what you can do is lay
the groundwork for possible future change. This person now knows that not
everybody shares these views. What’s more, they know that a credible expert
in the field doesn’t share these views. In Chapter 9, we’ll talk about taking the
long view and having patience with people: What you’re doing isn’t about
trying to persuade people of any particular position in a single conversation.
But it is about paving the way for people to change their minds at some point
in the future. And that’s part of why it is worth doing the work to be a
credible expert: It’s a good way to open someone’s mind!

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Present yourself as a credible expert by being prepared, clear, honest, and
respectful of the people you converse with.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

One way to give yourself instant credibility is to dress for the part.
Often when we go to festivals, we have everybody on our team wear a
T-shirt that advertises our home institution. Colleges and universities are
places that people recognize as reputable sources of knowledge. By
claiming our school, we are claiming the credibility that comes with the
whole institution of higher education.

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 98 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)

Figure 8.2 Three Ohio State University students getting ready to engage with visitors at the
COSI museum
Note. These students are wearing lab coats in preparation for working with visitors at the
local science museum. The logo on their cart represents the lab’s organizing sponsor, the
Buckeye Language Network. Photo credit: The Ohio State University.

But sometimes we go further. In one of our labs (LW), the students wear
lab coats when they interact with people. Lab coats are the stereotypical
attire of scientists, and when our students wear them, they encourage
people to see them that way. (As we mentioned in Chapter 2, children will
often ask them if they are real scientists!)
Some parts of the scientist stereotype are great: Scientists are generally
considered to be very smart people who have a lot of expertise in their
topic area. These features are important to us for two reasons. First, people
don’t always think that language is a topic that can be studied scientific-
ally, and we want to emphasize that it is. Second, having expertise is a
core element to credibility, and we value that association.
However, there are some stereotypes about scientists that we’d rather
not be connected with. We don’t want people to think our students are

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 Quality and Credibility 99

(cont.)
“mad scientists” who are more interested in getting results than in treating
people respectfully. That stereotype doesn’t help people perceive us as
having integrity or benevolence.
So, as the Spider-Man movies exhort, “With great power comes great
responsibility.” We want the power that comes from presenting ourselves
as experts, but we accept the responsibility that we need to represent
ourselves in honest and respectful ways. We work hard to wear our lab
coats responsibly!

CLOSING WORKSHEET

One of the most important things you will say during your conversations
won’t be about your topic. It will be the phrase “I don’t know.”
For the topic of your own doable demo, write down three things that
you do know. You can write down very specific pieces of information
about how your phenomenon works as well as some more foundational
pieces of information that underlie your topic area. But make sure that you
feel confident about the three things you write down: What knowledge
are you bringing to your conversation?
Now write down three things about your topic area that you do not
know. What are the limits of the knowledge that you are bringing to your
conversation?

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 Many language critics lack integrity and benevolence
Language critics are usually cheerleaders for prescriptivism: They are here to tell us
what is wrong with our language use. By contrast, language scientists favor descrip-
tivism, which is an approach focused on how language is actually signed, spoken, or
written. While we’re sure that some language critics really do understand how
language works as well as the average language scientist, most of the time, that just
doesn’t seem to be true. If you’re interested in a specific example of where the
language critics’ approach goes wrong, we recommend Pullum (2014). This article
critiques examples of writing advice from prescriptivists who are especially exercised
about the English passive. It shows that many of those telling writers to avoid the

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 100 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

passive don’t even recognize the construction in their own writing. The author
reviews and counters their various unsubstantiated ‘allegations’ against passives
(e.g., good writers avoid them). For a broader discussion about the uses and abuses
of linguistic prescriptivism, we recommend Anne Curzan’s book Fixing English
(Curzan, 2014).

2 Linguistic prejudice
There is ample sociolinguistics scholarship documenting linguistic prejudice. If you
want to read a summary of a variety of language myths, including many related to
regional prejudice, racism, and sexism, we recommend Bauer and Trudgill (1988) or
Kaplan (2016).

3 Students working at the BLN cart

This “Buckeye Language Network” or BLN is the cross-college organizing umbrella
for language researchers at The Ohio State University, where LW works.

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 9 Quality vs Quantity
Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect

OPENING WORKSHEET

Read through this lentil soup recipe:

(1) Get out a soup pot.

(2) Get out one large yellow onion. You should cut the ends off of the
onion and remove the outer layer of the onion (sometimes called the
onion skin). Dice the onion into small pieces.
(3) Put 4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in the pot and turn the heat to
medium-high.
(4) Once the oil is hot, put the onions in the pot. Cook the onions until
they are slightly translucent and very soft.
(5) Sprinkle a teaspoon of salt over the onions.
(6) Add 1 quart of liquid to the pot. You may use vegetable stock (if you
want the dish to be vegetarian), or you may use chicken stock. If you
use plain water, add some extra salt to the pot.
(7) Add a sprig of thyme to the pot.
(8) Add 1 cup of brown or green lentils. Make sure you have thoroughly
cleaned the lentils beforehand! Cover the pot. Cook the lentils in the
pot for approximately 45 minutes, or until the lentils are soft.
(9) Peel 2 cloves of garlic and finely dice them. Add the diced garlic to the
pot after the lentils have softened.
(10) If you want your soup to be smooth, place it in a blender and puree it
briefly. You may puree all of the soup, or just some of it. You can also
use a handheld blender and place it in the pot itself to blend the soup.
(11) Add a teaspoon of something slightly acidic, such as lemon juice, apple
cider vinegar, or red wine vinegar. Stir the acid into the soup.
(12) Wash a bunch of parsley and finely chop it. Add the chopped parsley to
the soup and stir it well.
(13) Ladle the soup into bowls and serve the bowls with soup spoons.

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 102 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Which steps (or parts of steps) in this recipe are not genuinely needed?
Remove all the steps (or parts of steps) that can be omitted but would
still allow you to make a decent soup. How many steps did you modify?
Now remove two more steps (or parts of steps). Can you still follow the
recipe? Would it still taste the same? If you answered yes to both those
questions, modify two more steps and see what happens!

In earlier chapters, we’ve encouraged you to have a regular conversation, to

make your science broadly interesting, to connect your science with the real
world, and to care about your audience’s point of view. At this point, you
may be feeling like we’re recommending that you dump your science in favor
of entertainment. We understand where you’re coming from – that’s a worry
that a lot of scientists have when they get this kind of advice.
We like to think about this worry in terms of Grice’s theory of cooperative
conversation, discussed in Chapter 3. On the one hand, you want your
science conversation to respect the Maxim of Quality: You want to tell the
truth. On the other hand, you want your science conversation to respect the
Maxim of Quantity: You want to provide the right amount of information
(channeling Goldilocks: not too little, but also not too much). Scientists often
feel like providing a simplified explanation of their work forces them to
choose between the maxims. You can be maximally accurate, but then you
have to provide way too much information for many people to digest. Or you
can provide less information, but then you aren’t being as accurate
as possible.
The Maxims of Quality and Quantity, however, are not actually in compe-
tition with each other. We want to offer an alternative way to think about the
problem: INCOMPLETE 6¼ INCORRECT . In the rest of this chapter, we’ll explain
what we mean by that and suggest some ways to approach your explanations
that will help you satisfy both maxims.

Am I Dumbing Down My Science?

Real science is complicated. If it were obvious and easy, we wouldn’t need
experts to do it. And it wouldn’t take many years to become an expert. In
fact, one of the joys of taking even an introductory course in a science is
discovering that there are wonderfully complicated details out there. For
example, we have the impression that when we talk, we just “do it” and it

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 103

doesn’t feel hard at all. But as language scientists, we try to understand how
talking works, and it turns out to be very complicated. To take one example:
Speech sounds can be described along three main dimensions (technically
described as place, manner, and voicing) and those dimensions can be
described with an alarming level of precision – which is necessary to explain
the differences between individual sounds and speech across languages. And
another example: A noun turns out to be much more than a “person, place, or
thing.” It’s an abstraction reflecting distributional, syntactic, morphological,
semantic, and occasionally phonological properties across languages. When
we talk, we are really doing precision mechanics with our mouths and
accessing symbols that connect across multiple representational domains.
We’re not “just” doing anything! Those details are part of what makes our
science serious business.
The more you study something, the more conscious you are of all the
complicated details that go into it. You also become conscious of the limits of
what we know. Evidence can support a claim, but it won’t definitively prove
it to be true. Most scientific papers are full of qualifications about what has
been found – predictions “may” be confirmed, analyses “are consistent” with
theories, and data “increases our confidence” in a hypothesis. Scientists are
careful because they know that new results might change their minds –
theories change when there’s enough evidence pointing in another direction.
If you want to be accurate about your science, you need to be careful about
what you’re claiming.
And when you’re talking with the general public, you’re not actually doing
your science then and there. Instead, you’re explaining your science. How
much detail should your explanations have in informal learning settings?
Not very much. We may move the field forward by being down and dirty in
the details, but those details matter because they support generalizations.
And while in principle every scientific generalization is open to revision,
some of them are so well supported at this point that they’re unlikely to be
overturned soon. Sometimes it is good to remember that there are a lot of
things that scientists agree on. Generalizations about foundational findings
can allow you to speak with a lot of confidence that what you’re saying is
indeed accurate.
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to explain how a traffic stoplight
works. The easiest way to put it would be to say: Red means stop and green
means go. Of course, as an expert driver, you’re likely aware that there are a
variety of situations that don’t really fit that generalization. In the United
States, some intersections allow you to turn right on red; a flashing red light
means that you stop briefly and then go if it’s clear; you should stop when an
emergency vehicle is whizzing by even if the light is green. All of these

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 104 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

situations are true, and all go against the simplest generalization about
traffic lights. But none of those exceptions are easy to understand unless
you already know the simple generalization. “Red means stop and green
means go” isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t cover every situation involving traffic
lights. In other words, it’s an incomplete description of traffic lights, but it’s
not an incorrect one.
To put this in terms of language science, imagine that your topic is
syntactic bootstrapping. Or, as we would put it when talking with the general
public, the fact that you can figure out something about a word’s meaning
by looking at how it’s used in a sentence. You might present people (as we
like to do) with the first lines of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem (Carroll,
1871/2010): “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the
wabe.” It’s easy to get people to articulate reasonable intuitions about what
the noun toves means based on its status in the sentence. For people who are
shy about offering their intuitions, we often ask them how many toves they
think there are here, and they will reliably tell you that they don’t know for
sure, but there is definitely more than one. Once you can get people to address
that one fact, it’s pretty easy to get them to think meta-linguistically about
what in the sentence helps them guess the meanings of nonsense words.
Now, we could point out that the mere presence of an -s at the end of a
word (even one that is preceded by a determiner) doesn’t necessarily make it
plural: Plenty of singular nouns end in -s (asbestos, glass, mess, success). In
fact, not only does the presence of an -s at the end of a word not necessarily
make it plural, but you can have a plural noun that doesn’t have an -s at the
end (children, feet, mice). If you want to get really detailed about how
the plural works in English, you really can’t just stop by pointing to a
word-final -s. You might at this point feel obligated to point out that this
so-called bootstrapping process of learning from a word’s syntactic context
involves a lot of probabilistic cue coordination. You might also feel obligated
to point out that the field’s beliefs about which cues can get coordinated and
how that coordination happens has changed over time (and might well
change in the future).
But does any of that detail matter here? The generalization that you can
use the “-s” on toves to help you make sense of this poem is a good one and
captures the essence of syntactic bootstrapping. All those complications we
just noted about plural morphology in English might help you identify
situations where syntactic bootstrapping would end up being less effective.
They might even be the situations that will force scientists to reconsider how
syntactic bootstrapping works. Still, before someone worries about the prob-
lem cases for this word learning strategy, they first have to understand what
the strategy actually is.

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 105

If Chapter 4 convinced you, your goal is to get people engaged enough to

learn a little bit about how your science works. They don’t have to pass a test
on the details of your topic area or be equipped to conduct their own study to
investigate the nuanced implications of what you’re sharing. Think about the
level of description that textbooks provide for those summary statements at
the end of each chapter. You aren’t reading any whole chapters to people.
You want to provide them with enough information that they feel inspired to
go find out those details for themselves. That’s not dumbing down your
science: It’s opening a door that anyone can walk through.

Three Ways to Balance Quantity with Quality

Finding the right level of generalization to use in talking about your science
isn’t always easy. To satisfy the Maxim of Quality, you will want to be
accurate in your conversation, but to make your conversation accessible to
others, you will need to limit the amount of information so that they can take
it in. So you will want to say the truth, and nothing but the truth; but you
might not always tell the whole truth about everything. Here we offer you
three suggestions for ways to think about your science so that the concerns
of quantity and quality are balanced.

Distinguish Phenomena from Explanation

All scientific fields have theoretical debates about what’s going on, and
language science is no different. Scientific theories are how we explain what
we currently know and predict what will happen in new situations. Theories
move science forward, and most scientists are genuinely committed to the
elements of their theory. But distinguishing between theoretical positions is
rarely an easy task. If one theory predicted that the sun would rise in the east
while another one predicted that it would rise in the west, there wouldn’t be
fights over who was right. Any theory that is worth arguing for is one that
can account for a lot of established facts and can make a lot of good
predictions about what we should find in the future. The nitty-gritty details
that scientists work on are important because they are often the ones that
distinguish different theories. If I can find too many exceptions to your
generalization, maybe you have the wrong one. And if you really want to
be able to explain how something works (and therefore to make good
predictions over the long haul), then you really do care about those theoret-
ical differences. Scientists definitely care about them. And people training to
become scientists spend a lot of time learning to focus on the cases that
matter for the theory.

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 106 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

We, however, don’t actually care what you believe at the theoretic level
because we want you to be focused on the phenomena. Since any decent
theory can account for a lot of facts, choose a fact that all decent theories can
explain. For example, in our own research on language acquisition, experts
debate the extent to which children are innately wired to learn their first
language and the extent to which they use domain-general strategies that
help them learn lots of things, including language. We certainly have our
own opinions on these matters, but they very rarely come up when we’re
talking with the public. Instead, we talk about striking phenomena in child
language development, like the fact that young children are great
word learners.
We mentioned before that people can learn new words from a poem like
“Jabberwocky” through a process called syntactic bootstrapping. There really
isn’t a theoretical debate about whether children can do syntactic
bootstrapping. But there are many debates about how it really works: How
do children use sentential context to help them learn word meanings? Which
parts of the sentence can they use at different ages? What kinds of meanings
can sentence contexts help with? To what extent is the process different
across languages? Are children born knowing how to link structures with
meanings or do they have to learn them all from experience? There are plenty
of highly specific details that matter in this debate. But for most people you’ll
encounter in a free-choice learning environment, the initial generalization –
that children can do it at all – will be news.
Just in general, the phenomena that theories were created to explain are
good ones to work with. And it is just fine to focus on the easy and obvious
cases that all theories can handle. Those cases might be boring from a
theoretical standpoint (because they can’t tell you who is right), but they are
a perfect starting point for a nonexpert. Before people can care about which
theory has the best explanation for something, they need to know that the
something even exists. Don’t worry about convincing people that something
works in a particular way. Instead, start by showing them that it happens at all.

Distinguish Classics from Hot News

The more you know about a topic, the more you are likely to take your basic
knowledge for granted. In Chapter 12, we’ll talk more about this problem and
how knowledge can be a curse. But when you are trying to choose the best
phenomenon to share in these public settings, we recommend going with a
classic. You’re looking for something that has been studied by many people
for many years. These phenomena tend to be robust and easy to demonstrate:
They have stood the test of time for a reason. Science is a cumulative
endeavor and you want facts that are close to the ground floor. Syntactic
bootstrapping is just the kind of thing that counts. It has been studied

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 107

experimentally at least since the 1950s, and as Lewis Carroll showed, it’s
something that people have known about for a lot longer.
If you’ve only taken one class about language science, then the classics
might be all you know about – good for you! It’s going to be easy for you to
choose a phenomenon that will work well in a free-choice environment. But
the longer you are in a field, the more these bedrock phenomena will feel like
old news, or even background noise. The typical focus for advanced courses
(or your own research) is what’s new in the field. An advanced seminar on
syntactic bootstrapping wouldn’t be about demonstrating that it happens, it
would be about the latest refinement to our understanding. For example, how
do preschoolers use function words to define relevant sentential contexts and
how quickly can they establish those contexts? The hot news on your topic is
what people are talking about at conferences and reading preprints on and
presenting in advanced seminars. But remember that the hot news won’t
make sense to somebody who doesn’t already know the basic generalization.
Just because you (and lots of other scientists) have known about the classics
for a long time doesn’t mean the general public knows them at all.
There’s no hard and fast rule about what makes something hot news and
not a classic. But if the phenomenon was the primary result of a paper
published within the last five (or even ten) years, it’s probably hot news.
And if something gets a half-page or more of description in an introductory
textbook, it’s probably a classic. You can also think about your phenomenon
in terms of what someone needs to know in order to understand it. We’ll talk
more in Chapter 15 about the process of conscious layering of scaffolding
support for learners, but the more details you need in order to explain what
your phenomenon is, the more likely it is to be hot news.

Emphasize Process
A common view about science is that it is a body of knowledge – a set of
things that experts happen to know. For scientists, though, what makes
something a science is the way relevant knowledge builds up. Scientists
emphasize the processes of gathering observations, making hypotheses to
explain patterns in the observations, testing the hypotheses, and evaluating
the evidence that bears on the hypotheses. For scientists – including lan-
guage scientists – it’s the process of knowledge creation that really matters.
So one way to approach your topic area is to talk about how people figured it
out in the first place and how people continue to study it.
You may also recall that experts in the field of informal science learning
devoted two of their six strands to talking about scientific process (see
Chapter 4). Strand 4 is to get people to think about science as a process
and Strand 5 is to get people to use the tools of science. Thinking about how
you study your topic can be a great way to help people understand it!

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 108 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

When we want to emphasize process, we focus on two pieces: testing

hypotheses and evaluating evidence. Or as we like to put it: guessing what’s
going to happen and thinking about different ways to explain what we
experience. There are lots of ways that you can encourage both of these
steps in the scientific process. For example, if you’ve given people a puzzle to
solve or a game to play, an easy way to promote hypothesis testing is to ask
them how they could make it easier. One of our activities uses the Stroop task
(see Chapter 13) with color words written in ink of different colors (e.g., the
word yellow is written in red ink) . When people are asked to say the color of
the ink, they get interference from reading the meaning of the word itself,
which leads to delays and mistakes. Once people have experienced the
phenomenon, we often ask them what we could do to make the game
easier. Those are guesses that we can sometimes test right there on the spot.
(For example, is it easier to do the game if you take your glasses off? Usually,
yes!) Guessing about the different ways to change the task is really a way of
hypothesizing about how the phenomenon works – it’s the process we use to
figure out what’s going on.
And we can also talk about how to evaluate the evidence. Is it a fair test of
your ability to do this task in a noisy public setting? Was your way of
making the task easier really helping or did you improve because it’s your
fourth time playing the game? Are color words special in some way that
creates the effect? Would it work the same if the color words were written in

Figure 9.1 The Stroop task, as seen on the back of a T-shirt

Note. The Stroop task is easy to display. Putting it on a T-shirt makes you a walking demo!

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 109

a different language? Talking about how we interpret the evidence we get

and whether it is a good way to see if we guessed right is getting at the core
of the scientific process. What’s more, this kind of approach makes the fact
that you might not know something into a real virtue. If someone asks,
“What would happen if . . .,” then you have an invitation to ask them how
you could figure it out.
When it comes to talking about the tools of science, there are also lots
of approaches to take. If you happen to want to work on a topic that has a
nifty measurement tool, then this is an easy one. Spectrograms are readily
available as tablet apps for very little money, and they are eye-catching,
interactive, and show people things they probably haven’t seen before.
An activity using spectrograms can – like the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA) names – be individualized as well. (See Chapters 7 and 15
for more examples of how to talk about speech sounds using spectrograms.)
But don’t overlook the fact that low-tech tools are tools all the same!
The IPA is a tool of the language science trade and makes for a great
activity (we talk more about using the IPA in Chapters 4 and 11). Another
tool that is often used, especially in language development work, is the
nonsense word. Lewis Carroll used them for poetic effect, but nonsense
words are one of the key ways that language scientists get perfect control
over frequency effects: If you have never heard a word before, then its
frequency count for you is zero. And if you want to talk about work in a
classic theoretical domain, you might talk about how introspection is a tool
of language science. Reflecting carefully about what you know has a long
history in our field. We appreciate that introspection is a somewhat con-
troversial tool to use within a scientific field, but it is an interesting
conversation starter.

Take the Long View

Once you accept that people don’t need to learn everything about your
topic from a brief conversation with you, then you can relax into the idea
that your goal is to provide people with an appreciation of your topic. You
will only be showing them a piece of your topic – but it will be a real piece.
And we hope it will be a piece that is both engaging and understandable
all on its own.
One additional worry that you might be having is this: What if people
walk away with the wrong idea? What if people misunderstand your point
and now believe that your generalization applies more broadly than it
does? Or what if they believe they now do know everything about your

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 110 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

complex topic when in fact they have just been introduced to a very
small part? Or worse: What if people misunderstand what you say and
walk away believing something that is genuinely wrong. What can you do
about that?
The short answer to that is, “Nothing!” You can’t control what people
believe. If you have ever taught a group of amateurs – whether they are
students in an intro class, knitters in a club, visitors to a historic site, or girl
scouts at a demonstration – then you know full well that not everyone is
going to learn from you equally well. No amount of detail or technique on
your part will guarantee that what you say will stick in the way that you
intend it to for everyone.
What’s more, when it comes to language, people may have entered the
conversation with you having some prior misconceptions. They will likely be
trying to connect whatever you say to their own understanding of language,
and that understanding might be flawed. For example, syntactic bootstrap-
ping is supposed to help people appreciate one way people learn new words.
But some people really don’t like the idea that new words enter the language
all the time and might walk away with the idea that you have to watch what
kids read or they will learn bad slang. (This example is not as far-fetched as
you might believe.) It’s OK to feel a little bit sad about the state of the
universe when something like this happens, but then you just have to let it
go and move on.
The very best thing you can do to stop this from happening is to help
people be interested in and excited about your science. If you accomplish
that, you increase the odds that they will be inspired to learn more about
your topic – including learning about the details that you skipped over, but
also including information that may override their misconceptions.
Education does not succeed or fail because of one individual conversation.
It is a process that happens over many encounters which may take many
years to happen. Your goal is to help people with a lifelong project of
improved understanding of scientific facts and processes. Your conversation
is just one piece in a very large puzzle.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

In order to make your science accessible for others, you will not be able to
cover all its details. Providing an incomplete description is not the same as
providing an inaccurate one! Focusing on well-established phenomena and
emphasizing how our science works can help you balance quality and
quantity in your conversation.

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 111

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Mayan glyphs
One of our activities is about the writing system used by the ancient
Mayan people. As can be seen in the image in Figure 9.2, this system
looks very different from modern alphabetic systems, whether you’re
thinking of the Roman alphabet, or Cyrillic, or Devenagri, or Hangul.
We offer images like this as puzzles to be solved. People get a set of
cards with the component parts of this image (along with some extras)
labeled with syllables. Their job is to try and recreate the whole picture and
then figure out how to pronounce it. The puzzle works because it turns out
that these complex pictures are composed of syllable units organized in a
regular order that goes roughly from left to right. The image in Figure 9.3
shows the same glyph meaning jaguar, but with each syllable labeled. The
pronunciation for this word is /balam/.
We have two main messages that this demo supports. The first one is
about how languages work in general: Letters are not the same thing as
sounds. Writing systems are cultural artifacts that can capture what a
language sounds like, but language itself isn’t the same as that represen-
tation. This point is true of Mayan, and it’s also true of every writing
system out there (see the description of the ghoti demo in Chapter 17 for
another approach to this core point).
Our second message is aimed at de-exoticizing unfamiliar languages.
Even though the Mayan writing system is ancient, and even though it

Figure 9.2 This image shows the word for jaguar

Figure 9.3 This image shows the syllabic breakdown for jaguar

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 112 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)

Figure 9.4 This image shows the glyph for jaguar

Figure 9.5 Here’s an example of a logo-phonetic symbol (it also means jaguar)
Note. All the Mayan glyph images were used with permission of Andreas Fuls (Fuls, 2019).

looks a lot like pictures, it actually works a lot like alphabets people are
familiar with. It breaks down the words into component sounds, which are
then ordered in a systematic way. Once you know what those individual
components are, you can figure out what a brand-new word is. We turn
this process into a matching game with cards.
Of course, the actual Mayan writing system is more complicated than
we’ve described it so far. For example, it turns out that Mayan does have a
parallel system of logographic symbols – that is, some glyphs can’t
be broken down into individual sounds but really do stand for a whole
word. In fact, the word jaguar has such a glyph, and it’s shown in
Figure 9.4.
What’s more, sometimes the logographic glyph would be combined
with some of the symbols representing phonetic syllables to form a
combination system that contained both, and it’s illustrated in Figure 9.5.
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that we’re not experts on ancient
Mayan, or any modern Mayan language. We certainly don’t know every-
thing about this writing system! In fact, one thing that we do know is that
there are many, many more complications to this system than what we’ve
presented here. Our demo doesn’t come close to providing a complete
explanation for how this Mayan writing system worked.
And that’s OK. What our demo does do is provide people with a glimpse
of how another language organizes its writing system. We hope that

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 113

(cont.)
people have an Aha! moment when they realize that something that looks
so different from their own alphabet and was used by an ancient culture
nevertheless works a lot like how their own language does. We hope that
people appreciate that the sounds of a language can be represented by all
sorts of different looking symbols. We hope that we have made this topic
interesting enough to inspire some people to want to learn more about the
complexities of how Mayan worked.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Review your notes about your doable demo from all the
previous worksheets.
What is your core phenomenon? That is, what is creating an Aha!
moment for you? (See Chapter 6.)
What is your explanation of that phenomenon? Try to get your explan-
ation to the level you would see in a textbook summary. What’s the larger
generalization that you are illustrating with your phenomenon? Write your
explanation down now if you haven’t already done so.
Now go through your explanation and see if you can reduce it by 10
percent. Count the words if you want to be precise, but make your
explanation shorter. Is your reduced explanation still understandable and
reasonably accurate? Great! Now cut out another 10 percent! Keep
repeating this process until your explanation is no longer a reasonable
description of your phenomenon. Only once you’ve reached that point
should you restore 10 percent of the content.
If your explanation is more than one sentence, you now have a second
task: Make a one-sentence version of it. This sentence is going to be your
Critical Take-Home Message for your doable demo. If someone were only
going to remember one scientific fact from their conversation with you,
this is the one you want it to be!

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 Real science is complicated
Objectivity is one concept that is often invoked as being a necessary complication for
science. We can unpack objectivity in several ways – engaging in certain agreed-on

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 114 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

practices when finding and reporting facts, being true to the established facts, and
avoiding social and individual values and biases (Reiss & Sprenger, 2020). Other
angles on such philosophical points include asking whether any factual observation
can be entirely atheoretical (Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Philosophy_of_science), or whether objectivity is actually desirable, or whether
theories can ever be falsified (Singham, 2020). One reason to think about such
debates from science studies and philosophy of science is that they keep us humble,
and that is valuable in the conversations that this book encourages. As this chapter
emphasizes, we believe that it is fine to talk more casually about the facts and
theories that we use to engage the public. After all, these conversations are short
and aimed at generating excitement and interest.

2 Syntactic bootstrapping
The term syntactic bootstrapping shows how jargon develops in a field. First, consider
the word bootstrapping. English has this idiom: I lifted myself up by my bootstraps.
Literally, this isn’t possible because your bootstraps are attached to your boots; as an
idiom, it means that you succeeded without help from others. Philosophers (and
computer scientists and statisticians) took up this idea of success without help to refer
to processes where one gradually and iteratively improves by leveraging what one
already has to gain something greater.
In the domain of language, Steven Pinker used the term semantic bootstrapping to
refer to the idea that children are innately endowed with links between a word’s
meanings and its syntactic categorization (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_bootstrap
ping). For example, children will expect that a word referring to an object (like table)
will be a noun, while a word referring to an action (like devour) will be a verb.
For Pinker, meaning was the information that allowed the child to bootstrap her way
into grammar. Then, Barbara Landau and Lila Gleitman (1985) showed that children
need more to learn many kinds of words. By studying how blind children learn sight-
related words like look and red, they showed that the entry to learning a word must
sometimes be through its syntactic properties. They used the term syntactic bootstrap-
ping as a clever way to highlight the reverse of what semantic bootstrapping describes.
However, bootstrapping came to be used much more broadly than this one
contrast suggests. Currently, it refers to any situation where learners leverage one
kind of information to help them identify another kind of information. And in fact,
the X bootstrapping phrase itself is now used productively by researchers to refer to
many such situations: for example, prosodic bootstrapping, aspectual bootstrapping,
morphological bootstrapping. For scientists in the field, the jargon phrase syntactic
bootstrapping is useful, productive, and a reminder of the history of the field. But for
people outside the field, it is just two difficult words combined to make a difficult
phrase. One of the fun things about learning about a science is that these kinds of
phrases become linked to people and debates that you care about. But those details
are best left for people who are purposefully going deeper into a field.

3 First line of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem

You can read the full text of the poem in Carroll (1871/2010) or here: www
.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky. And you can read a nice analysis

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 Quality vs Quantity: Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect 115

of it by Oliver Tearle (including some relevant links to language science) on

this website: https://interestingliterature.com/2016/01/a-short-analysis-of-jabber
wocky-by-lewis-carroll/.
“Jabberwocky” has also been translated into dozens of languages. You can find
some of these efforts here: www76.pair.com/keithlim/jabberwocky/index.html.

4 Using function words to define contexts for syntactic bootstrapping

If this hot news topic about syntactic bootstrapping interests you, we recommend
reading Babineau et al. (2021).

5 Emphasize process
Of course, science teachers are very aware of the importance of process for explain-
ing science! You can read about the importance of process in the Next Generation
Science Standards (www.nextgenscience.org/). It’s also central for teachers at the
National Science Teaching Association (www.nsta.org/nstas-official-positions/
nature-science).

6 Stroop effect
A relatively common question we get about the Stroop effect is about the weird
name. In fact, it is named after John Ridley Stroop, who was the first person to
publish a paper demonstrating it (Stroop, 1935).

7 Mayan glyphs demo

The Mayan glyphs demo was created, evaluated, and refined by former Ohio State
University student, Abigail Sarver-Verhey, who has gone on to become a designer of
museum exhibits: www.abigailsarververhey.com/. Much of the information for this
demo comes from Houston (1988).

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 10 Learn to Listen

OPENING WORKSHEET

Think about different kinds of people you might encounter when you are
doing your demo in a free-choice learning environment. For example:

• A young child, a teenager, a middle-aged parent, a grandparent;

• A teacher, a college student from a related discipline, an architect, a car
mechanic, a nurse;
• A person who is multilingual, a person who has traveled widely, a
person with hearing loss.

Pick two people from our list above. Write down your answers to the
following questions about each of those two people.
What questions do you think each person would have about the topic
of your doable demo? What questions do you think they would have
about the specific activity you are working on?

Conversations are not monologues, lectures, or performances! As we saw

from Chapter 3, a good conversation is fundamentally cooperative, and
cooperative conversation requires contributions from everyone involved.
What does that mean for you? It means you have to let other people talk,
too. What else? You don’t just wait until the other people finish talking and
then keep going with what you started. You listen to those people and
respond to what they say.

Ask Questions
The easiest way to guarantee that other people talk is to ask them questions!
But not any kind of question will do. You’re trying to encourage successful

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 Learn to Listen 117

conversational interaction, so don’t make it easy for someone to answer you

with a single word. Make your own questions open-ended, so that their
answers have to involve real substance. And don’t worry if your first ques-
tion doesn’t get things going – you can always ask more! You can even ask
people two or three questions at once. This gives them choices about which to
answer. Also, some people need a little extra encouragement, so feel free to
push people gently to contribute more: “Can you say more about what you
mean?” or “Why do you think so?” Not all questions will work equally well
with all people, so have more than one prepared so that you can always ask
another one.
There are plenty of ways to ask a good question. For example, you can try
to make the topic relevant by asking people to connect your topic to elements
in their own lives. Can they describe a time when they noticed your phe-
nomenon in their daily life? What are their ideas about why it happens? One
of the great features about language is that everybody has experience with it.
Asking about those experiences engages people and will help them see why
your topic matters. Encouraging people to tell you anecdotes from their own
lives and opinions based on their funds of knowledge will engage them and
may even give you new ideas about how to make the topic relevant.
Another great approach is to ask people to reflect on what you’re doing
with them in the moment and to encourage them to explore its possibilities. If
you begin your conversation by trying to spark excitement with a specific
example (see Chapter 6 for why this matters and Chapter 13 for some
practical suggestions), then you can use that example as a base for your
questions. Ask people to think about the experience you’re giving them:
What are they thinking when they do it? What makes it hard or easy, or
puzzling, or funny? As linguists have long known, introspection can be a
powerful tool of scientific investigation. Ask people questions that help them
introspect about the piece of language you are focusing on.
You can even invite people to engage in a bit of scientific reasoning. Is
there a way for people to manipulate your materials to create a different
effect? Even if it’s not possible to change things in this moment, you can
always engage in a thought experiment. What would happen if you spoke a
different language? Or if you were a child? Or if you ran the audio backward?
The key to these questions is to foster a conversation about your topic where
the nonexpert can have something real to contribute. Museum professionals
Sue Allen and Joshua Gutwill have called these kinds of questions “juicy,” as
they are intended to be “satisfying, enjoyable, and full of possibilities” just like
a perfectly ripe piece of fruit (Allen & Gutwill, 2009). Juicy questions are ones
that nonexperts can talk about and can use your materials/examples to gain
some real insight about. Critically, a juicy question isn’t one that requires a

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 118 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

base of expert knowledge to answer. The answer to a juicy question isn’t

something you just know; it’s something that you can figure out by working
with what you’ve got. In fact, one sign that your conversation is going
extremely well is that people will not only figure out the answers to your
questions but will even ask some juicy questions of their own.
For example, we’ve used an activity with a set of blocks to show people
how historical linguists see connections across languages. Each block has a
different word on it (like father or three); each side of a block shows the word
in a different color; each color corresponds to a different language (e.g., père
in red, pater in green, fader in blue). We ask people to find the patterns across
the words and the languages (colors). We encourage them to play around
with the blocks to see different groupings, or to say the words out loud to
help them notice the relationships between the letters and the sounds. Our
juicy questions explore what people notice about the different sounds (or
even letters) that are common within one color and different across the
colors. We ask them to suggest different ways to describe the relationships
across the words to help them discover connections. These questions engage
people with the materials. People don’t always recreate Grimm’s laws with
our materials, but they usually notice some of the systematic ways that the
languages are different from each other.
We have also – unfortunately – found that some questions can stop a
conversation cold. Unless you’ve had the right coursework, you may not
know the actual identities of the languages we used in this demo, or how they
are related to each other. You also may not be able to come up with examples
outside of our set: Asking people to think of another Germanic language or
to translate each word into Portuguese isn’t fair because the demo doesn’t
include the tools to answer them. Those kinds of questions turn the conver-
sation back into a lecture, or worse, into a test that few people can pass.
Instead, we want juicy questions that are full of possibilities rather than
being focused on one correct answer.
Part of being in an informal learning setting is that you don’t need to
worry about tests or grades. And that’s true even if you are using juicy
questions. No matter how good your question is, it won’t work for all people.
If your question falls flat, it’s OK to give hints! It’s fantastic if you can get
people to spontaneously come up with an analysis of your phenomenon, but
it’s also fine if you just get people to reflect your own analysis back at you.
Asking people to put something into their own words is a fair and useful
question (if a little obvious for many people). Alternatively, ask people to
consider how your phenomenon connects with their own experiences.
Remember, it’s more important to get people interested in what you’re doing
than for them to be able to conduct a proper scientific analysis of it.

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 Learn to Listen 119

Listen to the Answers

Questions will get people talking, but they also help you create a
conversation if you actually listen to the answers. Your questions shouldn’t
be rhetorical props that give the illusion of interaction but really are just
ways for you to say what’s next on your cue card. You need to be flexible
enough that your part of the conversation can be influenced by what the
other person says!
The first step to being a good listener is to provide the time for the other
person to answer. Many people will want time to think about what you’re
asking, so you need to give that to them. How much time should you give
them? More than you think. You already know what you want this conver-
sation to be about; in fact, if you’re working in a free-choice environment,
you may have already had this conversation dozens of times before with
other people. But for the person you’re talking with right now, it’s probably
the very first time they have talked about this topic. You came with a set of
prepared juicy questions, but they didn’t come with a set of prepared
answers! They need time to figure out what they think.

Figure 10.1 You don’t need a giant ear to be a big listener!

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 120 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

There’s an old trick that teachers use in classrooms, and it will work in this
context too. After you’ve asked a question, count to ten slowly (silently, inside
your head). Breathe deeply (but quietly). Just keep looking at the person with
an open, slightly expectant expression on your face. The first few times you do
this, those ten seconds will last forever, and in our experience, most people will
respond to you long before you reach ten! But your patience will pay off with
many more people being willing, and able, to interact with you.
The second step to being a good listener is to actually, for real, hear what
the other person says. It is critical that you are open to the possibility that
people won’t say what you were expecting, or hoping, that they would. If
you’re not sure whether you’re really paying attention, try echoing back what
the person’s answer was. If you’re having trouble doing that, you might want
to ask people to repeat, or to clarify, what they said. To make the
conversation a good one, you need to respond to what people are saying. If
you don’t know what that is, your conversation won’t go well.
Sometimes people will express their confusion. This could be a small thing
(maybe they didn’t hear you well). Or it could concern terminology (see
Chapter 14 for a judicious approach to technical terms). Or it could reflect
larger concepts (maybe they don’t see the point of what you’re saying). Take
a confused response for the helpful feedback that it is! This is your chance to
solve a problem, whether that means speaking up, defining terms, or explain-
ing examples in a different way. You might end up talking more about
foundational concepts than you expected, or you might end up talking more
about real-world applications. But it’s better for you to talk about fewer
things in a more understandable way than for you to talk about a lot of
things in a way that nobody follows.
Sometimes people will surprise you. They bring their own funds of
knowledge to the conversation – their life histories and personal agendas.
What’s important to them may not be what you had planned on at all. If this
happens, have some faith in the cooperative nature of conversations. Most
likely, the person you’re talking with is trying to be relevant to what they
perceive as your topic. But if their starting place differs a bit from yours, it
may take you some effort to figure out the connections. You can always ask
people to tell you more! And if you do, they’ll love it and you’ll learn
something from the exchange.
It could be that the person has misunderstood you in some way that will
hinder downstream communication. Maybe they think you’re asking about
their personal history with language when you bring up historical linguistics.
If that happens, you can gently correct them and move the conversation back
to where you want it. It is always important in these cases to acknowledge
what the person did bring up. For example, you might say something like
“I can see what you mean – we all have histories. Some linguists study the

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 Learn to Listen 121

histories of whole languages too, like English or Spanish. How do you think
the history of a language might be like the history of a person?” Don’t assume
they made a mistake because they aren’t smart or well educated or interested.
Instead, assume that they were making a sensible connection, even if it wasn’t
what you expected. If you don’t see the connection right away, ask them to say
a bit more so that you can figure it out.
In fact, sometimes, they may be making a sensible connection that you
actually do want to talk about! Maybe the differences across languages
reminds them of spelling errors that they have made. That’s a connection
that you could use to talk about how mishearings and misanalyses actually
are a factor in historical change. For example, the word apron was actually
napron in Middle English (spoken some five hundred years ago or so). But
apparently a napron got reanalyzed as an apron at some point, and so the
word changed. Or maybe the person you’re talking with just saw a documen-
tary about how scholars use differences in languages to track the migration
of people over time, so they want to talk with you about how language
informs our understanding of how cultures and societies have interacted over
history. That conversation would take you away from classic analyses of
sound change, but it surely is an exciting one to have on the topic of
historical linguistics! Most importantly, the person you’ve been having this
conversation with will leave it satisfied with the conversation itself and likely
intrigued about the idea of a language’s history.
Try to resist thinking of surprises as problems. Instead, think of them as
opportunities to learn about what’s on other people’s minds. Conversational
surprises are an opportunity for you to learn new ways to stay relevant!

Don’t Be Defensive
We mentioned above how important it is that we avoid making the people
you’re talking with feel like they are being tested. But it’s possible that you
will feel like you are the one being tested. If you’re used to formal classrooms,
then you’re used to being graded on your performance. That’s not what’s
going on here!
You don’t have to prove that you did your homework, or that you’ve got
all the answers, or that you’re the smartest person there. The people you’re
talking with aren’t going to give you gold stars or demerits. When they ask
you questions, they aren’t trying to catch you out in a mistake or create a
“gotcha” moment. When they tell you about a personal experience, they
aren’t trying to teach you a lesson or imply that what you’re doing isn’t
valuable. People are talking with you because they want to have a conversa-
tion with you about the topic you introduced. They are asking questions

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 122 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

because they want to know answers. They are telling you about themselves
because they think their experiences are relevant to the topic. They are trying
to cooperate with you! Please take their questions and comments in that
spirit, and be as straightforward and cooperative as you can be.
In fact, pretending people are being cooperative even in the rare cases
where they are not can be a great strategy for dealing with them. It demon-
strates your confidence. You know that what you’re doing is worthwhile and
that you’re doing it well. If it doesn’t seem like the person you’re talking with
agrees, you can assume (or if you need to, pretend) that they are just socially
awkward. A great way to deal with a socially awkward person is to be
especially socially appropriate yourself.
We mentioned another way to demonstrate your confidence in Chapter 8:
It is OK to say “I don’t know” when someone asks a question that you don’t
know the answer to. It is also OK for you to ask people for more information.
If you aren’t understanding the direction they want to take the conversation,
go ahead and ask them to clarify. Why are they bringing that new infor-
mation up? What do they see as the connection? Of course, when you ask
these questions, be sure that you are doing it in a respectful way! You don’t
want to sound accusatory, as if you are unhappy that they aren’t sticking to
your script. Getting people to talk with you requires a certain amount of
trust – in this case, trust that you will respect their perspective and are
interested in what they have to say. And if you take the funds of knowledge
approach seriously, you will be interested in what they have to say!
But what if you feel like you’re getting a lot of difficult questions and a lot
of off-the-wall comments not just from one person, but from lots of the
people who you talk with? Think of those as data points: You’re learning
something about how you’re presenting yourself and your topic. As we
mentioned in Chapter 5, audience design is your responsibility. It’s up to
you to figure out who your audience is and what they already know that is
relevant to understanding your topic. If you aren’t sure whether people are
following you, try asking them! It’s up to you to make your topic interesting
and your demonstrations engaging and relevant. If you’re not connecting
with people, don’t blame your audience. Instead, learn to listen.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

A good conversation requires give and take from everyone involved. To get
people talking, ask lots of questions that you prepared in advance. Try to
make your questions “juicy” so that they engage rather than test people. To
keep up your end of the conversation, really listen and respond to what
people are saying in a respectful and connected way.

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 Learn to Listen 123

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

One demo we like to do concerns regional dialects. Everybody

knows that people in different parts of the country (or the world) use
different words for the same things, even when they speak the same
language. English speakers in the United Kingdom say lift while English
speakers in the United States say elevator. Within the United States,
there is a famous beverage divide: Carbonated drinks are called soda,
pop, or coke, depending on where people live. And the phenomenon is
not, of course, unique to English! For example, Spanish speakers in
Venezuela call a carbonated beverage fresca while those in Argentina
call it gaseosa.
For our demo, we rely on the hard work of the sociolinguistics commu-
nity who have produced lots of fun resources that allow you to show maps
where different words are more commonly used. We present people with
an image (a refreshing looking drink, perhaps, as shown in Figure 10.2)
and ask what they call it. Then we show them the geographic breakdown
for the different words people use for the same item, as shown in the map
in Figure 10.3.

Figure 10.2 Picture used to elicit a term for a carbonated beverage

Note. Used with permission of Getty Images. Photo credit: Surasak Pumdontri/EyeEm.

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 124 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
Here’s what it looks like for our Spanish soda example:

ESPAN̂A

CUBA
MÉXICO REPÚBLICA
DOMINICANA
PUERTO
RICO

GUATEMALA PANAMÁ
EL SALVADOR
HONDURAS VENEZUELA
COSTA
COLOMBIA
RICA
AGUA DE
El Salvador
ECUADOR TIEMPO

PERÚ BEBIDA Chile

COLA Ecuador

FRESCO Honduras
BOLIVIA Costa Rica
Venezuela
PA
R

GASEOSA Guatemala
AG
U
AY

Colombia
Perú
Chile Argentina
Paraguay
ARGENTINA
Uruguay REFRESCO México
Uruguay
Puerto Rico
República Dominicana
Cuba
Espan̂a

SODA Bolivia
Panamá

Figure 10.3 Map showing what different dialects of Spanish around the world call a
carbonated beverage

This demo is all about the questions! We try to make these questions
juicy, in order to get people to think about what these differences mean,
where they come from, what they tell us in general, and especially what
they tell us about language! Here are some examples of questions we’ve
tried. They are grouped into categories. In each category are a few differ-
ent versions/phrasings of a key question as well as different ways of
approaching that category of question.

Opening questions (needed to make the example work)

What do you call this item?

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 Learn to Listen 125

(cont.)
Questions encouraging people to notice things in our materials
When you look at this map, what do you notice about where people use
different words for this item? Does it fit with your own experience? How is
the map for this word similar to / different from the map for the last word?
Why do you think that would be?

Questions about extending the phenomenon

Do you know anybody who uses a different word for this item? Where are
they from? Can you think of any examples of words that help you figure
out where people are from? Do you ever use different words for the same
item? Why do you do that?

Questions about social relevance

Why do you think people use these different words? What do you think
about people who use a different word from you?

CLOSING WORKSHEET

For your demo activity, think of three juicy questions that you can ask people.
Do your questions have clear right and wrong answers? If so, they
probably aren’t juicy! Try again!
What kind of answers would you like people to give to your questions?
How do those answers draw on the other person’s funds of knowledge?
How do your questions encourage people to explore your materials?
How can you follow up each of your questions to encourage yet more
engagement?

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 You have to let the other person talk
Of course, in some contexts, we don’t care what other people have to say and we
really don’t listen to them. Here’s a clip from the movie His Girl Friday, where neither
character is really listening to what the other one is saying: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vTut0y3EebE#t=3m10s.

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 126 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

2 Juicy questions
Some years ago, San Francisco’s Exploratorium (www.exploratorium.edu/) began
developing programs that would enhance science inquiry skills in students aged
ten to thirteen years during museum field trips. An important consideration was to
have the programs work without requiring earlier preparation on the part of teachers
or chaperones (Allen & Gutwill, 2009; Gutwill & Allen, 2012). For our purposes
here, it’s interesting that the original game designers found no need to regiment an
exploration phase. Exploration should come naturally for people who we interact
with too if we – like museum exhibit designers – spark interest through the
observations, experiences, and tools that we share. What mattered for real inquiry
was getting visitors to ask a “juicy” question – one that “nobody in their group
knew the answer to, yet was realistically answerable at the exhibit” (Allen &
Gutwill, 2009, p. 293). The “answerable at the exhibit” part helped keep adults
from becoming “teachers” who relayed stock answers to the rest of the group. So,
questions like “what happens if” are juicier than “why” questions; many of the
latter can’t be answered then and there. These considerations show us the import-
ance of helping our conversational partners ask and answer their own questions
about language.

3 The words père, pater, fader

Describing what makes two words “similar” or “different” from each other
requires the technical tools of phonology, but nonexperts can still find the right
pieces. For example, if you use two words that start with an [f] sound in English
(father, fish), people can notice that this sound changes to [p] in French (père,
poisson) but remains an [f] in Norwegian (far, fisk). There is a similar pattern
if you look at words that start with [t] in English: Two and ten are translated
as deux and dix in French and to and ti in Norwegian. Just these few examples
suggest that English is more similar to Norwegian than to French, which is in
fact the case. Of course, English isn’t the same as Norwegian, and there are also
opportunities here to look at places where those words don’t line up (focusing
on the ends of the words helps a lot with that part). Our demo focuses on a few
European languages, but it could easily be done with any languages that are
related to each other.

4 Grimm’s laws
One of the great discoveries of language science is how to use the relationship among
the sounds across related words in different languages to trace their historical
ancestry. These relationships can even be used to reconstruct a language no longer
spoken, such as Proto-Indo-European. Jacob Grimm was not the first linguist who
identified these kinds of relationships, but his particular formulation of the rules of
sound changes was very influential, and they are frequently called Grimm’s laws.
And yes, this Jacob Grimm is one of the brothers who documented and popularized
many folk/fairy tales. You can read the basics about Grimm’s life and work here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Grimm.

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 Learn to Listen 127

5 Have some faith in the cooperative nature of conversations

Although perhaps most famous for her research on gendered communication and
communication within families, Deborah Tannen has published a lot that is relevant
to this point (e.g., Tannen, 1986). For example, she’s shown that “enthusiastic
listenership” takes different forms. This includes devices that some speakers perceive
as interruptions, but that the ‘interrupters’ use to show how well they’re actually
listening. Tannen also illuminates cross-cultural communication of the kind we
discussed in Chapter 3’s Heathrow-based example (e.g., Tannen, 1984). Here is a list
of her articles for general audiences, which is an easy way to benefit from her
insights into conversations: www.deborahtannen.com/general-audience-articles.

6 Classroom trick: Count to ten after asking a question

Classroom teachers aren’t the only people who have noticed that pausing after asking
questions is a good idea. It’s also a very popular idea in the business world. To read
about how a professor in a business school approaches the idea, we recommend
James G. Clawson’s work (e.g., Clawson, 2008). But if you want a more popular
business approach, you can try this blog post: www.briantracy.com/blog/sales-suc
cess/the-power-of-pausing/.

7 Pretending people are being cooperative

When it comes to the question of dealing with noncooperative people, we know that
some are on the receiving end of this kind of behavior more than others. We are both
older white women with PhDs, and people in free-choice learning environments very
rarely treat us like we aren’t qualified to be doing demos. But we are keenly aware
that some of our students, especially younger women of color, encounter less
cooperativeness than we do. We still find that the strategy of willfully pretending
that the other person is being cooperative is pretty effective, largely because it keeps
the situation from escalating. Generally, we try to publicly grant as much authority
to our students as possible. As we note in Chapter 8, wearing lab coats is one tactic
that we sometimes use. But on a more interpersonal level, we don’t step on our
students’ authority in front of their audience. We trust them to handle themselves
and their demos in public, and we don’t interrupt them (except occasionally to
compliment them in front of people) or take over the interaction from them. We
can’t control the rest of the universe, but we can, ourselves, treat our students with
the respect they deserve.

8 Demos on regional dialects in English and Spanish

Our English version of this activity uses lots of materials that we got from Jeff Reaser
at North Carolina State University: https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/jlreaser/. He and
his colleagues have an extensive program of research on regional dialects, including
exciting work on how to promote tolerance for people who speak nonstandard
dialects. Our Spanish version of this activity was developed by several students from
The Ohio State University, most notably Shasteny Cabrera and Luana Lamberti.
Some people may already be familiar with these kinds of maps from a popular
dialect quiz that was published in the New York Times: www.nytimes.com/inter

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 128 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

active/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html. (Fair warning: The New York Times has a

paywall and only allows you to read a limited number of articles for free.) And this
quiz is also now available in a handy book form from Josh Katz: Speaking American:
How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide (www.amazon.com/dp/
0544703391/). If you’d like to go back to the original sociolinguists whose work
inspired the New York Times quiz, see this website from Bert Vaux and Scott Golder:
www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey.

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 11 Information Structure

OPENING WORKSHEET

Imagine a conversation with each of the following kinds of people:

• Someone who is about your age;

• Someone who is from the same country as you;
• Someone who has almost nothing in common with you – someone who
is much older (or much younger) and who is from a country halfway
around the globe where English is not prominent.

For each of these people, write down three things that both of
you know.
Now write down three things that you know, but the other person
probably doesn’t know.
You might want to consider things related to popular culture, food
customs, social etiquette, knowledge of the local area, world history, or
the current weather.

In Chapter 3, we laid out four principles from Grice’s theory about coopera-
tive conversation. The fourth one was the Maxim of Manner. This maxim
emphasizes the value of brevity, clarity, and orderliness. As we have noted,
being clear is not easy to do. But since clarity is an important part of any
good conversation, and an absolutely critical part of any good conversation
about science, we’re going to use the next few chapters to give suggestions
about how to address the Maxim of Manner. And lucky for us, the field of
language science has a lot to contribute on this topic! We’ll focus on one of
the most central distinctions that language science has given us about how to
be clear.

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 130 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

The Heart of Clarity: GIVEN BEFORE NEW

If you want your public engagement to be clear, talk about familiar things
(GIVEN ) before moving to unfamiliar things (NEW ). GIVEN BEFORE NEW is a nice,
short mantra, but there are actually two big ideas inside of it. The first idea
concerns the difference between given information and new information.
The second idea concerns the ideal ordering for these two kinds
of information.
Let’s start with the difference between given and new information. As we
discussed in Chapter 3, in order to have a successful conversation, you and
your audience create that conversation together. But as we discussed in
Chapter 5, you and your audience are going to come into that conversation
from different places – you’ll have different backgrounds, reference points,
and expectations. In short, your funds of knowledge will differ. What you
need to do together is to define a space that includes the information that you
share with each other. The technical term for this space is the COMMON
GROUND . Given information is what is already in the common ground. New
information is what you’re introducing into your shared space in order to
make it part of the common ground.
In principle, this is an easy distinction to make, but in practice it can be
hard to know if something in a particular conversation is given or new.
Things that we say explicitly should move seamlessly from new to given
information. If someone announces, “I enjoy reading books by George Eliot,”
that’s new information for the conversation. But now that this has been said,
the information becomes part of the common ground and all participants in
the conversation can assume it as a given.
Or can we? What if you don’t know who Eliot was or what any of her
books are about? Or what if you didn’t exactly catch the way that name was
pronounced? We all have a lot of assumptions about the common ground –
what everybody knows – and what is a distinctive addition into it. The more
similar you are to the person you’re talking with, the more information you
share. With members of your own family, you can assume that people will
know all sorts of things: Your family knows the name of your childhood pet
(if you had one), whether or not you like broccoli, and maybe even your shoe
size. The givens within a family can be so extensive that family members can
often speak with each other in a kind of shorthand since everybody knows so
much about each other.
With people who are outside your family but still from your general
community, you take less for granted. Even so, there are still many things
that you can assume as givens in your common ground: Students at the same

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 Information Structure 131

university know about their school’s sports teams, the basic layout of their
campus, and what good test-taking etiquette is. Some of these pieces of
information are specific to each university (like the campus layout), and
others are shared by just about all college students (test-taking etiquette).
But probably none of these items could be assumed to be given in the
common ground if you were talking to an elderly Tibetan monk. Just about
the only things that can always be assumed as given are things that every-
body knows by virtue of being a human on Earth (things fall when you drop
them, the sun rises daily) or things that are happening right in front of you
(it’s snowing, we’re inside a building).
When you start thinking about given and new information in terms of
language science, you will almost certainly overestimate the given infor-
mation. In Chapter 12, we’ll talk a little about why that’s true; and in
Chapters 13 and 14, we’ll talk about ways to ensure that you’ve established
what’s given before you provide new information. But as you probably
already know, one of the most important ways to make sure that you and
your conversational partners are in the same common ground is to listen to
what they say! In Chapter 10, we talked about how important paying
attention to your partner is. Tracking the common ground and what infor-
mation is given in it is one more critical reason to listen!
Which brings us to the second big idea inside of GIVEN BEFORE NEW : The
order that you talk about things matters. A conversation isn’t a painting
in a museum where you are looking at a finished product. With paintings,
you may not have any idea which part was painted first or last – you get
some effect of the painting all at once. But a conversation unfolds over
time, and that means that its success depends on what order people say
things. It’s more like a TV series where you need to understand the earlier
episodes in order for the later ones to make sense. Imagine that you
started watching a new TV program but the first three episodes were
missing and you had to start in the middle. You wouldn’t know who the
characters are, or what they want, or where they’re going. By the time you
get to the middle of a series, there’s a lot of information that is being
treated as given. And, if that information is new for you, you have to
work really hard to try and piece together how the common ground got set
up in the first place.
The general idea is really just plain common sense: You build on what you
already know. There’s a reason college students don’t start their coursework
with advanced seminars. Those seminars assume that students have already
mastered the information in the introductory courses. This idea is also
connected to the funds of knowledge approach discussed in Chapter 4:
People will connect with you better if you build on the knowledge that they

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 132 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

are bringing to your conversation. Given information is what you and your
conversational partner already know – it’s the common ground. The new
information isn’t going to make sense unless you have that shared founda-
tion of knowledge in place. You need to build these conversations from the
bottom up.

We Understand Language as We Listen to It

One of the reasons that order is so important is because we listen to language
in real time. When we listen to people talking, we don’t wait until the end of
each sentence to compute that sentence’s meaning. We actively engage with
what we’re hearing (or reading), and we are making meaning even as each
sentence unfolds.
Seriously – you aren’t waiting for anything! As soon as you hear even a
single sound of a word, you automatically start trying to predict what the
word will be. Psycholinguists Paul Allopenna, James Magnuson, and Michael
Tanenhaus showed that as soon as you hear the /k/ sound, you will start
looking around for objects that start that way – a can, a candle, a koala bear,
a chameleon, and so on (Allopenna et al., 1998). We are eager to know what
people are talking about and we have no reservations about trying to jump
ahead whenever possible.
Of course, sometimes you will guess wrong about where the sentence is
going and when that happens, you will slow down and may even get
genuinely confused. In fact, language science researchers are experts at
creating sentences that will encourage you to go down the wrong structural
path and predict the wrong things – that’s how they figure out the kind of
guesses people like to make. The technical term for sentences that mislead
you is a fun one: They are called garden-path sentences because they lead
you down a garden path and right into a dead end.
For example, check out the start of this sentence:

(1) The scientist examined . . .

What do you think will come next? Examining is something that scientists
are likely to do, and most people start imagining things that a scientist might
examine (maybe data? maybe specimens? maybe the literature?). Now see
what happens when we continue the sentence in an unexpected direction:
The scientist examined by the prosecutor was easy to understand. Most people
are surprised when they hit the word by – it’s just not what they were
guessing would come next. In this particular sentence, the scientist isn’t
doing the examining; instead, she’s getting examined!

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 Information Structure 133

What actually happens when a sentence takes a surprising turn? It depends on

the specific sentence and how badly it violated people’s expectations. But it
can get bad. In some cases, people simply slow down. If they were reading the
sentence (and not listening to it), they might go back and reread the first part
and figure out where they went wrong. In some cases, people misunderstand the
sentence as meaning something closer to their expectations: For instance, they
might think the scientist examined the prosecutor. And in some cases, people
reject the sentence entirely and report that it was nonsense or badly formed.
Sentence (1) is a classic garden-path sentence because it works against
your natural expectations. But it turns out that those expectations can be
changed. Think about how this sentence will continue:

(2) The specimen examined . . .

Sentence (2) has the same form as sentence (1), but changing the subject from
scientist to specimen changes your expectations. If this sentence continued
like the last one, most people wouldn’t find it very surprising: The specimen
examined by the prosecutor was easy to see. This sentence doesn’t slow people
down, or confuse them, or make them throw their hands up.

So what are people basing their sentence interpretation guesses on? As

these examples show us, one thing people care about is what they already
know. We use what we already know about scientists and specimens to guess
what someone else is going to say about them.
And what works for the word level, and for the sentence level, also works
for the level of a whole conversation. People will come into a conversation
with previous knowledge, and they will start using that knowledge to guess
where you’re going next. So where you start is going to make a big difference
for people’s expectations.
One way to think about it is that we are trying to create a movie in our heads
that corresponds to what people are saying. These movies (or mental models, to
use a bit of jargon) are built out of what people tell us, combined with lots of
other information that we already know about the general topic. If we tell you
that we’re going to show you something about Mayan glyphs (see the Worked
Example Box in Chapter 9), you will create a mental model that starts with what
we just said and whatever else you know about the topic. Maybe you know that
the Maya lived in Central America. Maybe you think about Egyptian writing
when you hear the term hieroglyphics. Maybe these words don’t mean much to
you at all. But you will use whatever you’ve got to start creating a mental idea
that helps you guess where our conversation is going to go.
Here’s where all the pieces start to come together! You will start building
your mental model with the things you heard first. If what you hear first is

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 134 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

something that is familiar to you – it’s given information – then you will start
building a rich mental model with a firm foundation. This foundation will
allow you to start thinking usefully about the topic, and so when you hear
something new about Mayan hieroglyphics, you will have something solid to
connect that information to. But what happens if what you hear first isn’t
given? What if instead it is unfamiliar information and therefore for you, it is
new information? You’ll have a harder time laying down the initial foundation
for starting the conversation with new information. You won’t know what
kind of information to be thinking about, so you won’t have ideas on your
mind that can connect to what’s coming. You also won’t be able to guess
where things are going, so you won’t have that sense that following the
conversation is easy. It won’t be like watching a romantic comedy or an action
movie where you know roughly where events are going. It will be more like
watching one of those avant-garde movies where you have to stay on your
toes the whole time and you are occasionally uncomfortable. Now ask yourself
this: Which kind of movie do you think most people might want to see?
By orienting people with given information first, you lay the groundwork
to make the new information easier to digest. Of course, you also raise the
possibility that you’ll create a garden path in your conversation. If people
have a lot of unexpected associations to your topic area, then the conversa-
tion may not go at all where you want to (maybe mentioning the Maya
makes people think about the death metal band MaYaN). If that happens, we
remind you of the advice from Chapter 10, that it is really important that you
listen to people! The only way you’ll know if people’s guesses have taken
them too far afield is if you pay attention to what they say to you.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

People are expecting you to provide given information before new infor-
mation, and they will understand you better if you do that.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

A favorite activity that we’ve mentioned in a variety of places is making

name tags in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The core of the
activity is very straightforward (you use the IPA to write a name tag for a
person), and the language science education comes in while you talk
through how those symbols represent their name.

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 Information Structure 135

(cont.)
Here’s one potential way to do that:
Did you know that language scientists have a special system, called the
International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, that lets them write down sounds from
languages around the world? Sometimes the IPA letters will be the same ones
you use when you spell your name, but other times they will be different. Let’s
try it! Your name is Cecile! Great – I’m going to write that like this: [səsil]. In the
IPA you can see that you’ve got the same sibilant consonant in there twice –
those are the two things that look like S’s. But when you spell your name, you
use two Cs instead. Have you heard about “hard Cs” and “soft Cs” in English?
Which one do you use in your name? What do those Cs really sound like?
English spelling doesn’t have just one letter for one sound – that’s why the letter
C can be pronounced different ways. But in the IPA, each symbol goes to just one
sound.

We’ve heard many students give an explanation that works basically

like the one above. The way the student is thinking about it is this: I start
with a nice quick summary of what I want to explain, and then I break it
down for people in a more specific way. My summary orients people and
helps them stay patient through the longer explanation.
But we do not recommend that you present information in that order!
Why not? Because that quick overview is full of new information. The
specific breakdown can feel like it’s long-winded, and students worry that
they need to get to their main point more quickly because otherwise people
might leave. But people need that familiar or given information first in
order to make sense of the quick summary. The given information is what
people can readily understand – it won’t feel like a distraction. Instead, it
will help people get oriented. Starting with information that people do not
understand is more likely to make them stop listening and so leave. If they
didn’t understand where you started, why would they think they can
understand where you’re headed?
In this example, it’s pretty easy to reorder things to get the given
information before the new info. We’d prefer this way:
Your name is Cecile! Great – I’m going to write that like this: [səsil]. I’m using
an alphabet especially made to write any sound from any spoken language. It
lets me write down the sounds of your name exactly as you say them. Did you
notice that you’ve got two Cs in the spelling of your name but that I didn’t write
them down? What did I use instead? Have you heard about “hard Cs” and “soft
Cs” in English? Which one do you use in your name? What do those Cs really

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 136 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
sound like? Since the sound you say in your name is an S sound, that’s what
I wrote. Language scientists call this alphabet the International Phonetic
Alphabet because it lets them write down the sounds of languages from around
the world.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Review the interaction that you have planned for your doable demo. You’ll
want to especially remind yourself of what you wrote for Chapter 6 (where
you identified an Aha! moment to provide), and for Chapter 7 (where you
came up with ways that your topic is relevant to people’s lives), and for
Chapter 9 (where you identified your Critical Take-Home Message), and for
Chapter 10 (where you came up with some juicy questions).
Write down the ideal interaction that you want to have with most
people. Try to write this as a series of steps. How will you invite people to
your table or cart or booth? What will you show them first? What questions
will you ask them? When and how will you try to connect your activity to
people’s lives? What do you have to explain to help people enjoy your
activity? When will you mention your Critical Take-Home Message?
Once you have a reasonable order for all your pieces, try moving things
around. What happens if you move the last thing to the beginning? What
happens if you start in the middle?
Try identifying what elements of common ground are needed to
understand each one of your steps. You should need the least common
ground for the early points, and as your common ground grows you can
need more. Is this reflected in your ordering? If not, try a new order.

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 The heart of clarity: Given before New
The study of discourse organization is a vast field with a long tradition. We’ve
adopted one set of technical terms from this field (i.e., given, new, common ground),
but other researchers have used other terms. For example, theme/rheme and topic/
comment are commonly used alternatives to given/new, and some researchers refer
to mutual knowledge rather than common ground. The differences in terminology
reflect different academic traditions, but also some theoretical differences in exactly

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 Information Structure 137

what matters for structuring information. Our choice of terms is not intended to be a
statement about our theoretical commitments in this area: We use given/new because
we find the terms transparent and punchy. Moreover, we are taking our own advice
from Chapter 9 seriously. Pretty much all theoretical perspectives agree on the basics
of the distinction and the role of common ground for navigating it. The details that
distinguish between different perspectives don’t matter for the purposes of accessible
science communication.

2 Report that [the sentence] was nonsense or badly formed

Many jokes put garden-path sentences to good use, or at least, they use them to make
people smirk and groan. To see a nice collection of such jokes, we recommend the
website put together by the linguist Beatrice Santorini: www.ling.upenn.edu/~bea
trice/humor/. The section on syntax jokes has lots of examples based on structural
ambiguities of the kind discussed in the main text.

3 Mental models
There is a large literature on mental models and how they organize text
comprehension. Our use of mental models here extrapolates from psycholinguistics
research by Zwaan (2008) and Gernsbacher (1990).

4 Death metal band MaYaN

You can read more about this band on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Mayan_(band).
And you can watch a music video of their song “War on Terror” here: www
.youtube.com/watch?v=BhBeb3ZMyow.

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 12 The Curse of Knowledge

OPENING WORKSHEET

Pick something you don’t know much about (a piece of linguistics would
work, but so would making an origami model, or the ingredients in a hot
sauce, or a historical event, or the chemical structure of alcohol).
Write down what you do know about this topic. Also write down three
questions you have about this topic. Label what you just wrote “Before.”
Put it away and don’t look at it until you have finished the rest of this
worksheet. It’s fine (even desirable) if you wait a day or two before doing
the next part.
Go learn about your topic. You don’t have to learn everything, but do
spend at least half an hour to an hour reading about it.
Write down what you learned. Also write down three questions that
you still have about the topic. Label what you just wrote “After.”
Now, go back to what you wrote originally, and compare your before
and after versions of what you know. How much of what you knew in the
After part was included in the Before part? How much is new? Did you find
answers to your original questions?

In Chapter 11, we laid out the key for how to present information in an
understandable way: Start the conversation with given (known, familiar)
information before you move to new information. In principle, it’s easy to
follow this advice. In practice, it can be hard to know what counts as given
and what counts as new. In conversations in informal learning settings,
given and new need to be defined in a cooperative way – given information
has to be familiar information for everybody in the conversation; infor-
mation counts as new if it is new for anybody in the conversation.
The problem is that it’s not always easy to keep track of the difference
between what everybody knows and what just one person knows, especially
when that one person is yourself. Once you know something, you can’t unknow

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 The Curse of Knowledge 139

it. The most you can do is imagine what it feels like (what it felt like) to not
know it. That imaginative leap is a skill, and not an easy one to master. Your
own knowledge – which is probably just the thing that makes you want to talk
to other people – will follow you like a curse. It will constantly interfere with
your ability to accurately guess what other people know, and therefore, it will
interfere with your ability to organize your information from given to new.

Kids Are Hilariously Cursed

The idea that what you already know interferes with your figuring out what
other people know has been studied extensively in the field of developmental
psychology. One term for this idea is the CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE , which is just
one piece of a research area known as THEORY OF MIND . The way we under-
stand other people – why they do what they do – is by assuming that they
have minds that are filled with mental objects like desires, goals, emotions,
and beliefs. Minds aren’t something you can see or touch, so what we have is
a theory about someone else’s mind. We use that theory to predict what
people will do. If we hypothesize that in your mind you desire to go home,
and you believe the bus stops on the corner, and you think that you have
exact change in your pocket, then we can predict that you’ll go to the corner
to wait for the bus. What could be viewed as a weird random act (Why in the
world would someone stand on a street corner for twenty minutes?) becomes
a very sensible activity – even one that can be predicted fairly reliably.
It turns out that this ability to think about other people’s minds is a
complex and difficult skill. And it’s one that research has shown will trip
kids up for years. In a classic task designed to study theory of mind in
children, a three-year-old child is shown a box that the child knows well.
In the original (British) version of the task, it was a box for the popular candy
Smarties; other researchers have used boxes for all kinds of products that
kids know very well: crayons, Cheerios, Graham Crackers. The key is that the
child has opened boxes like this one before and knows what is typically
inside of them. The researcher asks three-year-olds what is in the box, and
they always say it’s what you’d expect to find.
Then the researcher opens the box up and – surprise! – there’s something
else inside. Maybe it’s pencils, or cotton balls, or toy dinosaurs. Whatever it
is, it is something the child can label, but not what is usually in the box. Then
the researcher closes up the box and asks some variants of the critical
questions: When you first saw this box, what did you think was in it? If
I showed this box to your friend now, what would they say was in the box?

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 140 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

And here’s where the curse comes in. The child knows what’s in the box
now, and that interferes with their ability to say what a naïve person would
guess is in the box. Children frequently say that their friend would guess
there are toy dinosaurs in the box. They even frequently say that they
themselves did guess that there would be toy dinosaurs in the box. The
children cannot make the imaginative leap from what they know to be
true now (there are toy dinosaurs in the box) to what someone less know-
ledgeable would believe about the contents of the box. Their knowledge
curses them.
The Smarties task, as it is commonly known, has been done with thou-
sands of children in many different variations. The good news is that children
do overcome this extreme version of the curse. There are ways to make the
task easier for young children so that their knowledge doesn’t interfere as
much. But the most reliable way to get children to pass the task is to wait for
them to grow up: Four-year-old children generally get it right (particularly if
they are middle-class Western children), and by the time children are six
years old, most are great at the task.
But just because we get better at separating what we know from what
someone else knows doesn’t mean that we ever fully grow out of the curse.

Adults Are Cursed Too!

Generally speaking, adults don’t fail the Smarties task. In fact, the right
answer usually seems so obvious to adults that parents are often shocked
to hear their three-year-old children’s responses. But it turns out it’s not that
hard to trip adults up either.
Sometimes the curse plays itself out in small ways. The psychologists Boaz
Keysar, Shuhong Lin, and Dale Barr designed a situation where adults had to
remember that they knew something that their partner didn’t know – a
classic theory of mind situation. Here’s the setup: One adult (the “director”)
has to tell another adult (the “mover”) to move around a bunch of objects on
a table. The catch? The mover hides one of the objects in a paper bag before
the director even walks in the door. So during the game, the mover knows
something that the director doesn’t, namely, what’s in the bag.
How can we tell if the mover is cursed with their secret knowledge about
the bag’s contents? The experimenters compared two conditions to get at this
question. In their control condition, the mover put some batteries in the bag,
and the director never saw anything like batteries during the game. But in the
cursed condition, the mover put a roll of tape inside the bag. And critically,
during the game, there was a cassette music tape on the table as part of the
moving game.

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 The Curse of Knowledge 141

The sketch in Figure 12.1 shows what’s going on inside each person’s head
when they look at the paper bag in the cursed condition: The director only
sees a bag without knowing its contents, and the mover sees a bag that she
knows has a roll of tape inside.

Figure 12.1 The mover sees a bag that has a roll of tape in it, but the director just sees a bag
Note. Image from Keysar et al. (2003) used with permission.

In the critical trials, the director told the mover to move “the tape.” From
the director’s point of view, there’s only one tape in the game – the cassette
tape on the table. But for the mover, there’s one kind of tape on the table and
a different kind of tape in the bag. What happens then?

Figure 12.2 The director mentions the tape, and the mover thinks about what’s in the bag
Note. Image from Keysar et al. (2003) used with permission.

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 142 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

The mover really shouldn’t think about what’s in the bag when the director
mentions tape. After all, the director doesn’t know that there is tape in there;
but the mover does know that, since she helped hide the tape. What’s
fascinating is that the mover just can’t stop herself from knowing about
the hidden tape. And that knowledge affects her behavior in the task.
When the experimenters compared how the movers behaved in the cursed
condition to the control condition (when there were irrelevant batteries in the
bag), they found that the movers who were cursed by their own knowledge
looked at the paper bag holding the hidden roll of tape five times more often.
But wait – there’s more: 82 percent of the movers were slower to reach for the
visible cassette tape, and 71 percent of them actually reached at least once for
the paper bag containing the hidden tape! The movers were truly cursed. Just
like little children, they treated the directors like they had the same know-
ledge about what was in the bag that they had themselves.
One big place that adults have a blind spot is when they think about things
they used to believe – or rather, about things they used to be unsure of. We often
make predictions about how things are going to turn out: who will win the
election, what the final score of the game will be, when the meeting will end.
Some predictions are easier (or harder) to make, but they all have an element of
uncertainty to them since you can never really know the future. But if you talk
to people after they know an outcome, they tend to remember being a lot more
certain about how things would turn out, and they also tend to think the actual
outcome was more obvious than it probably was. There’s an old adage that
“hindsight is 20/20,” and researchers have called this the “hindsight bias.”
At its core, this bias reflects the curse of knowledge: Once you know how
something turned out, it is hard to unknow it. It is also apparently very hard
to make the imaginative leap to how it felt to be unsure about what would
happen. We remember seeing the handwriting clearly written on the wall
when in fact if you ask people before they know an outcome, they are a lot
more hazy about how things will go.
From the perspective of talking with the general public about new mater-
ial, it is worth dwelling for a moment on the fact that hindsight bias means
that we usually overestimate how certain and how knowledgeable we were in
the past. We view the past cursed by our present state of understanding. It
may be very human to think we always knew better, but it isn’t helpful for
talking with people who are still in what was your past state.

The Curse of Language Knowledge

When you’re talking with people about language, there’s an extra factor to
consider, and that’s the fact that people really do know their native language.

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 The Curse of Knowledge 143

One of the reasons that language is so fun to talk about with everybody is
that they do use language all the time, often in creative and sophisticated
ways. People have strong funds of knowledge concerning language, and
there is a sense in which all participants in these conversations are experts.
In fact, one of the core findings of language science is that people implicitly
know the rules, structures, and components of their language. For example,
everyone who speaks English will automatically use the SVO order for their
basic sentences. At this implicit level, just about all of language can be taken
as a given – it is well known and familiar to them and to you.
But don’t think that because people are implicit experts at language, they
also have an explicit understanding of how language works. For example,
you can ask any English speaker – from a grandmother to a child in the first
grade – how to make a plural form of a noun using the wug test. (In fact, we
do this task as a demo activity.) You just introduce a nonsense word (“here is
a wug”) and ask people what you call two of them. They usually say that
wugs is the plural form. So clearly there is a real and important sense in
which people know the rule for the English plural. But just because you can
do the plural, doesn’t mean that you can also explain it. If you ask people
what the plural rule is, they will almost certainly tell you that you “add an s”
to the word. But language scientists know the rule is more complicated than
that! At a minimum, the English plural rule also requires you to know
something about the sound system of the language – the plural of wug, after
all, doesn’t add an /s/ sound; it’s really a /z/ sound. And people do in fact
produce the correct sound. So they really don’t have the explicit knowledge
to explain the actual rule that they themselves are following!
Consider a related example. Most people you’ll be talking with not only
use language well but can also move their legs in various ways – they can
walk, run, hop, skip, and jump. Just because they can do those things,
though, doesn’t mean that they can explain how their legs work. In fact,
mechanical descriptions of different types of motions can get pretty compli-
cated! Being able to do something and being able to explain it are very
different things.
You probably do have some explicit analyses of language if you’re plan-
ning on talking about language science. But it is the curse of knowledge that
makes you feel like your explicit understanding trickles down to your impli-
cit knowledge. People can use language outstandingly well without having
any scientific analysis for why it works as it does. Don’t let your language
science savvy lead you to overinterpret what people know about language.
One way to find out what people know, and to create some common
ground, is to invite them to share an experience with you. Ideally, to share
a fascinating and even puzzling experience. In Chapter 13, we’ll talk about

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 144 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

how to create some experiences that will anchor this conversation, and
which can help you keep the curse of knowledge at bay.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

You need to be able to tell the difference between what is given infor-
mation and what is new information for the people you are talking with.
And unfortunately, human psychology is not going to make that easy: Once
you know something yourself, it is very hard to imagine what it felt like to
not know it. Learning to take this imaginative leap is an important skill for
effectively communicating with the public because it will help you appreci-
ate your audience’s starting place.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Suppose you have an activity that shows off our implicit knowledge about
reference. You want to impress on people that without any explicit
instruction, they already know that a reflexive pronoun like herself can
and usually must find its referent within the same clause (rule A) but that a
nonreflexive pronoun like her cannot find its referent within the same
clause (rule B).
For example, here is a (very) brief story that illustrates the rules:
Mary and Jane went to the store.
Mary bought herself a popsicle.
Then Jane got her a napkin.
There are two different pronouns there – herself and her – but they refer to
the very same person! The reflexive pronoun herself links up with the
woman in its own sentence (Mary), while her links up with someone
outside its own sentence. Since the only woman outside the Jane sentence
is Mary, she is the referent for her as well.
It’s pretty easy to guess that the average person on the street hasn’t
heard of these rules or what linguists call Binding Theory since they are
part of a specific linguistic theory, which not everybody is trained in. If
you were trained in it, you probably remember the class where the rules
were first covered. If you weren’t trained in it, you may be busily looking
them up on the Internet at this very moment! So binding rules are defin-
itely new information.

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 The Curse of Knowledge 145

(cont.)
But which pieces of these rules about reference are new for that person
on the street, and which ones are given? Should you expect that this
person knows what a reflexive pronoun is? Do they know what a pronoun
is? Do they know what a noun is? What about a clause?
If you’re the kind of person who thinks it would be fun to explain these
rules in an informal setting, you’re probably the kind of person who
doesn’t actually remember learning what a pronoun is. Was that some-
thing they covered in fourth grade language arts? Or is that one of those
Intro to Linguistics concepts? It’s knowledge that you may have had for a
while and know well, and it’s connected to lots of other things that you
know. But thinking about pronouns just might be a new thing for the
person you’re talking with.
You should assume that everything involving explicit knowledge is
new. Anything that would be in the main text (not an example sentence)
in a linguistics textbook should be treated as new. Why? Because if it’s in
the main text, then that means that it is how you talk about language. And
anything that’s meta like that should be treated as new. Basically, only
example sentences can be treated as given.
And if this whole example seemed like it was full of new information to
you, then you know what we mean. Try to channel that feeling when
you’re working on your own demo and make sure you’re providing all the
background context people need to understand whatever you want to
talk about.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Review what you’ve put together so far for your doable demo. Focus
especially on what you wrote for Chapter 8 (where you identified things
that you did and didn’t know about your topic), as well as for Chapter 9
(where you wrote your Critical Take-Home Message).
Identify a few key concepts that are central for your demo activity.
You’re looking for words or phrases that describe important elements of
your topic area. They can refer to very specific elements of your activity
(prepositional phrase attachment) or to foundational concepts (hierarchical
structure or even sentence).

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 146 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Use your favorite web browser to find out how that phrase is used by
people in the world at large. You might also try entering your phrase into
Google Images. Is the dominant use the same as the one you have in
mind? Is it similar? Is it completely different?

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Theory of mind
Theory of mind is a large area of research involving adults, children, infants, and
nonhuman animals. You can get some sense of its breadth through Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind. See also Birch and Bloom (2007),
which links the curse of knowledge to this theory of mind research with children.

2 Hindsight bias
Research on the hindsight bias goes back at least to the 1970s, and it is associated
with economists and psychologists such as Robin Hogarth, Daniel Kahneman, Amos
Tversky, and Baruch Fischoff.

3 The wug test

Originally published in Berko (1958), this task has been used a great deal by many
researchers. The wug is also the unofficial mascot for many language science groups
and events.

4. Explicit descriptions of motion

One way to get a sense of how hard it is to be explicit about mechanical motion is by
seeing how people build robots that move. For example, read more about MIT’s
Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory (https://biomimetics.mit.edu/) after enjoying this
video showing off their robot cheetah: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ1DaQgg3lE.

5 Binding Theory
Binding Theory was introduced in Noam Chomsky’s book Lectures on Government
and Binding (Chomsky, 1981/1993). The theory represented at the time sweeping
changes to his earlier work (e.g., Chomsky, 1957, 1965). Being a theory, it has of
course been further revised in more recent years.

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 13 Start with Examples

OPENING WORKSHEET

A picture can be worth a thousand words. Consider this diagram:

Figure 13.1 Number of native speakers of different languages around the world
Note. This image is used under the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike
4.0 International license.

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 148 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Write down the main point of this figure in words. How many words
did that take? What does the figure convey that goes beyond that main
point? What does it convey that is harder to get across with your words (or
that takes a lot of words to accomplish)?

First impressions matter, so it’s good to start by really impressing people!

You know from Chapter 11 that you want to begin your conversation with
given information. In this chapter, we’re going to encourage you to introduce
that given information in memorable and fun ways.

Good Research Is Full of Good Examples

If you read an academic paper about a topic, it often starts with an introduc-
tion that situates the topic in terms of the past literature. It might review
various theoretical positions that aim to explain relevant phenomena. That’s
part of the standard convention that scientists use when writing their ideas
down for other experts, and it’s the general convention that students use
when trying to prove that they have understood a complex topic.
But in a free-choice learning environment, you’re rarely talking with
experts. So don’t start with a long story about all the different ways that
scientists from different points of views have investigated your phenomenon.
Instead, start by sharing the phenomenon itself with the other people in your
conversation! One of the easiest ways to create common ground is by giving
your audience an experience that they can talk about with you.
Choosing a good example to illustrate your phenomenon isn’t all that
hard: Most people without formal training in a science are unfamiliar with
the classic examples that you’ll see in any introductory textbook on that
science. Don’t worry about originality when using those examples. Enjoy
standing on the shoulders of giants! Or, as we show in the Worked Example
Box in Chapter 6, you can always tap a more advanced source – such as a
recent academic paper – and use one of its examples.
You should also feel free to freshen up some of those old examples. Some
of the classics in the language sciences are actually a bit sexist (and some-
times a bit violent), so you’ll want to make sure that your examples work well
with any public audience.
One place to find good phenomena is in research articles. If you’re looking at
a theoretical linguistics paper, then check out the example words or sentences
that are used to illustrate the core arguments. If you’re looking at a more

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 Start with Examples 149

experimentally oriented paper, then check out the task that the researchers
presented to their participants. Either way, just remember that you’re
not trying to accomplish the same thing that the paper did – you don’t
need to show all the nuances of the theoretical position, and you definitely
aren’t running an experiment. You get to skip the hard parts – the excep-
tions that require extra explanation, the control items and counterbalan-
cing setups, and so on. You can just jump right in and share the fun stuff
with people.
For example, we do an activity that is about the process of word learning.
Our goal is to help people understand the various learning strategies that
child and adult learners use. To help people experience the core problem, we
show them a cluttered picture, tell them that it shows gavagai, and ask them
what they think that new word means. This conversation starter is just an
implementation of a thought experiment that the philosopher W. V. O. Quine
devised in 1960. We even use his nonsense word! Even though this example
is featured in countless textbooks as well as by countless researchers in
academic papers, it’s new for most people you’ll encounter. And the reason
that the example has been used by so many scientists is because it really is a
great illustration of the problem: Without any other cues, it is impossible to
know what gavagai means!

Figure 13.2 An Ohio State University student engaging a COSI museum visitor with the word
learning demo
Note. The student is asking what the word gavagai might mean.

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 150 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Our activity continues by running people through very short and very easy
versions of classic word learning tasks that have been done with children. We
didn’t make these tasks from scratch; we borrowed them from the literature.
But as soon as someone does each task, we have created another experience
to talk about.
If you are basing your activity on an experimental study, one thing
that it is important to be clear about – both for yourself and for the people
you talk with – is that even though the activity is based on real studies,
you aren’t trying to collect new data on the topic when you use it. The
people you are talking with are not research participants! There won’t be
any new results to add to the word learning literature based on what
people guess in our word learning demo. In fact, we chose our tasks
precisely because there have been so many studies on word learning using
them already that we’re pretty confident in how well they work. The results
are already in! But if you do get a person who likes thinking about the
experimental process more generally, feel free to go with it. Such people
can often provide the very reasons that this setting would mess up the
results, if it were actual research. As we discussed in Chapter 10, it can be
really helpful to let the conversation shift over to something that interests
an individual visitor!

Give Them Something to Talk About

Your goal is to create a conversation starter, so you want to make your
examples as striking as possible. You are using your phenomenon to draw
people in, so don’t be afraid to make it big and bold. Also don’t be afraid to
make your examples a little bit silly and fun. You want people to be
interested enough in what you’re doing that they want to stay and talk with
you about it. There are many ways that you create such an experience for
your audience – what works best will depend a lot on the specific phenom-
enon you have in mind. Here are a few ideas for how to get started talking
about many common language science topics.

Use Your Body!

We all carry around our very own speech production apparatus with us
everywhere we go! If you want to talk about any aspect of phonetics or
phonology, why not let people play with the apparatus they came with.
Obviously, you can’t touch all of your articulators, but the lips, teeth, nose,
and tongue are pretty easy to get to. And you can feel your vocal cords
vibrate if you put your hand to your throat. You can also feel a puff of air on

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 Start with Examples 151

Figure 13.3 You can feel your vocal cords vibrate!

Note. An Ohio State University student doing a demo about speech production.
Here, she is showing how voicing works. Photo credit: The Ohio State University.

aspirated stops if you put your hand in front of your mouth. One simple
activity we’ve used to explain how speech sounds work just involves having
people hold on to their lips, front teeth, tongue, or nose while they say
“apples and bananas.” Try it yourself and see what happens!

Special Hardware or Software

Some people associate complicated machinery with the sciences. Since many
language scientists use such tools, hardware and software are another way
to start conversations. For example, activities that encourage people to use
their own speech production apparatus could be paired with ultrasound
imaging as we mentioned in Chapter 6. A group watching images of one
person’s moving tongue can easily be tied to some juicy questions, which
your tools give them ways to answer then and there. Another example
involves having a laptop running Praat or a similar program that can show
wave forms and spectrograms of sound that you record on the spot. People
can record their own names and see how a language scientist would analyze
their speech! Or you can pair this tool with an fMRI video of opera arias (very
vowel-y) and beatboxing (very consonant-y). (See the link in the Resource
List.) These videos illustrate differences between consonants and vowels from

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 152 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

an articulatory perspective, but if someone enjoying your demo is willing to

produce either type of music, Praat will also illustrate the difference from the
acoustic perspective. Remember that showing off the tools of science is one
of the core goals of informal science learning (it’s Strand 5!).

Videos
There are plenty of great videos freely available on the web that will show off a
wonderful range of phenomena: X-rays or endoscopy of the vocal tract,
tongue twisters in different languages, kids performing classic language tasks,
animations for how sound moves through the ear, movie stars singing in Pig
Latin (seriously!). Many of these videos are funny, or gross, or visually and
auditorily striking. Videos with unusual sounds will bring people in as well,
some just to see what’s making the noise and then staying for the science
conversation. For example, one of our favorite vocal tract videos provides a
larynx-eye-view of people singing the “Kyrie” from Tomás Luis de Victoria’s
Missa O Magnum Mysterium; and as mentioned above, another favorite con-
trasts fMRI footage of an operatic aria with some beatboxing. We provide a few
of our favorites in the Resource List in this chapter, but new videos are added all
the time – just search for the topic you’re interested in and see what you can find!
One thing to be aware of is that many of the videos may contain elements
that you don’t want. Some videos are just too long, and asking people to
watch them in their entirety won’t leave any time for conversation. Other
videos contain mini-lectures about your topic along with the examples.
These are great for getting ideas and learning about things for yourself, but
the full video rarely works well for free-choice learning. We encourage you
to pare things down by editing the video to the specific experience that you
want to share. By now, we hope we’ve convinced you that you want to have
a conversation with people, not give a lecture. Letting a video give a lecture
for you isn’t a conversation either! You want to stick to the video clips – or
parts of video clips – that illustrate your phenomenon so you can engage
people in a conversation.

RESOURCE LIST: ONLINE VIDEOS

Here is a list of some of our favorite videos. But there are many more out
there!
Your body doing speech (good search terms: larynx, vocal cords, X-ray):

• “The Diva and the Emcee”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=

M2OdAp7MJAI

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 Start with Examples 153

• “What Happens in Your Throat When You Beatbox?” (Tom Thum):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqdFL0u2HLY&t=253s
• “Cords: Hear Us and Have Mercy”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=
5rJ8nCTgZ2Q

Pig Latin (good search terms: Pig Latin, language games):

• “The Simpsons Gibberish/Pig Latin”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_

sWPz1CS0g
• “Gold Diggers of 1933: We’re in the Money”: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=UJOjTNuuEVw

Tongue twisters (good search terms: tongue twisters):

• “Moses Supposes”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tciT9bmCMq8

• Xhosa tongue twister: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZlp-croVYw
• “Lion-Eating Poet . . .”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4
• More tongue twisters to use: https://clearingcustoms.net/2018/06/10/if-
peter-piper-picked-a-peck-of-global-tongue-twisters/
• “70 People Try 70 Tongue-Twisters from 70 Languages”: www.youtube
.com/watch?v=SI1J2bbbOt4
• Various tongue twisters on Omniglot, including some audio files: www
.omniglot.com/language/tonguetwisters/index.htm

Just a few more:

• Broca’s patient who says only “tono”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=

6CJWo5TDHLE&t=1s
• Categorical perception: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V5pQyKsgg4

Pictures and Objects

No matter what you’re talking about, adding something visual or tactile will
help. Pictures attract attention, you can point to things in them, and people
can find things in them on their own as well. If your core phenomenon is a
contrast between two sentences, write those sentences on giant cards so
people can see them and point to their parts. If you care about a meaning
difference between two sentences, illustrate those meanings with pictures. Or
consider asking people to place stickers on a picture to vote on their preferred
interpretation. Want to talk about how the ear processes sound waves?
Consider getting a giant model of the ear that can be taken apart. Maps are
great if you want to talk about dialects or endangered languages, and they
also open up opportunities for people to mark things with crayons or stickers.

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 154 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

If you’re interested in discussing writing systems, you could use a

small whiteboard and some markers. One of our activities is about
syntactic ambiguity, and we present sentence trees on a giant piece of felt
that is attached to a wall or on a stand (see Chapter 14 for more on that
demo!). Many phenomena of language are very abstract, and visual aids can
provide a good anchor that will help keep your topic the focus of the
conversation.

Games and Puzzles

Anything that has ever been on a linguistic problem set can be turned into a
puzzle. Anything that has ever been made into a psychological experiment
can be turned into some kind of game. People like getting scores, and they
have fun getting tricked. If you’re looking for a ready store of relatively
concise language problems, you can check out the website for the North
American Computational Linguistics Open (NACLO) competition at www
.nacloweb.org. NACLO posts practice problems on a variety of topics using
a variety of languages. (Just be sure to give credit to the people who created
those problems!)
Plus, games and puzzles lend themselves naturally to incorporating
various kinds of objects into the experience – cards that need to be flipped
over, blocks that need to be rearranged, buttons that need to be pressed,
wheels that need to be spun. Also, many puzzles work well with crowds. If
you can pose a clever juicy question, you can help a whole group of people
have a conversation about it! And what’s more, puzzles provide a great
opportunity to give people something they can take away with them. We
often have stacks of paper-based puzzles that include information about
how to contact us later or suggestions for teachers to use in their own
classrooms.
The trick with approaching your core experience through games and
puzzles is to make the experience challenging enough for people to be
interested, but not so hard that it frustrates them. It is often a good idea to
have different versions of your game/puzzle – one that is easier to do and
therefore more appropriate for kids, and one that is harder to do and would
be a bit more fun for adults. But even more important is realizing that you
don’t want people to feel like you’re administering a test. If people can’t solve
the puzzle, or if they get a low score in the game, you should make sure that
you know how to focus the conversation on the experience itself, and not on
the final result. After all, the point is to get people talking, not to see how
well they do on a brain teaser!

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 Start with Examples 155

The More the Merrier

When you’re first thinking about your demo activity, it can be helpful to
center it around a single interesting example. But most phenomena can be
illustrated in multiple ways, and most topic areas are rich enough to
support several related examples. In Chapter 10, we suggested that you
prepare multiple juicy questions for your activity so that you can tailor
questions for your audience and to help people engage with your materials
in different ways. The same thing is true for examples. Having multiple
access points to your topic will help you be flexible with different audi-
ences: Some people will really love the gross-out dimension of the larynx-
eye view of the vocal cords, while others will be more intrigued by seeing
an actual tool like Praat at work. Moreover, by illustrating your topic in
different ways, you’ll help people create connections across the examples
and reach a richer understanding. There is no reason why you can’t use
your own body, and show a video, and have people do a puzzle all as part
of the same demo!

First Steps, Not Last Steps

Your visual aids and interactive demonstrations are only to get the ball
rolling: They are what starts the conversation, not what ends it! You’re
creating a conversational common ground. The given information there
will support what comes next. You’re also designing an experience that
should be fun for lots of different audiences. One great way to help people
connect with your phenomenon right from the beginning is by asking
them questions about it! In Chapter 10, we emphasized the importance of
encouraging people to engage with your materials with a sense of explor-
ation. Think of your materials as a launchpad for asking juicy questions:
What do people notice? What can they figure out? What do they find
unexpected or confusing? People learn best when they discover things
on their own. You just need to give them something that is worth
investigating!

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Begin your conversation by giving your audience an experience that they
can talk about with you (and maybe also with each other).

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 156 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

When you’re thinking about how to illustrate your phenomenon, we

encourage you to think broadly and creatively! One of our most popular
activities uses the Stroop effect. In the spirit of this chapter, we’ll start by
showing you what it is! So get out your crayons and markers and channel
your inner child.
Write down the word blue in red ink, the word green in purple ink, and
the word yellow in green ink. Now for each word, say the color that the
letters are written in.
How did that feel? Did you “get Strooped,” as we like to say?
This phenomenon depends on the fact that reading is an automatic
process for expert readers (which you likely are). So even though the task
asks you to focus on the colors, you can’t stop yourself from reading the
words – and of course, the meanings of those words directly conflict with
the colors you’re supposed to name.
The Stroop effect can be demonstrated in many different ways. We just
did it with three words on a printed page, and you can do that, too.
Or, you could print out dozens and dozens of words on a giant poster.
That’s a great way to get whole groups of people doing the task at
one time.
Or, you could use an online iPad app that implements this effect. There
are many such apps available (and new ones get posted all the time). Some
of the apps are long and boring, but some are set up to work much like a
game. Using an iPad gives the activity a slightly more high-tech flavor,
and if you use one of the game-type apps (that give you a score!), it can
encourage friendly competition.
Or, you could present people with a piece of paper that allows
someone to color in each of the color words. Of course, you have to tell
people to color in the words with the ‘wrong’ color (e.g., use a red
crayon to color in the word “blue”), and that turns out to be part of the
fun. This approach has the added bonus that people can take the
cards home with them and do the activity with their own friends and
family.
Or, if you like the bonus of giving things away, you could print out the
key words on a small object to give away – a keyring, a zipper pull, a
highlighter pen. It really only takes three words for people to understand
what’s going on, and many cheap giveaway objects can handle three
words!

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 Start with Examples 157

(cont.)
Or, you could print the words on the back of a T-shirt so that every-
where you go, you are giving new people the opportunity to do the task.
(We don’t give those away to the general public, but we do give them
away to our students!)
Or, you could take advantage of your language science depth and create
any of these items using a different language! If you’re working in a space
where there are people who speak another language, then this is a terrific
opportunity to include them. And for the people who don’t know that
language, they can feel what it’s like to have reading not be automatic!
We often choose a language that uses a different alphabet from English
(Korean, Russian, Arabic) to really block people’s ability to read.
Or, maybe you’re worried that children who can’t yet read won’t
understand the effect. We encourage you to include those children as
part of your activity anyway – they won’t experience the interference that

Figure 13.4 A partial collection of different ways that we engage people with
the Stroop demo. And see also Figure 9.1 for another example.

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 158 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
expert readers do, and it can be lots of fun for them to be the ones who do
best by not getting Strooped while the adults around do get Strooped!
But you can also give nonreaders the core experience: Use a picture of a sun
and a moon and ask people to say “day” to the moon and “night” to the sun.
They will experience the interference there, even without written language!
You don’t need to do all of these things with your demo activity. But we
invite you to consider the possibility that there are many different ways to
implement your own demo so that the phenomenon at its heart excites interest.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

It’s time to get more concrete about how your doable demo is going to
work: Plan out the materials that you would like to actually use, and focus
on how your materials invite interactions with others.
What can people do with your materials? Are they just looking at
something? Does that something change? Are they listening to some-
thing? Are they listening to themselves? Can they touch something? Can
they move something? What or who are they interacting with?
How attention-grabbing are your materials? Are they big? Colorful?
Do they move around? Are they loud? Can you be silly while using
them?
What kind of reaction are you hoping for? Do you want people to
gasp in surprise? Do you want them to say, “Oh gross!” Do you want
them to laugh? Do you want them to talk to each other (if you’re talking
with a group)?
Is there any component of your materials that people could take
away with them? Can they (or you) create something that they take home?
Is there a relevant image that you could put on a sticker or other small
object?

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Academic papers
In fact, academic papers are so formulaic that it’s easy to make fun of them. One
comic from XKCD makes the point very well, and has spawned a fun meme so you

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 Start with Examples 159

Figure 13.5 XKCD comic #2456: Types of Scientific Paper (https://xkcd.com/2456/)

Note. Reprinted with permission from Randall Munroe.

can generate versions of this for yourself. You can read about the meme here: www
.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/xkcd-science-paper-meme-nails-aca
demic-publishing/618810/
But we couldn’t resist showing the original XKCD version in Figure 13.5.

2 Make your examples work well with a public audience

You can read more about the unfortunate history that the field of linguistics
has with using examples that are not particularly inclusive or appropriate in
Cépeda et al. (2021). Sadly, the point of this very recent article is that the field
hasn’t taken the lessons of respect all that much to heart in the last thirty-plus
years.

3 Word learning demo

If you want to know more about this demo, LW has posted the materials and
guidelines from her lab, as well as a video version of it online: https://u.osu.edu/
thebln/language-outreach/.

4 You aren’t trying to collect data with the demo

Of course, there are many researchers who actually do collect data in informal
learning locations. For example, LW collects research data on-site at the COSI
museum (https://u.osu.edu/thebln/language-pod/), as do many other language

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 160 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

scientists and psychologists. And the Museum of Science in Boston has pioneered the
Living Labs program, which creates partnerships between museums and university
researchers for data collection purposes (www.mos.org/living-laboratory). For dis-
cussion about this practice among developmental psychologists, see David Sobel and
Jennifer Jipson’s book Cognitive Development in Museum Settings (Sobel & Jipson,
2015). And to be extra clear – all of the researchers who do data collection (and not
just engagement) in these settings always get official ethical clearance from their
home institutions before they do it!

5 Larynx-eye view of people singing

You’ll find a link to the video we mention (the “gross” one that shows the larynx in
detail) in a box in the main text. But if you discover that you love the music itself,
you might enjoy hearing it in a more traditional format, along with seeing the
musical score instead of the vocal cords: www.youtube.com/watch?v=
RDC96uZIvYM.

6 Maps are great if you want to talk about dialects

There are many (many!) dialect maps out there for different parts of the world. These
maps work great on their own, but it can be particularly interesting to combine
maps about language with maps about other things. For example, in The Language of
Food (Jurafsky, 2014), Dan Jurafsky discusses the different pronunciations of the
word pecan in the United States. Depending on where people live, they might
pronounce this word PEE-can, pee-CAN, peeKAHN or pickAHN (to use Jurafsky’s
phonetic spellings). The word itself is a borrowing from Illinois, a language in
the Algonquin family of Native American languages. The Illinois word was pro-
nounced something like paKAHni. In his book, Jurafsky places two maps side-by-
side. One shows the places in the United States where the current pronunciation
of pecan is closest to the original Illinois word (pickAHN). The other map shows
the places in the United States where the pecan tree is indigenous – that is, where
the Illinois speakers would have been most likely to gather pecans. The overlap
between the two maps is striking! As Jurafsky notes, the people who are currently
living closest to the original Illinois territory are the people who pronounce
the word most like the original Illinois people that the word was borrowed from
in the first place. Language is connected to many different things – history,
culture, food, trade. It can deepen people’s perspective about how language is
interwoven into our lives to illustrate the ways that language intersects with other
things we care about.

7 The Stroop effect can be demonstrated in many different ways

One example of an alternate to the original Stroop tests uses figures that people can
easily label and the names for those figures. A series of figures can be presented, with
each one labeled with the name of a different figure, as shown in Figure 13.6. Readers
who are asked to name the figures will be slower and less accurate in this case.

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 Start with Examples 161

But if the same figures are labeled correctly, readers will be faster and more accurate
in naming the figures.
You can imagine something similar with line drawings of animals like an ele-
phant, a giraffe, and a gorilla. You could also use easily recognizable and nameable
foods or any other such category.

Figure 13.6 Name the shape outline

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 14 What’s New?
Jargon

OPENING WORKSHEET

What would you call the item pictured in Figure 14.1? Write down at least
five different nouns that label it.

Figure 14.1 What is this?

Note. Used with permission of Getty Images. Photo credit: Chris Stein.

Maybe you called this a banana, a patch of grass, an anomaly, or

food. Or maybe you came up with an innovation, compost, a problem, or
a genetic experiment. Each of those words and phrases means some-
thing – some are more or less specific ways of getting at roughly the
same thing, some focus on different attributes, some have different
emotional valences. But none of them are wrong. They do different work

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 What’s New?: Jargon 163

for you, and each would be appropriate in some context (or with some
audience).
Now think about your doable demo. What words could you use to
describe your demo activity? Write down at least five different ways to
describe it. What does each of the different descriptions focus on? Which
ones make the activity sound more exciting, interesting, and fun? Which
ones make it sound harder and more challenging?

Chapter 11 laid out the principle of Given before New, and Chapter 13
focused on ways to provide given information. Now we turn to some special
problems involving the introduction of new information. As you’ll see, our
advice hasn’t changed: It is still critical to save the new information for later.

Concepts First!
Every subgroup of people, including subgroups of scientists, has their own
special set of words they like to use. These are jargon terms. Jargon is the
ultimate in new information. For people outside of the group that uses those
terms, these words are often unfamiliar, and they often mark new ideas. They
should never ever start your conversation. In fact, it is totally fine if they
never show up in your conversation at all. Deciding whether or not to use
any jargon should depend on how the conversation unfolds. Make sure that
the person you’re talking with is both ready and interested in hearing some.
So where should you start? With given information. You must make your
key concept part of the conversational common ground first. Only once that
has been done successfully will your new terms have something solid to attach
to. This idea, that new terms stick better after you understand something about
the concepts they are supposed to stick to, isn’t unique to informal science
learning. It applies just as well to formal classroom-based learning.
Consider, for example, a study that was done in 2008 by education
researchers Bryan Brown and Kihyun Ryoo with children in fifth-grade
science classes. They developed two different web-based lesson plans to
teach the children about plants. In the concepts-first lesson plan, the children
first learned the core concepts with everyday language describing things with
easy-to-understand words like food and green pigments. In the jargon-first
lesson plan, the concepts were introduced from the very beginning with their
scientific terms (glucose and chlorophylls). Then both groups of children got
practice with the scientific terms and their definitions, followed by examples
of several plant experiments using the scientific terms.
Now, the overall lesson plans were pretty good, and all the kids learned
about plants from these lessons. Figure 14.2 shows how well the children did

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 164 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Figure 14.2 Learning concepts before jargon helps in the classroom

Note. Our adaptation of Figure 1 in Brown and Ryoo (2008). Students understood both scientific
terms and scientific concepts better when the concepts were first introduced without jargon terms.

on a plant test before the lesson (the pretest scores are shown in the lighter
bars) and after the lesson (the posttest scores are shown in the darker bars).
As you can see, everybody did better on the posttest! But the children who
were taught with the concepts-first lesson improved more than the children
who started off with the jargon. And not only did the concepts-first group of
children learn more about the concepts, but they also learned more about the
specialized scientific vocabulary.
So, even when you’re in a classroom environment, where students are
often required to learn the specialized vocabulary, it still helps to ground
them with concepts before laying the jargon on them. Given before New isn’t
a specialized feature of informal science learning, or even of general
conversations. It is how people are built to process information, and giving
information to them in that order helps them learn!

How to Spot Jargon

Before we worry about how to get rid of jargon terms, it’s good to know how
to find them in the first place. Because of the curse of knowledge
(Chapter 12), it can be hard to identify all the terms that you use comfortably

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 What’s New?: Jargon 165

that are actually jargon. If you’ve known what a word means for a while, it
will feel like everyday vocabulary that everyone knows. But remember that
not everybody has read textbooks and papers on your science before; most
people won’t know what your specialized vocabulary means. To make
matters even more confusing, sometimes people will think those words mean
something different from what you think they mean! If you have any doubts
at all that you’re using jargon, or that you’re using an everyday term in a
technical way, then assume that you’re using jargon. You will need to
rephrase what you’re talking about to avoid that term!
Some jargon is very easy to spot. The language sciences, like all sciences, are
littered with words that sound “fancy” because they are often multisyllabic
and have Latin or Greek origins. Words like telicity, pharyngealization, and
syntax are relevant examples of such influence on the English language.
The incomparable Oxford English Dictionary notes that telic is from Greek,
pharyngeal is from Latin, and syntax has both Greek and Latin origins.
It is also easy to spot terms that involve proper names, acronyms, or weird
arrangements of words that you really can’t imagine ever reading outside of
an academic article. Some examples from linguistics are Grimm’s Law, SVO,
V2 languages, X-bar theory, and do-support. These terms are all very spe-
cialized, and – assuming you know what all of them mean yourself! – you
likely remember the class in which you first encountered them.
But some jargon is much harder to spot. Again, like all other sciences, the
language sciences repurpose many common words to refer to technical
concepts. These are words that everybody knows, but they have a technical
meaning inside of language science that is different from their common
usage. Words like ambiguity, argument, aspect, binding, click, control, scope,
stress, and tree are some examples. There is obviously a connection between
how language scientists use these words and how they are used in everyday
speech, but that connection is really only apparent after you understand how
the words are used in the science that makes the technical terms. It’s impos-
sible to make the link if you don’t already know the concepts involved.
A closely related set of words involves specialized relationships. Language
science uses common relational terms when talking about theoretical struc-
tures. For example, the terms high, low, front, and back are all common
words, but they have very specific meanings in the context of talking about
the vowel space. If you are familiar with how your vowel space can be
described, these terms will seem very intuitive – what could possibly be
confusing about a high-front vowel (like the [i] sound in feet)? Actually, a
lot! For people who are unfamiliar with the science behind vowels, it’s not at
all clear what kind of space you’re talking about. And even for language
scientists, these relational terms refer to somewhat different things
depending on whether you’re talking about articulatory phonetics (in which
case they refer to places in the mouth) or acoustic phonetics (in which case

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 166 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

they refer to places on a chart of formant values). The simplicity of the words
is hiding a lot of information.
The last class of specialized vocabulary that is worth watching out for is
popular grammar terms – both from school and from headlines. Some
examples would be passive construction, parsing, uptalk, creaky voice, prep-
osition, and (split) infinitives. These are terms that are linked to popular ideas
about how language works, and many of them are prescriptivist bugaboos
about what is bad/ugly/confusing in how some people talk. We hope that
you, as a representative of language science, are not planning on endorsing
any of those prescriptivist points of view! But from the perspective of jargon
usage, what you need to be aware of is that many people use these terms
a little bit differently from language scientists. What you think a passive
construction is, and what a member of the general public thinks a passive
construction is, could very well be different things. Even if someone is
spontaneously using one of your jargon terms, don’t assume that they mean
the same thing by it as you do!

But I Can’t Explain Anything without These Words! Actually,

You Can. Si, Se Puede!

One of the most common complaints from students who are just starting to
do demos in free-choice locations is that they have to use specialized
vocabulary terms. They claim they simply cannot explain what their favorite
topic is without them. This is not true.
Keep in mind that your jargon terms are names for things. Instead of
worrying about the label for the thing, try just talking about the thing itself.
In Chapter 13, we discussed different ways that you can show people a
phenomenon. Just letting people talk about that experience is a great way
to get them to appreciate the thing that you care about.
Consider next what level of detail your audience needs to really appreciate
your phenomenon. You’re not trying to train new colleagues here, so it doesn’t
matter if they won’t be able to understand an academic article on the topic. It’s
fine to rephrase jargon terms into everyday language. That shift may make
your description a bit less scientifically modern from a terminological stand-
point, but it will allow you to share your core points with anyone. For example,
one activity we’ve done looks at syntactic ambiguity with prepositional
phrases (PPs). Or, to put it another way: Who’s got the banana?
The activity starts with this sentence: The man touched the monkey with a
banana. We then ask people whether they can think of meanings for the
sentence. As they describe each meaning, we bring out a picture to go with

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 What’s New?: Jargon 167

Figure 14.3 The syntactic ambiguity demo

Note. A University of Arizona student at the AAAS Family Science Days festival showing pictures
of meanings for The man touched the monkey with the banana. She is pointing to one
representation of what we mean by mentally linking “with the banana” to different words.

that meaning. We ask how the exact same words in the same order can mean
two different things. The demo shows how these meaning differences depend
on whether we mentally link with the banana (a PP) to touched or to the
monkey. The activity can be used to show that language scientists have a
special way of describing those different mental links. We can do the whole
activity without ever saying the phrases PP attachment or syntactic ambigu-
ity even though that’s precisely what the demo is about.
Rephrasing jargon terms will often mean that you will need a lot more
words to describe your topic than you would in academic writing. One thing
that jargon buys scientists is a great shorthand way to talk about their work
with each other. But your audience can keep better track of a lot of easy-to-
understand words than if you use a few brand-new terms. And for the record,
using less jargon actually helps scientists too. An investigation from
2021 by two biologists, Alejandro Martínez and Stefano Mammola, looked
at which scientific papers get cited by other scientists. They found that the
more jargon used in the title and abstract of a paper, the less likely it was to
be cited by other researchers. Even scientists are turned off by jargon!

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 168 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

You might also notice that the less technical rephrasing makes it harder to
see which scientific theories you are committed to and which scientific debates
you are part of. But the audience in an informal learning setting doesn’t care if
you are an advocate of Minimalist syntax or Categorial Grammar. The central
goal of this activity is not to advocate for one theory of syntax over another; it
is just to show people that we can, and do, mentally make different links
among the words in a sentence. What’s more, those different mental links lead
directly to different interpretations of the sentence.
The nontechnical rephrasing in the syntactic ambiguity demo also helps us
identify the critical components of the sentence that people need to attend to
in order to understand the underlying phenomenon, namely, the phrase that
gets linked to different places in the sentence (with the banana) and the two
phrases that it can get linked to (the man and the monkey). If you can get
your audience to understand how those three pieces are related, then you
basically did teach them how PP-attachment options explain syntactic
ambiguity. Or at least, you have taught them enough that they are in a good
position to learn more.
One final advantage to using less jargon is that people will be more
interested in what you’re talking about. Biology education researchers
Tobias Dorfner, Christian Förtsch, and Birgit J. Neuhaus analyzed how
secondary school teachers in a German school used jargon in a biology
class (Dorfner et al., 2020). The researchers found that there was a negative
link between the amount of jargon that the teachers used and how interested
the students were in the class. Specifically, the more jargon the teachers used,
the less interested the students were. One of the perks of interactions in an
informal venue is that people are there to explore their natural curiosity and
have some fun. Jargon is a wet blanket on people’s interest. Everyday
language (and perhaps a monkey or two) keeps the mood positive.
Jargon can also be used to show that language scientists know how to
have fun with their science (trust us, monkeys are a fun way to talk about
syntactic ambiguity). We also often wear a banana suit for this demo (as you
can see in Figure 14.3 and many people come over to the demo just to learn
why someone is dressed as a bright yellow banana. Plus, we offer banana
candies at the end of this activity so people can take away a little fun with
them.
Another critical lesson to remember is that an incomplete explanation is
not an incorrect one (Chapter 9)! Just because you’re not using all the
technical jargon you could to explain your demo doesn’t mean you’re
explaining it wrong. Getting people to understand the main concepts – even
if they don’t understand all the fancy words that scientists use to describe
those concepts – is still correct. In Chapter 15, we will expand on this idea by
discussing how you might consider breaking down your topic area so that

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 What’s New?: Jargon 169

you are trying to explain the piece of it that your audience is most likely to
really profit from.

But . . . Jargon Is Part of Science

The general public doesn’t need the precision or the distinctions that the scientist
does. However, that specialized vocabulary does have a role to play when you’re
talking with the public: Those terms mark you as a scientist and as an expert
more generally. People know that scientists need jargon and that being able to
use such terms fluently is a sign that you know the details.
But more than that, people know that part of learning about something
scientific is learning new words. In Chapter 4, we laid out the six strands of
science learning. You may recall that Strand 5 was about showing people the
tools of science – the specialized items that we use to make science happen.
The National Research Council’s original framing of this strand referred
explicitly to the language of science, and as language scientists, we’re aware
of the fact that words are themselves a kind of tool. Further, philosophers
have argued that jargon is also an important tool of science. Understanding
new words can help people understand how the science is working.
A new term might help people label and remember an idea that is new for
them. For example, an activity that we’ve used before highlights the McGurk
effect during speech perception. The name of the effect is a jargon term for
something that most people are unaware happens. (This jargon is fairly easy
to spot since it involves a proper name.) If you search online for the term
itself, you’ll find lots of videos showing it off, and we’ve put links to a few
of our favorites in the Resource List below. If you’ve never experienced the
McGurk effect before, we do recommend that you go and try one out before
you continue reading.

RESOURCE LIST: SEE THE MCGURK EFFECT

Here are a few videos showing the McGurk effect:

• This one is super basic and short:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFPtc8BVdJk
• This one comes with some surrounding explanation:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypd5txtGdGw
• And here’s one from some of our students:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HkdaTXllUenbi1st63XARxL_iXl5_eSH/
view

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 170 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

The effect shows how we combine auditory and visual information when
perceiving speech. Listen to one of the McGurk effect videos with your eyes
closed and write down the sound you hear. Now turn the sound off and just
watch. What sound does it look like the person is making? It will be a
different sound! The videos are set up so that there’s a mismatch between
the auditory and visual channels: What is coming to your ears and what is
coming to your eyes are different. Round out the experience by watching and
listening at the same time. People resolve the mismatching information in
different ways. Some people are very audio dominant and will perceive the
sound coming to their ears; some people are very visual dominant and, even
with the sound on, will ‘hear’ the sound that they see; most people do
something in the middle. That usually means perceiving a sound that is
between the audio and visual information. So if the audio has a /ba/ (which
is pronounced by closing the lips at the front of your mouth) and the video
has a /ga/ (which is pronounced by making a closure at the back of your
mouth with the back of your tongue), you might hear a /da/ (which is
pronounced by making a closure in the middle of your mouth with the front
of your tongue). The McGurk effect shows that your naïve ideas about how
we hear things just aren’t right: It’s not all about the ears! It’s our brain that
perceives speech, and the brain integrates information from lots of places.
You don’t need to use the term McGurk effect to explain the core idea that
our hearing is influenced by our vision. But the term labels an experience
that people have probably never had before. It tells people that this experi-
ence is scientifically important, and it allows them to refer to it in an easy,
shorthand way – just the way language scientists refer to it!

Keep It Simple
So far, we’ve just been talking about jargon – words that are technical for a
specific field of study. But there is another kind of word (and sentence) that
we recommend avoiding as well: big fancy words and long, complex con-
structions. One of our former English teachers used to say, “Never use a five-
dollar word when a ten-cent one will do.” There’s a misconception out there
that using big words makes you sound smart. In fact, the smartest people out
there do most of their work with ten-cent words. What makes you sound
really smart is saying things that people understand! This lesson is one that
definitely applies when you’re talking with people in a free-choice setting,
but it is also one that applies in more contexts than most people realize –

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 What’s New?: Jargon 171

your academic writing will probably also be better if you rely more on ten-
cent words as well.
And in addition to those five-dollar words, there are also five-dollar
sentences out there. These are constructions with multiple clauses and lots
of connectives like whereas and heretofore. You’re going to want to avoid
those too. Take your ten-cent words and put them inside simple sentences
that anyone can easily follow.
Keeping your words and sentences simple and clear is the best way to
achieve the goals related to knowing your audience that we laid out in
Chapter 5. One of the fastest and easiest ways to lose your audience is to be
hard to understand. You’ve probably experienced this yourself. Have you ever
dropped a class because you went on the first day and couldn’t understand a
thing that the teacher said? Have you ever stopped reading a newspaper article
or a blog post because you couldn’t follow it? If people find you hard to
understand, then they will do the equivalent of dropping the class or surfing
away from a blog: They will walk away from you. Most people are pretty
polite, so they may suddenly discover they need to go to the bathroom or
remember that their bus is coming soon. While the ideal time will vary with the
venue, it’s generally a good idea to aim for getting people to stick with you
long enough for you to show them something interesting and for you to come
out with your Critical Take-Home Message (see Chapter 16).
Not only is being hard to understand a turnoff for people in general; it is
also going to keep the people who do engage with you from learning much.
To put this in terms of the strands of science learning, if you’re hard to
understand, you will fail to spark anyone’s interest. And people who are
bored (or just being polite) aren’t going to be very receptive to the content of
your science. So even if you feel like focusing on your manner is all about the
form and not the substance, remember that if you don’t have decent form,
nobody will ever learn the substance.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Jargon is the ultimate in new information, and you should avoid using it.
Instead, present a phenomenon for people to experience, and use everyday
language to talk about it. You might want to include a jargon term (but
really just one, or at most two) to show how technical terms are part of your
science. But in that case, be sure to present the concept first so that people
have something for the specialized label to attach to. Given before New!

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 172 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

There are lots of online tools that can help

you identify jargon, and the Closing
Worksheet is going to ask you to pick one
and use it on your own work. But before you
do this yourself, we wanted to show you a bit
about how one of these works!
We’re going to use what is (by far!) the
strictest of all such editors – the Up-Goer
Five Text Editor (https://splasho.com/
upgoer5/).
This editor was inspired by a strip from the
XKCD comic created by Randall Munroe (see
Figure 14.4). If you’ve never read the strip
before (https://xkcd.com), we recommend it!
In one of Munroe’s most famous posts, he
described the NASA Saturn V rocket using
the thousand most frequent words of
English. And since words like NASA and
rocket aren’t among those thousand words,
he called it “US Space Team’s Up Goer Five.”
For that matter, the word thousand isn’t
among the thousand most frequent words,
so as the author says, he really uses the
“ten hundred words people use most
often.” You can read more of Munroe’s
stripped down explanations in his book
Thing Explainer.
The Up-Goer Five Text Editor website was
created by Theo Sanderson, and it lets you see
if your writing meets the very strict Up-Goer
Five standard: Every word you enter that
doesn’t meet the super high-frequency stand-
ard will get marked in red. In case you’re
wondering how Sanderson decided what the
Figure 14.4 XKCD comic 1133: thousand allowable words were, he used the
Up Goer Five (https://xkcd.com/ Spell Checker Oriented Wordlist (SCOWL) to
1133/) determine his frequencies.
Note. Used with permission of
To show how this works, we’ll see just
Randall Munroe.
how well we were doing at avoiding

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 What’s New?: Jargon 173

(cont.)
jargon as we wrote this book! So here’s a sentence that used to live in this
chapter:
For the uninitiated, jargon terms are unfamiliar and functionally denote new
concepts.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor flagged seven out of the twelve words –
that’s 58 percent of the sentence! One of the flagged words is clearly jargon:
jargon. Given what this chapter is about, you can understand why we might
want to keep that word. But what about the rest? The word denote also raises
a flag: It’s Latin based. It’s a word that philosophers of language use a lot
but isn’t one that is used much outside of the academic literature. This word
needs to be changed, and the word mean will serve us just as well here.
Some of the words that the Up-Goer Five editor flagged are words that
feel like everyday words, but we might be using them in a somewhat
jargon-y way: unfamiliar, functionally, concepts. These are words it’s
worth thinking about. Do we really need each of them? In this case, we
might argue that the word functionally is just providing a level of nuance
that doesn’t really matter here. So we could leave it out. The word concept
means something pretty specific in the world of semantics, but maybe we
don’t need to be that specific. A word like idea means something similar
and is much more understandable.
Another word that the editor flagged is us showing off our fancy
vocabularies – uninitiated. This one is a classic five-dollar word, and there
are plenty of ten-cent substitutes that we could use instead.
The last two words that the editor flagged are ones we wouldn’t nor-
mally worry about too much – unfamiliar and terms. Neither of these
words is really a jargon term in our science, and they don’t seem like five-
dollar words. But it is useful to be reminded about just how many words
you regularly use that aren’t super frequent in the language.
Now for the hard part: rewriting our sentence so that it passes the Up-
Goer Five Text Editor! Here’s a new version of the sentence that does pass
the editor:
For people outside the group, new words that most people do not use are often
not well known, and they show off new ideas.

One thing you might notice is that the new version of the sentence is
twice as long. (As Grice might put it, we solved the clarity problem at
the cost of prolixity.) That is almost always true: One of the things that
jargon buys you is the ability to package ideas efficiently. It often takes a

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 174 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
full sentence or phrase to cover one nice noun: jargon became new words
that most people do not use.
You might feel like it’s overkill to have to figure out how to rephrase a
fairly common word like unfamiliar. But there is real value to going
through this exercise. First, it will help you get more mentally flexible in
how you phrase things. Our students sometimes tell us that there is just
“no other possible way” to describe something. But there is always
another possible way. This exercise will force you to start thinking about
some of those ways. And you’ll notice that some of the changes could be
pretty helpful. For example, the word words would probably be far more
understandable to most people than terms, and the difference in meaning
between the two is very slight.
Another reason to value this exercise is that if you’re planning on
talking with children, it really will help you get things to a better place.
Unfamiliar may be an easy word for an adult but a five-year-old will
genuinely benefit from a simpler word. It’s a very good idea to know how
to make your activity accessible for everybody! (Of course, if you go back
to the beginning of this chapter, you’ll see that we didn’t listen to all of the
advice from the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, and we definitely kept the word
unfamiliar.)
Last, we’re not the only people who like this editor! The bloggers Chris
Rowan and Anne Jefferson at Scientific American have written about it
and challenged all kinds of scientists to describe their work in a way that
meets the Up-Goer Five Text Editor’s standard. You can read the results in
their Tumblr “The Ten Hundred Words of Science” here: https://
tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Review some of the key messages you came up with for your activity. In
Chapter 9, you wrote down your Critical Take-Home Message, and in
Chapter 7, you wrote down some ways to link your activity to people’s real lives.
Now, write down two of the main messages. Does either one contain
any jargon? Circle every word that might be jargon. Which ones were easy
to spot? Which ones were more difficult (and why?). How can you rephrase
each of those terms so that you get your point across without it?

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 What’s New?: Jargon 175

Now enter your messages into one of the online editors designed to
help you avoid jargon. Here are our favorites:

• Up-Goer Five Text Editor: https://splasho.com/upgoer5/

See the Worked Example Box for a full description!
• Hemingway Editor: https://hemingwayapp.com/
This editor will mark words that have simpler alternatives. It also marks
long sentences that have complex structures. And it gets very exercised
about the passive construction (for better or worse).
• De-Jargonizer: http://scienceandpublic.com/
This editor will tag your words in red if they are rare, and in orange if
they are moderately infrequent. It will also give you a score for how
suitable your writing is for a general audience.

How many of your words get marked by one of these editors? Were
they the same words that you identified as likely jargon? How can you
rephrase your main points so that you can ‘pass’ these online tools?

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 Influence on the English language
The geography and history of English speakers explains many such influences on the
English language. Here’s an example: As the Roman Empire extended across what we
now call Europe, Latin became useful for doing business with the Romans. It was the
language of the church, as well as a lingua franca for scholars. A little later, when
French speakers ruled Britain, the French language – itself influenced by Latin –
became useful for government, law, and religion. In the computer sciences, you can
see something similar happening with English now. English terms for computational
concepts and tools and so on are being borrowed into other languages. In those
languages then, words that came from English are prevalent in the computer
sciences.

2 Use of common relational terms as jargon

The domain of syntax also has its share of relational jargon. Sentence trees look a lot
like family trees, and syntacticians have imported common family relationships to
describe relations between nodes on a tree: A mother node has daughter nodes, for
instance. When you’re comfortable with hierarchical tree structures, having these
friendly words to describe how pieces of the tree are connected to each other is very
helpful. But people who are unfamiliar with syntax do not find them nearly as
obvious. One place that the connection falls down hard is the fact that syntax only

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 176 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

uses a very small set of kinship terms to describe relations. The most obvious
omission is that there are no male nodes – no fathers, sons, or brothers. There are
also no nodes related to marriage – no wives, or sisters-in-law, or stepdaughters. And
relations that require connections across multiple people are infrequent (aunts) or
missing entirely (nieces, grandmothers, granddaughters). If you know how a syntac-
tic tree works, it’s kind of fun to link the positions to kinship terms; but knowing how
kinship works won’t really explain how a syntactic tree works!

3 What the general public thinks the passive construction is

In fact, the linguist Geoff Pullum has written extensively about how people, includ-
ing many who like to write about language, have very odd ideas about the passive
construction. You can read the text of one of his famous papers here: www.lel.ed.ac
.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html. If you want to read more from linguists
(including Pullum but also lots of others), here is a long list of blog posts on the
topic from the Language Log site: www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives
.html#passivepostlist.

4 The man touched the monkey with a banana

The syntactic ambiguity demo reflects research in a University of Arizona disserta-
tion (Zimmer, 2016). Elly Zimmer, who has gone on to develop linguistics-based
curricula for K-12 students, helped refine a number of our demos.

5 PP attachment and syntactic ambiguity

PP attachment is in-house talk for how a prepositional phrase (PP) associates with
words preceding it. If a PP has more than one option for this association, this is a
standing syntactic ambiguity. In other words, it’s a word string that has more than
one structural analysis, and this has consequences for our interpretation of the
sentence. The ambiguity doesn’t depend on a single word such as bank or buffalo.
Instead, it shows different options for connecting the words. In addition, the ambi-
guity is not resolved by words later in the sentence, as in a garden-path sentence. As
we discussed in Chapter 11, garden-path sentences are temporarily ambiguous (“The
scientist examined . . .” can go in different directions), but those sentences do resolve
into a single interpretation by the end (“The scientist examined by the prosecutor” is
not ambiguous).
A favorite illustration of PP-attachment ambiguity comes from Groucho Marx. In
the hilarious 1930 movie Animal Crackers (directed by Victor Heerman), Groucho’s
character says, “I shot an elephant in my pajamas.” He pauses, and then follows up
with “How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know” (you can hear the joke here: www
.youtube.com/watch?v=NfN_gcjGoJo). The PP in my pajamas can either be attached
to the verb shot, or to the object noun phrase an elephant. When the PP associates with
the verb, I shot an elephant in my pajamas is interpreted to mean that the speaker was
wearing pajamas when he shot an elephant. When the PP associates with the object an
elephant, the sentence is interpreted to mean that the elephant was inside the speaker’s
pajamas. The ambiguity is where exactly in the sentence the phrase in my pajamas
attaches. And different attachments support different meanings.

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 What’s New?: Jargon 177

6 Jargon is a tool of science

Highlighting the tools of science is one of the core goals of informal science learning
(it’s Strand 5). But terminological tools can be particularly tricky ones to use and
explain. A central point that philosophers make is that scientific terms don’t stand on
their own: They are mutually interdependent, and collectively they create what’s
known as a “web of belief.” When scientific revolutions happen, words can be cut off
from this web and they stop meaning anything at all (phlogiston is a famous
example). This shows that:

(1) Terms are critical for creating a coherent science.

(2) You can’t really understand a scientific theory unless you know a lot of terms.
You have to know enough to support a whole web.

These points should make us wary about using technical terms – an extension of the
curse of knowledge. Once you’re inside the web, all the words make sense because
they are all mutually defined. In short, they are interconnected. But if you’re new to a
web, each term can feel like it’s just pulling a loose string in a sweater and the whole
thing always feels like it’s unraveling. For more on this, see Thomas Kuhn’s classic
philosophy book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962); or try a more
psychological approach with a more recent book, Carey (2009).

7 The McGurk effect

First reported by McGurk and MacDonald (1976), what is now called the McGurk
effect is a perceptual illusion that can be described as an integration of auditory and
visual cues. This description is too simple though, as much depends on the specific
cues that are used as well as their order. For example, if the auditory signal relays [g]
and the visual signal relays [b], people most typically perceive a [bg] sequence rather
than a fusion of [b] and [g] (Tiippana, 2014).

8 De-Jargonizer
This tagger was created as a tool to help scientists be more aware of how much jargon
they are using. It depends primarily on word frequency counts, but its assessment of
a word as jargon has been validated by comparison to other kinds of word taggers, as
well as by seeing how it analyzes both technical and nontechnical writing (as well as
oral presentations like Ted Talks). The details can be found in Rakedzon et al. (2017).

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 15 From Given to New
Scaffolding

OPENING WORKSHEET

All the sciences include complex problems. The first time you look at almost
any of these, it can feel like everything matters all at once and you can’t find
a good starting point. But all these complex problems can be broken down
into component parts. Human genetics is complicated, but it can be decom-
posed into four bases (ACGT). Chemical molecules are complicated, but
they are all made of atoms.
The same is true of our favorite science. In fact, a classic type of
problem set in linguistics involves showing people some sentences in an
unfamiliar language and asking them to figure out how to make new
sentences in that language. At first glance, the unfamiliar language looks
impenetrable: How could you ever figure out its component parts? The
standard method is to look for pieces that repeat and see how they
compare to the translations in the language that people do know. Once
you figure out one piece, you can use it to find more and more pieces until
you’ve broken everything down into its component parts.
We would add that it’s important to begin by taking a deep breath and
believing that the problem really is solvable. It’s easier to find the compon-
ent parts in this kind of linguistics problem if you believe that they are there
to be found.
So give it a try! Here’s a language analysis problem that we adapted
from one that Rachel Nordlinger made for the Australian Computational
and Linguistics Olympiad in 2008. You can find the full version through the
International Linguistics Olympiad website (https://ioling.org/).
Lalana Chinantec is a language spoken by approximately ten thousand
people who live in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. For the record, we’ve
adjusted the orthography a little bit to make this easier to read, but it
won’t change the way that you solve the problem.

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 179

Here are a few phrases in Lalana Chinantec and their English

translations.

kalakwaa kwee liiuh The beautiful corn grew.

kalaʤö kwee The corn turned out well.
liiuh kalane kwee kwaa kya My tall corn yellowed beautifully.
meelakwaa kwee The corn has grown.

Can you figure out the meaning of this word? Kwee

How about this word? Liuh
What do you think this sentence means? Meelakwaa kweee liiuh

Now try thinking about your doable demo in the same way! Take a
deep breath and believe that you can break your complex science down
into smaller pieces. What are the component parts of your demo? Write
those down. How can you put them together in different ways?

In previous chapters, we laid out how to start with given information and
we cautioned you to save the new information until the end. In Chapter 13,
we encouraged you to start your interaction by putting some striking given
information on the table for people. In other words, start with compelling
examples or a phenomenon that people can experience for themselves. In
Chapter 14, we discouraged technical terms in general and suggested that
very new information like jargon should come only after you’ve explained or
demonstrated your concepts in super accessible ways.
But there’s more to the idea that given comes before new than just saying
“examples before jargon.” There is also the question of how you organize
your concepts so that they build in a natural way from given to new. And
you will probably have already realized that audience matters here too. In
this chapter, we’re going to show you how to break down a complex concept
in a way that will allow you to reconstruct it for people from the bottom up.
One of the key lessons for this chapter is that combining information is a
form of new knowledge because it depends on understanding the pieces that
are coming together. With that point in mind, we’re going to first review
some things you already know.

Building Up to More
Every audience you work with will benefit from getting given information
before new information. But just how much new information can you give

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 180 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

someone? It depends! Informal learning venues like museums and

festivals gather a very broad range of people. In Chapter 5, we talked
about how different people come with different motivations: Explorers
want to learn about new things, Hobbyists want to build on knowledge
they have, Facilitators want to help others learn something, and Spiritual
Pilgrims and Experience Seekers are generally more interested in the
experience itself. Each of these kinds of people brings a different level
of background knowledge to your demo. That means that you need to
take extra care to make sure that all the given information you care
about is firmly in place before introducing anything new. And if you’re
working with young children, you should assume that nothing is given
information!
Think about your topic like it’s a big building. On the ground floor of the
building are the foundational ideas of your topic, and as you go up the floors,
the information gets more and more detailed. You’ve been working on this
building for a while now, and maybe you’re comfortable on the top floors,
near the roof. But the people you’re talking with have to build this building
for themselves. You’re going to help them do this by providing SCAFFOLDING
that will support their efforts. But any building project, including your
scaffolding, needs to start from the bottom. You can’t start by supporting
people on the seventh floor; your support scaffolding needs to begin with the
foundations. If you don’t provide the scaffolding from the bottom up, you
will leave people hanging out of a high story window – and that is never a
comfortable place to be.

Figure 15.1 It’s no fun to be left hanging with no scaffolding to support you!
Note. This image is used with permission from Getty Images. Photo credit: Hulton Archive/
Stringer.

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 181

Audience Design
Recall that speakers who consciously accommodate to those they are
addressing start by finding shared knowledge and then work to share more
knowledge that is based on that common ground. Scaffolding is one way to
instantiate this kind of partner-specific approach.
One useful way to think about building your scaffolding is to imagine
talking to a young child, then an older child, then a teenager, then a college
student, and then someone who is an expert in your field. Each level of
scaffolding will provide true information, but each higher level will add more
detail and more nuance.
Another good reason to imagine starting with your youngest potential
audience is that, if you’re in a free-choice learning environment, you may
well be talking with an actual young child! Older members of your audience
will surely understand your explanation to a younger member of their group,
and they will appreciate that you made the demo interesting for the youngest
members of their group. Further, the older members may get interested
themselves, which will allow you to move further up your building.
In practice, approaching people this way means that you will very rarely
get all the way to the top of your building. You may spend all your time
talking with someone about what you consider to be a very basic part of the
topic – maybe even something you consider such deep background that you
never intended to talk about it at all. But remember the curse of knowledge
from Chapter 12. Just because you’ve known something for a long time
doesn’t mean that everyone else knows it, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not
worth talking about!
So think about Chapter 4 and remember your goals! You want people to
get excited about your topic, and you want them to enjoy learning about it.
That’s the very first strand of informal science learning. If all they are ready
to learn is at the foundational level of your topic, then so be it! Working with
people where they are will get them more excited about what you’re doing
and will actually lead to more real learning.

Break It Down, Then Build It Up

One of the hardest parts about building scaffolding is figuring out what
information really goes on which floor of your building. When you’re trying
to break down a problem that you already understand, it is often easier to
start at the top and move down. Sometimes it helps to start by letting
yourself describe your topic using language that is as technical as you want.

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 182 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Let’s imagine that you want to explain why formants are critical to defining
the vowel space. You might describe your core point something like this:
You can describe most individual vowels and distinguish among them by looking
at their first two formants. In fact, the classic vowel chart plots each vowel as a
function of its F1 (Y-axis) and F2 (X-axis) values.

There are several easy-to-identify jargon terms in this description (F1, F2,
formant, Y-axis, X-axis), and one jargon term you might not immediately
spot: vowel. One clue that vowel is a technical term within the field is
the fact that linguists have specialized charts that we use to describe
them. Nonlinguists also use the word vowel, but often they don’t mean
the same thing that you do. What do most people think about first when
you say vowel? If you’re not sure, go and ask someone (a nonlinguist!) in
your family. Or try googling it. You will find is that the most common
association people have to vowels is the letters a, e, i, o, u (and
sometimes y).
Now we have our first clue about what needs to go on the ground floor of
our building. If nonexperts are thinking about letters, and you are thinking
about speech sounds, then you need to make sure that sounds are the first

Figure 15.2 A plot of eleven vowels of English

Note. In this graph, each vowel is shown inside the same pair of consonants, [h] and [d]. This
figure was created by Jory Ross, a graduate student at The Ohio State University.

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 183

given in your interaction. How do you do that? Make some noise!! Speech
sounds are fun for the whole family to produce! (And check out some ways to
encourage people to produce sounds in the Worked Example Box.)
Once you get people to focus on sounds and not letters, where do you go
next? To figure that out, head back up to the top floor and work your way
down! In this activity, we want the top of our building to be about formants,
so think about what you’re going to need to get up there. What do we mean
by formant? It has to do with the frequencies in the sound wave. The vocal
cords vibrate at one frequency (called the fundamental frequency), but the
sound wave that the vocal cords make has to pass through the rest of the
vocal tract before it gets out to where people hear it. We use our speech
articulators – things like our tongues, lips, and that little flap at the very back
of your throat – to modify the shape of our vocal tracts, which causes the
sound wave to change shape as well. These changes result in lots of distinct-
ive patterns. And these distinctive patterns that we make in the sound wave
correspond to vowel formants. This description is still pretty technical, but it
contains several concepts that aren’t too hard to rephrase and use on earlier
levels. Let’s take a look!
What do we mean by frequency? Start by thinking about what the differ-
ence is between a high-frequency sound and a low-frequency sound. That
difference corresponds to pitch. So what you’re really talking about is the
fact that we can make high- and low-pitched sounds. And the fundamental
frequency is really about the fact that some people have characteristically
lower or higher voices. Great! This distinction is also easy to get people –
even very young people – to make for themselves. Just ask people to make
high and low sounds. We are still on a low floor of the building.
What about vocal cords, vocal tract, and articulators? These terms refer to
actual parts of a person’s body, and that means you can ask people to touch
the ones they brought with them! Well, it’s actually a little unsanitary to
really touch most such things directly, but you can definitely ask people to
touch their throats to feel their vocal cords vibrating. And it is pleasantly
gross for most kids to touch their fingers on their teeth, lips, and tongue.
Alternatively, there are loads of great pictures out there of all these things as
well as anatomical models you can buy that will show what these look like.
(There are also great videos, such as the ones we mentioned in Chapter 13.)
These body parts aren’t all that exotic, so we’re still relatively low in
our building.
Finally, what do we mean by sound wave? This phrase actually describes a
genuine physical entity, although one that is hard to see. But it’s not impos-
sible to see (see our suggestions in the Worked Example Box), and it is
definitely not impossible to describe what a sound wave is and connect it to

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 184 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

other kinds of waves that people may know about. A very young child might
not have the patience for this concept, but you could talk about it with an older
child. So we’ve moved up the building, but we’re still not on a high floor yet.
The whole point was to use formants to describe vowels, so let’s not lose
sight of those! What do we mean by vowel? We mean a speech sound that is
made with little or no obstruction of the airflow. How can you explain what
that means? Better yet, just show what it means! Try asking people to sing a
few syllables (like tra la la) and see which parts they can hold on to for the
longest. You can hold a note on a vowel pretty easily but not as easily on a
consonant. This difference is one that is easy for people to produce and easy
to reflect on. As a rough-and-ready rule, almost anything involving speech
sounds is going to be something that you can get people to do. Plus, there are
some great videos out there showing what the vocal tract looks like when you
say both vowel and consonant sounds (see our suggestions in the Worked
Example Box). But vowels go on a slightly higher floor than the general
category of speech sounds – vowels are a type of speech sound, and more
specific things belong on higher floors.
By now we’ve got all the basic pieces in place, and what we need to do
next is combine them to really explain how formant frequencies connect to
different vowels. Typically, combining information will be on a higher floor
of your structure. But until the component pieces have been established as
given information, there’s no point in trying to combine them. You want the
combination itself to be the only news. Don’t try to introduce a new concept
and also combine it with an old one at the same time.
In terms of how you actually accomplish the combination, we recommend
that you provide some kind of visual aid to help you and your conversational
partners. These aids will help people keep track of all the component parts
and make it easier to focus on how the different pieces add up to something
more. If you’re talking about something like vowel formants, using images of
spectrograms or wave forms can be helpful (see Figure 7.2 for examples).
Better still, use software that will allow you to see spectrograms in real time
(there are lots of cheap or free spectrogram programs out there). Just because
you’re near the top of your building doesn’t mean you should stop trying to
provide striking examples and experiences for people. Those are powerful
learning tools for every level.

Be Careful with Your Jargon

The lower you are in the building, the less jargon you should use. If you’re
talking to a preschooler, you should stay on the ground floor of the building

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 185

the whole time, using absolutely no technical terms at all. The higher you go
in the building, the older the person you’re likely to be talking with, and the
more jargon you might introduce.
But remember the core lessons from Chapter 14: Never introduce a jargon
term until after you’ve introduced the concept for it. And never introduce
more than one (or, at most, two) jargon terms during the course of your
activity. If you are feeling like you really need more technical terms than
that, you should think more seriously about what your main points are and
how you’re building up to them. If you need more than two jargon terms, you
might be trying to go too high too fast.
One way to be sure that your scaffolding is providing enough support is to
do knowledge checks. See if you can get people to articulate your concept in
their own words before you offer them a technical description, and before
you move to a higher floor. And don’t be afraid to go back down if you
realize that someone is confused!

Incomplete 6¼ Incorrect
You may not be satisfied with providing scaffolding from the bottom up.
After all, if what you really want to talk about is vowel formants, you might
feel like encouraging preschoolers to make high and low sounds isn’t really
what you came for. It’s fine if your deep motivation is to share your passion
for an abstract, technical element of your own language expertise. Just
remember that you may need to inspire people at a more general level if
you want them to appreciate your favorite piece of language. Before someone
can be impressed by vowel formants, they need to understand how language
scientists describe speech sounds. And if you want people to learn about
speech sounds, then you’ll also want to encourage them to develop an
interest in language science itself. Revisit your core goals and remember
what you’re doing in this informal free-choice learning environment!
The closest that a preschooler is likely to come to formants is learning
that they can make different speech sounds and that a language science
expert can make cool pictures of those sounds. That truly is step one for
learning about formants, and you should feel successful if you are able to
do that.
As you work with older children, teenagers, and adults, you may still feel
like you’re not really explaining the nuances of formants or how the vowel
space works. From the perspective of working professionals in language
science, that may be true. But your goal isn’t to create new language
scientists; your goal is to get the general public interested in language and

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 186 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

to give people some insight into what a language scientist is an expert in.
And it’s also worth keeping those relevance connections in mind! Who cares
about vowel formants? Clinicians who treat children with speech impair-
ments do. Forensic experts who work on voice identification do. Dialect
coaches who help actors sound like they are from different regions do.
You’re helping people understand some of the science that makes these
things possible. Measure your success not from the heights of what a linguist
knows, but from what that person knew before they talked with you. Helping
people move to a higher floor in your building is progress, even when that
means just moving from the first to the second floor.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Moving from given to new information needs to be done in a structured
way. Break your topic down into component parts and introduce the
foundations first. And don’t worry if you don’t get all the way to the top!

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

In the main text, we talked in general about how to structure your explan-
ations from the bottom up to go from basic speech production all the way
to vowel formants. Here, we provide some detailed ideas about five
different levels of explanation. For these interactions, we’re going to
assume that you have access to a few resources – a few apps for an
iPad, a vowel chart diagram, and the ability to play a few videos. Here’s
how each level might work.

For a young child

[Technical terms: none]
[Tools: something that shows a spectrogram. There are many inexpensive
apps available that display spectrograms in many colors. If you want
something very simple, the Singing Fingers app works well with young
children. If you want something a bit more technical, the program Praat
will show you both spectrograms and wave forms.]
Did you know you can make different kinds of sounds with your mouth?
Let’s try! Let’s make a sound like we’re giant monsters [you’re encouraging
sounds that are loud and low in pitch]. Now let’s make a sound like we’re

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 187

(cont.)

tiny fairies [you’re encouraging sounds that are quieter and higher in
pitch]. My app lets us see what sounds look like. Do you see – those
sounds look different on my program! Different sounds look different!
What other kind of sounds can we make? I wonder what those look like?

For an older child

[Technical terms: high/low; loud/soft]
[Tools: something that shows a spectrogram]
What ways are monster and fairy sounds different? Which one is higher
than the other? Which one is louder than the other? Can you make a really
high sound? And a really low one? What do you see that’s different on my
program when you do that? [If you’re showing a spectrogram, point to
frequency bands that differ.] Can you think of any other ways that sounds
can be different?

For a teenager
[Technical terms: sound wave; vowel]
[Tools: something that shows a spectrogram;
“The Diva and the Emcee” video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=
M2OdAp7MJAI);
video of guitar strings making sound waves (www.youtube.com/watch?v=
SoAv8E86Ifo)]
Let’s try making some language sounds! Can you say ah, ee, ooo, and oh?
Those sounds are all vowels! [If your audience seems unsure about what
vowels are, show them “The Diva and the Emcee” video and point out how
they differ – mouth open for vowels in an aria and more closed for conson-
ants (and other percussive sounds) in beatboxing. You can also ask people to
sing a word or short phrase and extend it in time. It’s easy to extend vowels
but not so easy to extend most consonants!] My program lets you see what
sounds look like. Do you notice any differences between them? When you
make these sounds, you make waves in the air. Do you want to see what
sound waves look like? [Show guitar video.] Do you notice anything about
how the strings move differently? Now let’s look at a program that shows
properties of those sound waves. The sounds we make when we talk sound
different because they have different properties in their sound waves. Let’s
look at the patterns you get from two different vowels (pick two that have very
different spectrogram profiles, like /a/ and /i/). What differences do you see?

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 188 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)

For a college student

[Technical terms: spectrogram; frequency]
[Tools: something that shows a spectrogram;
video of guitar strings making sound waves (www.youtube.com/watch?v=
SoAv8E86Ifo)]
Can you say two different vowel sounds, like aah and eee? I’ve got a
special program that makes spectrograms, and it will show you what
those sounds look like. What do you notice about how they are differ-
ent? What this spectrogram measures is the frequencies in a sound
wave. Waves go up and down, and if they do that really fast, we say
the wave is high frequency; it changes very frequently between going
up and down and back again. When the waves go up and down more
slowly, they change less frequently and we call them low frequency.
You can see what this looks like for guitar strings that make different
frequencies [show guitar video]. When you say a real language sound,
you’re actually making really complicated waves that have peaks at
different frequencies. Let’s try saying a whole bunch of vowels to see
how the patterns are different! What do you notice on the spectrogram
that is different for each vowel?

For an expert in a language-related field

[Technical terms: formant]
[Tools: Something that shows a spectrogram;
vowel space diagram, such as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_
diagram#/media/File:California_English_vowel_chart.svg]
We can describe vowels in terms of a few core properties of how they are
produced in the mouth, such as whether they are high or low, or front or
back. Can you think of vowels of these different types? [Show the vowel
chart and work with the person to fill in four or five vowels from different
parts of the chart.] We can also describe these different vowels in terms of
the kinds of sound waves that produce them. Each vowel sound is made up
of a complex sound wave that has different components, and we can
control the intensity of those components by the way we use our speech
articulators to change the shape of our vocal tract. Different vowels have
intensity peaks at different frequencies. The first formant roughly corres-
ponds to vowel height. Try saying a high and a low vowel and see if you
can see the difference on the spectrogram. The second formant links to
another frequency component in the sound wave. It is related to whether a

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 189

(cont.)
vowel is front or back. That one is a little hard to see on a spectrogram, but
it’s basically there in the way the lines are clustered together for some
vowels and spread apart more for others.

Figure 15.3 A look at Praat windows showing sound files, spectrograms, and wave forms
Note. Praat is a program that lets you visualize sound in a variety of ways. It’s fun to have
people record their names so you can show them their personal formants, or voiceless stops,
or stressed syllables. Praat makes it easy to select, label, and print a wave form for some
unusual name tags.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Review the Critical Take-Home Message for your doable demo. You should
find that in your Closing Worksheet from Chapter 9. Break down your core
message into its component parts: What foundational information does it
depend on? What dimensions of it are likely to be given for other people
and what parts are likely to be new?
Think about how you can scaffold your component parts. We know
the image in Figure 15.4 is a ladder. The image is simpler than a scaffold,
and ladders are used to climb up scaffolds. So let’s use the ladder analogy.
Choose three of the rungs on our image of a ladder and write down how
you would adjust your activity for each level.

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 190 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Figure 15.4 Instructions from a manual on ladders: Start at step 1, then go to step 2, then
step 3, and so on
Note. Ladder created by Firkin.

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 You may well be talking to a young child
The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science (https://aldacenter.org/) used to
run a science communication competition called the Flame Challenge. The competi-
tion asked scientists to explain an abstract scientific concept to an eleven-year-old.
The fun twist was that the Alda Center actually had classrooms full of eleven-year-
olds judging which explanation was the best. (Well, they did have a panel of
scientists vet the answers for accuracy before they let the contestants loose on the
kids.) The competition is defunct these days, but you can still find many of the
winning videos online. As language scientists, our favorite year was 2016, when the
target concept was “Sound.” Here’s a link to the winner for that year: https://vimeo
.com/147241241.

2 What do people think about first when you say “vowel”?

Here are some things we found when we googled the word vowel:

• www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/vowels.htm
• https://teachphonics.blog/2019/10/10/what-are-vowels-and-
consonants/
• www.dictionary.com/e/vowels/
• www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU6G6h-wV04
3 What is a formant?
Obviously, there’s a lot more one could say about vowel formants than what we have
in our example! If you want to learn a lot more, we recommend taking a course on

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 From Given to New: Scaffolding 191

phonetics. What we’ve described in the main text is the “source-filter” model of
speech sound production.
If you want to dip your toe a bit further into those waters, here are two websites
to try:

• www.voicescienceworks.org/harmonics-vs-formants.html
• www.britannica.com/science/phonetics/Vowel-formants

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 16 The Three-Legged Stool Approach

OPENING WORKSHEET

At the end of this chapter, we’re going to ask you to pull together all the
pieces you’ve been working on for your doable demo and make a set of
guidelines to help you (and maybe someone else too) use your activity to
engage with the public. To prepare for the worksheet at the end of this
chapter, jot down now some responses to the following questions:

• What pieces of your doable demo are in great shape? What are you
confident is really good? What are you most proud of?
• What pieces of your demo feel like they still need some work? Are there
any pieces you’re missing? Is there some part that you’re not sure you
understand as well as you’d like to?

While you read through this chapter, think about your responses to the
questions above. Modify any answers that this reading inspires.

At this point, we’ve covered all the major things you need in order to
effectively engage with the general public: have a conversation, keep it
relevant to your audience, balance quality and quantity in your own contri-
butions to that conversation, put given information before new information,
and keep your goals in mind but be open to shifting directions. All of these
things are important, but it can be hard to focus on all of them at once. And
doing your demo with people will be a lot more fun – both for them and for
you – if you’re not spending your time worrying about how to address each
goal. In this chapter, we’re going to be doing the integrative level on your
scaffold. We’re not suggesting you do anything new, but we are going to
offer a metaphor to help you connect what you’ve already learned about how
to have successful conversations with people.
Our metaphor is the three-legged stool. Your interactions with others
during these special conversations depend on three distinct elements: your

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 The Three-Legged Stool Approach 193

materials, your plan, and you. Each of these elements is essential on its own.
It’s also important that you keep them in balance. If you only depend on one
leg of this stool and leave the other two underdeveloped, then your stool will
be lopsided and this will affect your interactions.

Leg One: Have Good Materials

The first leg of your stool is the actual stuff that you’re going to have with
you. If you’re working on the IPA, this leg might include blank name tags
and a handout for people who’d like to learn more; a clipboard or whiteboard
and markers are also helpful. If you’re doing a word learning activity, this leg
might include laminated pictures of novel objects. If you’re doing an activity
based on the McGurk effect, this leg might be a video that you show on a
laptop with some headphones. Materials like these are what people often
remember about activities! You may see your activity as elucidating the IPA,
but visitors are likely to remember it as the fun name tag activity. The
materials are going to be central to people’s experience with you and your
activity, so you want to choose them with care.
Make sure that your materials are engaging! In Chapter 6, we talked about
sparking interest as a core goal for your activity and using fun materials as a
way to generate some excitement (Strand 1). Make your materials stand out.
Use big sizing, bold colors, objects that are fun to play with, videos that are
lively and maybe even loud! If you want to talk about word learning, don’t
use tiny black-and-white line drawings of nonsense objects; use large
colored pictures of really weird things. If you want to talk about how hair
cells are involved in processing sound waves, don’t show a picture from a
textbook. Instead, consider getting a giant model of the cochlea. If your
materials are visually exciting – and visible from a distance – then they will
help you attract people. If people hear odd sounds coming from your cart or
booth, then they may come over to see what’s happening and even start the
conversation you want themselves. A crowd often brings more people, and
you might end up with lines of people waiting to engage with you and
your activity.
Also, don’t be afraid to be a bit silly with your materials. Informal learning
venues are usually designed to be fun places to go, and you’ll fit right in if
you’re noticeable or even outrageous. Why not wear a T-shirt with your
school’s name spelled in the IPA? Why not wear a paper model of the brain
as a hat? Why not dress up as a banana? And while you’re at it, think about
ways that your materials can turn into a small token that you give away to
people. We’ve given away temporary tattoos that show off the sound wave

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 194 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

for the word language spoken in different languages; zipper pulls and colored
markers that have the Stroop task printed on the side; headbands with paper
brains; and stickers saying everything from “I did language science today” to
“Prescriptivism is fun but Descriptivism is funner.” We model these materials
as well (e.g., having tattoos on our faces) because having fun isn’t just for the
people you’re talking with. Remember that your number one goal is to get
people interested and excited. Having fun is a good way to get started.
Try to make your materials show your core points. In Chapter 13, we
talked about how videos, pictures, and games can help you demonstrate a
phenomenon so that you are well positioned to explain it. So choose
materials that do illustrate your topic area. For example, if you want to
talk about how we hear different vowel sounds, then a giant model of the
ear isn’t your best choice. Giant models are great for attracting people, but
there’s a big gap between an ear and a vowel. A tablet showing off a
spectrogram of vowel sounds, on the other hand, is visually interesting and
has a direct connection to the acoustics of vowels. Make sure there is a
genuine, organic, and clear connection between what your materials show
and what you want to talk about.
Be practical with your choice of materials. If your engagement efforts are
successful, you will be talking with a lot of people, and that means wear and
tear. If you’re using pictures, we recommend getting them covered in plastic.
If you’re using a tablet, buy a shock-resistant case for it with grips on the
sides that lets you hold the case while someone else uses the tablet. If you’re
using headphones, you’ll probably want to have dedicated cleaning supplies
with you. Backup copies of items can also be especially useful. And stay
away from items so small that they could easily get lost (or worse, swallowed
by a small child). If your materials involve electronics, you’ll also want to pay
attention to things like whether your venue includes internet access and
electricity (or, just how far away the nearest plug will be). Bring duct tape
and spare bags and cords. Bring water and peppermints or lemon drops to
soothe throats stressed from a very successful event where you talk with
hundreds of people. Label everything. We recommend downloading any
videos you want to use and putting them on a looping cycle so you don’t
have to worry about constantly reloading them.
You’ll also want to pay attention to the specifics of your environment. Are
you going to be at an outdoor fair? Are you in a tent or out in the wind?
What’s the weather going to be like? Depending on your setup, you might
have a giant table in a quiet room. Or, you might have a sliver of space next
to a loud stage. Not all materials will work equally well in all places. It’s good
to think ahead of time about how the materials will actually be used and to
prepare backup plans.

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 The Three-Legged Stool Approach 195

Figure 16.1 iPad in a shock-resistant case

Note. Brutus Buckeye (left) is the mascot for The Ohio State University. He is used to working at
sporting events, so it’s a good idea to make sure our materials can stand up to some rough-and-
tumble interactions.

Leg Two: Have a Plan

In Chapter 4, we talked about the value of clear goals before your start.
Related to that, we cannot emphasize this enough: You need a plan.
Conversations that you have with friends and family in your everyday life
don’t require much planning, but talking about your science in a free-choice
setting is not that kind of conversation. Before you start, you should know
what your goals are and how to use your materials; you should have a nice
stockpile of juicy questions to ask people and think about questions that
people might ask you. Also, have some ideas about where you want to take
your conversation. As the American baseball icon Yogi Berra put it, “If you
don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
Of course, just because you have a plan doesn’t mean that you can always
stick to it. Nevertheless, you still need to have one! As we discussed in Chapter 5,
you’ll be talking with real people who don’t necessarily have the same perspec-
tive as you. They will have their own agendas, questions that are off-the-wall to
you (but fascinating to them), unanticipated confusions, and various personal

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 196 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

concerns. They will have their own funds of knowledge. And, as we mentioned
in Chapter 10, it’s important that you listen for all of these things and respond to
them in a genuine way. You don’t want your activity to be a performance where
the public’s contributions are treated like some random humming that ought to
be ignored; these contributions are critical to the conversation too, and you will
need to let your conversational partners help steer it. So no matter what your
plan was when you started, you will need to be flexible and open to different
directions once you’re actually interacting with people.
But if you start with a plan, then it will be a lot easier to be flexible! Your
goals will always matter, and if you are well practiced with your activities
and materials, you will be able to answer a wider variety of questions about
them. If you have a planned reserve of key points, exciting examples, and
juicy questions to use, then you will have options to draw from no matter
what turn the conversation takes. The better you know your plan, the easier it
is to steer things in the direction that you want to go; it will also be easier to
handle being steered in the direction someone else wants.
For most of our activities, we actually write the plan down as a set of
guidelines. These guidelines contain the critical scientific background that
someone would need to do the activity (and some suggestions for where to
read more on the topic); detailed information about how to use the materials;
suggestions for how to engage people with the materials – What are some
possible juicy questions? How do you explain how the game works?; and a
set of educational messages about the science in the activity and how the
science connects to people’s everyday lives. You can get a sense of what our
guidelines look like in this chapter’s Worked Example Box.
We treat our guidelines as a living document. We revise them regularly
based on the experiences of the students who use them. There’s even a
section at the end where we add in the answers to questions that people
frequently ask and ways around problems that we sometimes encounter.
When our students first do an activity, they tend to stick very closely to
the plan laid out in the guidelines: The plan that’s there works pretty well for
most people. But as they get more comfortable with the activity, our students
adapt the plan so that it fits them better, and so that it fits the specific person
they are talking with better. Learning the plan will get you off the ground.
Mastering the plan allows you to really soar.

Leg Three: You!

You add value to the activity. Without you, it’s just a bunch of stuff. If you’ve
got really great materials, your stuff might be reasonably exciting –

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 The Three-Legged Stool Approach 197

interesting objects, a fun game, a super gross video. People might be very
happy to interact with your stuff. And if you put an especially informative
sign next to your stuff, people might even learn something from it. (Just
don’t underestimate how hard it is to make such signs!) Museums are
typically full of non-staffed displays with signage. And people are capable
of learning from these kinds of displays. People are also capable of learning
material by reading a textbook. But there’s a reason why students attend
classes with live teachers in them, and why museums and festivals like to
have real people staffing their carts and booths: People matter.
You transform the static materials into a conversation tailored to the
person you’re talking with. Unlike a sign, you can go in a lot of different
directions. Also, you check to make sure people are following the infor-
mation. You help people engage with the materials so that they experience
the relevant phenomena and so they can link its lessons to their own lives.
You attend to whether they are enjoying the learning experience. You answer
questions. You ask questions! You make the activity fundamentally inter-
active because people get to interact with you. To put it another way, you can
make the activity fun in a way that no object or signage can.
You are critical for getting people excited about the topic. As Chapter 2
emphasized, if you are enthusiastic about and interested in your own topic,
you will help others feel the same way. People really do feed off your energy:
If you are projecting the sense that you think what you’re doing is amazing,
they will believe you. If you are projecting the sense that what you’re doing is
boring (or hard, or irrelevant), they will believe that instead. So go ahead and
gush about how much you love your science! Your positive energy will carry
people along with you, and your enjoyment is likely to be infectious.
You are also critical for helping people learn something about your topic. If
you’ve made great materials, they will help you illustrate information, but
people may need guidance to help them think about the illustration in effective
ways. In Chapter 10, we discussed how different kinds of questions can help
people think constructively about your materials. You are there to ask some
juicy questions! You’re also there to answer questions that others might ask. You
are a critical source of content knowledge. You are also a knowledge monitor –
you keep track of whether people are understanding what’s going on, and so you
are able to guide the conversation to where it will be most helpful.
Finally, you are a representative of your field, and of science more
generally. You are putting a human face on what a language scientist – or
any kind of scientist – looks like. This role will give you a certain amount of
natural authority. You can use that authority to make a positive experience
for everyone who you interact with. As we noted in Chapter 8, science has a
long history of exclusion. Sadly, this is also true of informal science learning

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 198 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

venues. If you don’t look like a classic stereotype of a scientist, embrace the
fact that just being who you are is helping to make your space more
inclusive. And no matter what you look like, remember that “a positive
experience” includes welcoming every single person who you meet in your
venue to engage in a conversation about your activity.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Your interactions with people depend on three distinct elements: Your
Materials, Your Plan, and You. Make sure your materials are engaging,
educationally helpful, and practical to use. Make sure your plan is detailed
but nimbly supports change if needed. Embrace the fact that you add critical
value to the experience through your expertise and your personal style. All
three legs of this stool matter.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Our dinosaur communication demo is about communication without

language in the animal realm, featuring our favorite animal, dinosaurs.
In this box, we provide an excerpt of the guidelines we use for this activity.
As you’ll see, the guidelines describe the materials you need for the demo
(Leg 1), but mostly it constitutes the plan that we want students to use with
those materials (Leg 2). And of course, the better you know your plan, the
more of your individual you can go into the interaction (Leg 3).

Background readings
General information about how animals communicate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_communication
More specific information about Hockett’s design features:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_features

Materials
There are bags of small plastic dinosaurs and laminated cards with the core
information summaries and interaction suggestions for each one. Each bag
has sets of different dinosaurs and shows off a different type of communi-
cative function. You can do as many (or as few) of the bags as you want,

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 The Three-Legged Stool Approach 199

(cont.)
and you can do them in any order. If you want to give people a choice, you
can put out a representative dino toy from each bag (a triceratops, a T. rex,
a parasaurolophus, and a stegosaurus) and ask them which one they want
to talk about.

Interaction
The laminated cards provide specific information for each communicative
function, but the basic interaction components for all of them is the same.
Here is the contents of the card for the communicative function of group
identification.

Dinos to use
Two parasaurolophuses and four (or more) dinos of any other kind.

Figure 16.2 This picture shows what a parasaurolophus looks like

Note. The picture of the parasaurolophus is used under a Creative Commons CC-BY-
SA License.

Set up the situation

Give the museum guest one of the parasaurolophus dinos and put all the
rest of the dino toys in a loose group. Ask the person: “How can your
dinosaur figure out which other dinosaurs are in her group?”

Hints and juicy questions

Suggest that people consider things that the dino might see or do. The
parasaurolophus’s coloring could be used to identify it as a member of a

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 200 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
particular group; the parasaurolophus might make a distinctive noise. In
fact, the crest on its head was part of its nose and the parasaurolophus
could breathe through it, and it could make a loud noise like a trumpet. The
specific nature of the noise depended on the shape of the crest, which was
different for different species.
Suggest that people think about modern animals. The closest living
relatives to dinosaurs today are birds. How do birds communicate with
other members of their flocks?
Suggest that people think about how humans would solve this task! You
can ask people to look around at the people nearby and see if they can spot
ways that groups look the same (e.g., matching T-shirts or clothing styles).
How do humans communicate with other members of their groups?

Core messages
Critical Take-Home Message: There are lots of ways to communicate
information, and animals (probably including dinosaurs!) can signal many
different kinds of information to each other.
But wait, there’s more: Human language is a special kind of communi-
cation. Only humans seem to be able to learn it, and it is capable of
communicating some things that animal communicative behaviors cannot
(such as abstract meanings like SQUARE , FREEDOM , THINK ); it also seems to
work differently and relies on symbolic signals, compositional structure,
and duality of patterning. Ask them how dinosaurs would communicate
more complex ideas such as “See you next week” or “I miss that tree we
used to eat from.” This is a great way to talk about differences between
human language and animal communication, including how the commu-
nication abilities of animals are limited.
And one more thing: When scientists make hypotheses about how
dinosaurs communicated, they look at the fossil records to figure out what
kinds of physical traits and physical abilities these animals probably had.
That tells us what kinds of signals they might have been able to make.
Scientists also observe how modern animals communicate. Dinosaurs
faced similar kinds of situations as today’s animals. It is reasonable to
think that dinosaurs probably would have arrived at similar kinds of
solutions to those communication pressures as modern animals
currently do.

Relevance Connection
Many people have pets at home! Ask them to think about the ways their
pets communicate – with each other and with their owners. What kinds of

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 The Three-Legged Stool Approach 201

(cont.)
information can their pets communicate and what kinds of information
can they not communicate?

Making a Link
This activity links to core points in the wug test demo. The wug test helps
show people how children implicitly know complex rules in their
language. That’s probably something animals (even dinosaurs) can’t do.
This activity links to core points in the dialect demo. Humans also use
language to mark their social groups. Dialect differences illustrate that
beautifully.

CLOSING WORKSHEET

It’s time to make the guidelines for your own doable demo! Your focus here is
on making sure you have a strong plan for how to use your materials. This
worksheet provides a basic template you can use. As you fill in your own
details, you may realize that you haven’t yet made final decisions about
various aspects of your activity. Now is the time to commit! Settle on the
specific materials that you want to use and how you think they can best be
used. Remember, your guidelines aren’t fixed in stone: After you’ve had a
chance to use them with some real people, we recommend that you come
back to them and improve them. Every time you engage with other people
through your demo, you will learn something new about how to do your
activity better – your guidelines are a great place to keep track of what is
working. So this is just the start of the living document for your doable demo.

Name of activity
• Background readings:
Where did you learn about your topic area? It’s important that your
activity be based in real science, so make sure you can point to one or
two sources so you’re sure you have the science right!
[Check out your notes from the worksheets in Chapter 8 and
Chapter 12.]
• Materials:
What are you using to engage people with?
[Check out your notes from the worksheets in Chapter 6 and Chapter 13.]

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 202 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

• Interaction:
What are you going to do with your materials?
What kinds of instructions will you give? What are your juicy questions?
[Check out your notes from the worksheets in Chapter 3, Chapter 4,
Chapter 6, and Chapter 10.]
• Core messages:
What do you want people to learn?
How are you adjusting your message depending on who you’re
talking with?
[Check out your notes from the worksheets in Chapter 4, Chapter 5,
Chapter 9, Chapter 11, and Chapter 15.]
• Relevance:
How are you planning on connecting with people’s everyday lives?
[Check out your notes from the worksheets in Chapter 5 and
Chapter 7.]

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Communication without language in the animal realm
The dinosaur communication demo was created and refined by a former student,
Abigail Sarver-Verhey, who has gone on to become a designer of museum exhibits:
www.abigailsarververhey.com/. You may remember we mentioned her before with
our Mayan glyphs demo. No wonder she went on to work in museums!

2 Only humans are able to learn human language

The way we discuss the question of non-human language abilities in our activity is a
good example of how being incomplete is not being incorrect. While the generaliza-
tion that only humans are able to learn human language is broadly true, the picture is
more complicated the more you learn about it. There have been attempts to teach
animals specific human languages like English or ASL, but those haven’t worked out
well. On the other hand, many species have abilities that are evolutionarily related to
what humans do: There is hierarchical syntax in birdsong; dolphins can use word
order to assign thematic roles; the dog Chaser learned labels for hundreds of objects;
Alex the parrot could understand some compositional structure, as could Kanzi the
chimpanzee. What’s more, if one considers animal communication systems on their
own terms and not just in comparison to humans’ preferred method, they show a
range of intriguing properties, such as the specialized alarm calls of vervet monkeys.
A good place to get an overview of the breadth of animal communication abilities is
Marc Hauser’s book The Evolution of Communication (Hauser, 1996).

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 Working with a Range
17 of Different Audiences

OPENING WORKSHEET

What kinds of people might respond particularly well to your doable demo?
For what kinds of people might your doable demo pose a particular chal-
lenge? Think about both your materials and your interactions for
these questions.
What kinds of people outside of an informal free-choice learning
setting might be interested in the main messages of your doable demo?

Our focus has been on informal learning environments, and the people who
you’ll interact with in such places vary along just about every dimension.
You’ll see toddlers and great-grandparents; families with very attentive
parents; families where the parents are looking for a place to park their
young children while they check their phones; young couples on a date;
people who look just like you; people who look very different from you;
people who don’t speak the language you’re most comfortable with; religious
school groups; tourists; people who know the region better than you; adults
with disabilities; community leaders; retired professionals in your field.
Talking with each of these kinds of people is different, and you don’t want
to have the same conversation with all of them!
You may also want to engage with people outside of informal learning
venues as well. And beyond these locations, you might encounter variation
of a different sort. You may find yourself wanting to talk about your science
with your parents, your neighbors, your boss, potential employers, a local
political representative, your child’s teachers, or the random person who sits
next to you on a bus, train, or airplane. Talking with each of these kinds of
people is also different, and you want to vary the conversation with each of
these people, too.
In Chapter 15, we emphasized the ways in which you’ll modify how
scientifically detailed your conversation is depending on who you’re talking

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 204 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

with. In this chapter, we want to talk more broadly about audience design:
How do you change the conversation to make it ideal for different people?
We’ll discuss how to approach the range of people you’ll encounter in
informal learning settings, and we’ll review how to apply the major lessons
of the book to working with different audiences. We’ll also discuss how to
approach people in the rest of your life who you might want to talk with
about language science.

Different Audiences in an Informal Learning Setting

We want to start by saying how you might get an audience in a free-choice
learning venue in the first place. As we discussed in Chapter 1, people have
choices in these locations, and one of the first things you’ll need to do is
attract people to your conversation. In Chapters 6 and 13, we talked about
some ways to make your activity attractive so that people will approach you,
wanting to talk with you. But sometimes, you will have to encourage people
to join you.
Making eye contact and smiling are great ways to be welcoming – people
generally would rather talk with someone who looks friendly and enthusi-
astic than with someone who looks bored or uncomfortable. You can also
explicitly ask someone to talk with you. In our work, we call this the PITCH (as
in, a sales pitch), and it’s just a quick comment that serves as an invitation.
The pitch can be as simple as “Do you want to see what I’ve got here?” or it
can be something more dramatic, like “Do you want to trick your brain?” or
channeling carnival hawkers: “Get your free spectrogram here!” What’s
important is that you’re initiating the interaction and letting other people
know that your activity is for them. It will probably seem obvious to you that
anybody can come and do your activity, but it might not be so obvious to the
people you want to talk with. As the sociologist Emily Dawson has found
through her work with visitors in these settings, individuals who come from
minority backgrounds or who don’t speak the region’s dominant language
natively may not feel all that comfortable at your venue (Dawson, 2014,
2019). They may worry that your activity requires special skills or involves
an uncomfortable social interaction. Your pitch helps make it clear that you
want to talk with people, that you’re ready to talk with them, and that this
person in particular is someone you want to talk with.
Another concern that Emily Dawson noted was financial. Many museums
and festivals charge admission fees, so people are primed to worry about
cost. On top of that, many special museum events require what’s sometimes
called an “up charge” and many booths at festivals are selling their wares.

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 Working with a Range of Different Audiences 205

You can see how someone who doesn’t have a lot of money to spare might be
wary about agreeing to join you in what might end up being a costly
situation. You can help alleviate such worry by being very clear that your
activity is totally free. Sometimes we actually say that quite directly (“Try
this out! It’s totally free for everyone!”). Sometimes we tell adults that we’re
teaching our students how to talk with people and ask if they would be
willing to help us out. Sometimes we lead with a giveaway and then move to
the demo (“We’re giving away some stickers! Here! Do you want to try our
game?”).
Once you’ve engaged with a few people, it is usually easier to engage with
the next few. Mostly that’s just a property of crowd mentality. If people see
others having a good time doing something, then they will be interested in
checking out what’s going on. You don’t need to pitch to new people – your
satisfied customers are doing the pitching for you! And the more people you
talk with, the easier it gets to have these conversations, and the more
comfortable you will be approaching more people for the next iteration.
We recommend being conscientious about inclusivity in both your pitches
and the conversations that follow. Don’t assume that people who look a
particular way won’t be interested in your activity. Instead, pitch to people
who are every gender, every skin color, every age, wearing every kind of
religious marker. If someone is at your location, whether that’s a festival, a
museum, a library, or anywhere else, you should assume that they are open
to learning something from you. It is more likely that these people are
worried that you don’t want to talk to them. So send them all the signals
you can that you welcome all kinds of people at your activity. Your goal is to
spread your love of language science, and you should want everybody to
enjoy it as much as you do.
If you find yourself talking to only one or only a few kinds of people, try
giving yourself a pitching rule. Maybe you’ll pitch to every person who
comes within four feet of you. Maybe you’ll pitch to every third person
who walks through the entrance. Maybe you’ll pitch to everyone you see
who is wearing green. So long as your rule will identify people in a reason-
ably arbitrary way, it will help you approach a real diversity of people and
not just those you feel most comfortable with.
Even after you’ve started your conversation, you should still strive to be
inclusive. If you’re talking to a group of people, make sure that everyone
within the group gets a chance to speak. Direct your juicy questions to
different members of the group, and make sure everybody gets some
hands-on time with your materials. Don’t just talk to the most sophisticated
person in the group or entertain the least sophisticated person. Don’t just
engage with the most dominant or the most enthusiastic person. It’s fine to

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 206 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

explain your activity multiple times in different ways to the different people
in the group. What’s most important is that everybody feel like they got
to participate.

Some Guiding Principles

Of course, if you are successful at attracting a diverse range of people to your
activity, then you have to have some idea about how you’re going to have a
good conversation with different kinds of people! Exactly how you shift your
conversation to match with your audience will depend on what you’re
talking about, who you’re talking with, and who you are. But we can suggest
a few principles that will help.

Know Your Goals

In Chapter 4, we talked about the importance of having specific goals. This
clarity on your goals will help with audience design a lot. Remember that
experts in informal science learning laid out six core goals (or strands).
Keeping these goals in mind will help you focus your activity for different
people. And just to remind you what those are, we’re listing them again!

Strand 1: Generate interest and excitement.

Strand 2: Celebrate scientific knowledge.
Strand 3: Foster observations, explorations, and questions.
Strand 4: Invite people to reflect on science as a process.
Strand 5: Collaborate in using the tools of science.
Strand 6: Encourage people to think of themselves as science learners and as
potential scientists.

Not every activity will be equally good at accomplishing all six goals, but
you should have a clear idea about how best to use your activity to accom-
plish as many of these goals as possible. Now combine what you know about
how your activity works with what you know about your audience.
If you are talking with a young child, then your main goal might be to
generate interest and excitement. If you are talking with an older child, then
your goals might include teaching content and fostering observations and
questions. If you’re working with a group of people of different ages, you
might target different parts of your activity to different people in the group.
For example, if your activity demonstrates articulatory phonetics, you might
encourage the younger children to hold their nose and/or tongue while they
say different words (it’s fun to do and gets kids excited!). For older children,
you can ask the juicy questions that link the fun activity to the content: What

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 Working with a Range of Different Audiences 207

kinds of words sound the same/funny when you hold your nose? Can you
figure out what those words have in common? A discussion about which
words are affected by blocking different articulators leads naturally into
explaining how linguists define sounds partly in terms of the place of
articulation. And if you have older or more informed people in the group,
this point might lead to a discussion of what a phoneme is.
You can think about these strands as creating a kind of scaffold like
what we described in Chapter 15. At the foundation of your scaffold is the
first strand: Generate excitement. As you move to a more advanced
(higher) floor in your scaffold, you can foster observations, explorations,
and questions. Introducing content is also something on a mid-level floor
of your scaffold. The strands centering on connecting the demo experience
to science as a process is on a higher floor yet. Different members of your
audience will respond better to different strands. Know your goals and
focus on the ones that fit best with the audience you have in that
particular conversation.

Think about What’s Given and New for Different People

Following the general principles from Chapter 11, you will want to organize
your activity so that you’re presenting familiar information (given) before
you present new information. But also remember that what counts as given
and new will be different for different people. Our funds of knowledge differ.
So just as you will have different goals in mind for different people, you
should also keep in mind that your explanations will need different starting
places for different people. Luckily, this principle works well in tandem with
the previous one. Just in general, talking about phenomena is a good way to
generate excitement and it’s a good way to establish some common ground
that you can build off of. The scaffold that you build to help you move from
one goal to the next will also scaffold the information that you want
to deliver.
And remember that it’s always fine to start at the foundational level. If
you’re talking with a child, you should assume that no information is given
and begin at the very beginning. And for a young child, the lowest founda-
tional rung of the ladder may well be as far as you go. But it is also fine to
start at the bottom of the scaffold even if you’re talking with someone who
needs very little scaffolding. Just be aware that you can move swiftly up the
scaffolding if you’re talking with someone with more expertise.

Plan Ahead
One element that is embedded into the last two principles is planning! You
don’t want to figure out how the different pieces of your activity best satisfy

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 208 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

the different goals or which information is most familiar while you are
having a conversation with people. You’ll be more comfortable and they’ll
be less confused if you figure that out before you start. As Chapter 16 shows,
part of creating a good activity is having a plan for how your conversation
will go. You should know your goals, know your content, and know different
ways to make your activity interesting and connected to the real world. The
more you’ve figured out ahead of time, the more flexible you can be with
different people.
If you have a plan, then when you’re talking with an individual or a group
of people, you can consciously focus on the audience design part of the
process. Are you talking with a little boy who is eager to see something
shiny? What’s in your plan that could get him excited? Are you talking with
a grandmother who is curious about why anybody studies this topic? What’s
in your plan that connects to the real world? Are you talking with a family
group with kids of varying ages? How can you order your content so you go
from simplest to most complex?
Audience design is never easy, but if you have a good plan in your
head – a plan that lets you choose your goals, organize your information,
and make connections to the real world – then you can treat the problem
like a matching game. Where does this person link to your plan? Of
course, you may match someone wrong and focus on the wrong part of
your activity. To figure out if you’ve done that and therefore that you
need to focus on a different part of the plan, remember the advice from
Chapter 10: Listen to what people say to you. People will give you
feedback about what they need. If you have a plan, you will know how
to use that feedback!

Some Completely Different Audiences

Throughout this book, we have focused on how to talk with the general
public in a free-choice learning environment such as a museum or a festival.
In Chapter 1, we explained why we chose this focus. First, these are import-
ant locations where a lot of people do a lot of learning. Second, we ourselves
have the most experience working with people who visit these locations, and
so have the most useful advice to offer for these settings. Third, they are
challenging to work in: If you can succeed here, you will have mad skills!
And finally, they are places where you’ll get lots of opportunities to practice
and receive lots of feedback – so you’ll have great opportunities to improve.

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 Working with a Range of Different Audiences 209

The lessons from this book apply to other kinds of audiences as well. If you
are an effective communicator in the context of a cultural festival, then you
already have a lot of the tools that you need to be effective with other kinds
of audiences as well. The guiding principles you’ll need beyond informal
learning venues are actually just the same: Know your goals, Think about
what’s given and new for your audience, and Have a plan.

Applied Audiences
One kind of audience you might want to talk with are people who actually
use knowledge from your science in their work. With language examples,
you might want to talk with a teacher about how children learn words. Or
you might want to talk with a principal about the value of bilingual educa-
tion. Or you might want to talk with a lawyer about how dialect influences
the believability of a witness. Or you might want to talk with a policy maker
about translation practices for new immigrants.
One of the biggest differences between talking with these kinds of
audiences and with people in an informal learning venue is that the
conversational goals are likely to differ. Often your goal in these contexts
will be more about advocacy or activism. You don’t just want to get people
interested in your topic; you want them to believe something specific about
it. To be effective with this kind of audience, you will want to consider very
carefully the question of real-world relevance. Why should these people
care about your point of view? How does understanding your science better
help them? You’ll want to be very focused on what your audience cares
about so you can make it clear how your knowledge is going to be useful
to them.
In Chapter 9, we emphasized the principle that incomplete 6¼ incorrect.
This matters for these audiences too. If you have something useful to contrib-
ute to an applied question, then you will want to state that clearly and
straightforwardly. You will almost certainly need to omit a lot of details, a
lot of nuance, and a lot of qualifications. You will definitely not be giving
people a complete understanding of your topic. But just because you don’t
talk about everything doesn’t mean that what you do say is wrong. You can
mention that things get more complicated when you dive into all the details,
but what will be persuasive is a clear generalization.
Having a plan is absolutely critical for these other audiences. And in order
to be prepared to talk with applied audiences, you need to do your home-
work. If you’re trying to persuade someone, you should know what their
current point of view is and why they hold it. What really matters for this

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 210 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

audience? It will be imperative that you make your science relevant to their
interests, so make sure you know what those are!

Academic Audiences
We often think that academic audiences are composed of people who are a
lot like you – they are people who are interested in and knowledgeable about
a particular science. And if you go to a language science conference (or an
oral defense related to an advanced degree), that may well be true. But there
are lots of people in the academy who you may want to talk with who are
outside of your immediate field, and talking with them is not that different
from talking with the general public. If you are talking with the dean of your
college or the president of your university, that person is probably very
smart, but odds are that their academic background is different from yours.
Even if you’re talking with people who you think should have the same
background as you – say, you’re giving a talk at a seminar or a departmental
job talk – it’s still the case that many people in your audience will know
different things from you. That means that it’s up to you to communicate
your topic effectively! How can you do that? Use what you know about
having a successful conversation with the general public.
Start by knowing your goals. One goal that many people really do have
with an academic audience (especially for something like a job talk audience)
is to show off how smart they are. Proving you are smart is something you
should never have as a goal in an informal learning setting, but establishing
your credentials is truly a part of what people expect from a job talk. Still,
just being smart isn’t going to get you hired. You will do better if you can
also show people why your research is exciting and interesting, and you’ll do
even better if people feel like they can understand what you did and that you
are open to discussion. So actually, the goals of informal learning are still
pretty useful to keep in mind.
One thing that people often misjudge about talking with academics is what
is given and what’s new. Far less is given than you may think! Just because
academics are experts in one area doesn’t mean they are knowledgeable
about your topic. In fact, presumably the reason they want to hear from
you in the first place is because you know something that they don’t! The
curse of knowledge that we discussed in Chapter 12 can be especially strong
in the academy. If you’ve just read six journal articles that all use the same
technical vocabulary, you may forget that not everybody uses that jargon.
Always define your technical terms, and always always always define any
abbreviations you use.
Everyone in the academy – students and faculty – has had the experience of
listening to an academic presentation and not understanding it. Sometimes

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 Working with a Range of Different Audiences 211

the problem is with you as a listener: There are presentations designed solely
for high-level experts in a field, and if you aren’t one, then you won’t get it. It’s
OK that not every chemist can follow a talk in the music department and vice
versa. Academic talks do have relatively narrow target audiences.
But if you are the intended target audience, then you should understand it. If
you don’t, then the fault isn’t with you. Sometimes the fault is with the
speaker: The speaker is trying too hard to prove they are smart and not hard
enough to be understood. As one of our graduate advisors liked to say: If
people don’t understand you, that’s your fault. Being impenetrable isn’t a sign
of intelligence. It could be a sign of arrogance – maybe the speaker doesn’t care
if their audience understands them. It could be a sign of duplicity – maybe the
speaker has something to hide and is being difficult to understand so you can’t
tell for sure. Or it could just be a sign of communicative incompetence – maybe
the speaker just doesn’t know how to explain things clearly.
None of those things are good things to be. The people who are considered
really smart are almost always good communicators. Even in the academy!

Practice, Practice, Practice

If you’re working in an informal learning venue, practice and feedback are
built into the process. Each conversation with a new person is pretty short,
and you’ll have similar conversations over and over (and over) again. By
paying attention to how people respond to you, you’ll get a lot of feedback
about what’s working and then you’ll get lots more opportunities to practice.
However, if you’re talking to an applied audience or an academic audience,
your interactions won’t be as repetitive. But that doesn’t mean you can skip the
practicing part. It just means that you’ll have to do it ahead of time. You should
practice any presentation many times before you actually give it. It doesn’t
matter how long or short your presentation is. Whether you’re practicing the
two-minute elevator pitch, the ten-minute advocacy speech, or the forty-five-
minute job talk, you should practice over and over (and over) again before you
do any presentation for real. Some of your practicing can be done alone in
front of a mirror, but ideally some of it should be done in front of a sympa-
thetic audience who can give you feedback. Hard work can make you an
effective communicator. Don’t skip the work!

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Be prepared to talk with a lot of different kinds of people by knowing your
goals, thinking about what’s given and new for different people, and
having a plan.

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 212 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Our ghoti demo is about English spelling. Here’s how we might spin it
differently for different audiences.

At a museum
First, we spark interest by using an example often (and probably wrongly)
attributed to George Bernard Shaw: How would you pronounce the word
ghoti? Most people say something like “goat-y.” We then show them how
the letters can be pronounced in different contexts: enough, two women,
nation. If those letters were pronounced the same way in ghoti, then the
pronunciation would be “fish.”
For elementary-school children, we make the connection to their real-
world experience of spelling tests: This is an extreme example of how
English letters don’t always link up to sounds. And that is our Critical
Take-Home Message: Letters are not sounds.
For older children and adults, we ask them to think about the pros and cons
of English spelling. The complicated mapping between letters and sounds is
usually brought up as the big con. The pros come out when we bring up
something like dialect (Would we really want people in the northern and
southern United States to spell the word pie differently?). Another pro is the
way that spelling can show how some words are clearly related even if you
can’t hear it in the sounds (hymn/hymnal; practice/practical; sign/signature).
Those funny spellings help you find other kinds of information.
And for those who are still interested, we might bring up the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and talk about how language sci-
entists need a way to represent sounds for all the world’s spoken lan-
guages – even ones they don’t know. English spelling is doing too many
other things for it to be very good at capturing the full range of sounds
across languages. Not to mention the fact that some languages have
sounds that English doesn’t!

For a politician contemplating a spelling reform bill

Reforming English spelling so that each letter represents a single sound is
something that periodically captures the public eye. If a politician were
considering supporting a bill to change the way we spell words, we might
want to use some of the key points from our activity to argue against it.
Something that might matter to a politician would be the regional
tensions that might arise. What might happen to national unity if people
in different parts of the country not only pronounced words differently

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 Working with a Range of Different Audiences 213

(cont.)
but also spelled them differently (reflecting their pronunciation)? We
might even suggest the possibility that if spellings started dividing along
regional dialect lines, we might foster a sense of difference between
different regions. It could be possible eventually that children wouldn’t
be able to read the same texts all around the country.

For the principal of a school

Teaching kids how to spell correctly is hard, and thanks to spell-check
programs, it can feel like an old-fashioned skill to have. If a principal were
looking into how to revise her school’s spelling-relevant curriculum, this
activity might have some features that could help guide the process.
Some points that might matter for an educator would be the idea that
spelling isn’t just about arbitrary rules but reflects a fundamental connec-
tion between speech sounds and written symbols. Learning that you can
represent your speech visually is an important thing in and of itself.
Working through the places where letters do and do not match sounds
can help children think about how that symbolic connection works.
Another point that might matter is the idea that English spelling doesn’t
just represent sounds, it also represents meaning information that allows
children to see connections among words. The connection between prac-
tice and practical is hidden in the sounds, but the spelling helps kids see
that those words should have similar meanings.

For the dean when you’re applying for a job

Deans usually care about whether your research topic will allow you to get
funding and academic publications. If your research is on spelling (or
alphabetic systems, or reading more generally), then you might consider
using the ghoti example as a way to create a striking memory with the
dean about your work. Ghoti shows us how the history of English is alive
and well and living inside of how we currently spell things. It shows us
that there is both a bottom-up level to reading (involving letter-to-sound
correspondences) and a top-down level (involving meaning-based con-
nections that cut across the lexicon and different dialects). Ghoti shows us
that there is no way to make a perfect symbolic representation of speech
that preserves all of the information that we know about a word – there
are always trade-offs between being accurate to the sounds of an individ-
ual item and representing an idealized notion of the word across people
and situations.

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 214 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Reflect on the core lessons of working in a free-choice learning setting:

know your goals, consider what’s given and what’s new for different
people, and have a plan. Now, how could you talk about your doable demo
topic in a job interview? How could you explain your doable demo topic to
your parents or friends?

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Applied audiences
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has compiled a range
of articles about different aspects of science advocacy: www.aaas.org/page/center-
research. For a more corporate perspective that provides lots of very concrete advice
about being persuasive, we recommend Made to Stick by the brothers Chip and Dan
Heath: https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick/ (Heath & Heath, 2006).
Regardless of whether one is selling good science or the latest widget, it turns out that
experts recommend very similar techniques, such as being concrete and using compel-
ling examples, sticking to the point, and not overwhelming people with information.
These bits of advice may sound familiar to you if you’ve been reading this book closely!

2 Academic audiences
The Linguistic Society of America runs an annual event called the “Five Minute Linguist”
where professional language scientists give brief talks that are supposed to be understand-
able for everyone in the room. A particularly awesome example of this talk was given in
2019 by linguist Ai Taniguchi (www.utm.utoronto.ca/language-studies/people/ai-tanigu
chi). You can watch her here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qbqr17L6OY&t=3695s.

3 An example wrongly attributed to George Bernard Shaw

The evidence suggests that G. B. Shaw was not the first person to use the ghoti
example, and in fact, he might never have actually used it at all. You can read about
it all here in an article by Ben Zimmer (Zimmer, 2010): www.nytimes.com/2010/06/
27/magazine/27FOB-onlanguage-t.html. (Fair warning: The New York Times has a
paywall and only allows you to read a limited number of articles for free.) We don’t
necessarily like to maintain the misattribution to Shaw, but since it’s a fairly
commonly believed myth, it’s good to know of it.

4 Spelling reform
Probably the most famous attempt to reform English spelling was advanced by Noah
Webster (of dictionary fame). Most of his proposed changes were never adopted, but
his efforts are one of the reasons for transatlantic differences in spelling words like
color/colour and center/centre.

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 18 Where Can I Go?

OPENING WORKSHEET

Where can anyone who lives in your community go to learn new things? Try
to think broadly – people definitely do learn things in school, but they also
learn things in other places! What informal learning settings exist where you
live? Jot down a couple of specifics.
Hint: If you don’t know where to start, try looking at a tourism website
for your local community. Or do a web search on your town’s name and
words like museum, festival, and fun activity.

If you’ve been playing along so far, by now you should have put together an
activity designed to engage people in a demonstration of your science –
perhaps most likely a language science. You’ve got some materials, some
core points, a plan for how to engage with different people that includes
questions to ask and to answer, and you’ve practiced with your friends and
family members. You’re ready to take this thing live with the general public!
So, where can you go to do that? And what do you actually do at these
venues?
The short answer is that there are lots of opportunities for doing this kind
of work if you are open-minded. As for what you do at such venues, that will
depend on where you go. As Chapter 19 emphasizes, it’s important to be a
good partner with the people who organize these opportunities, no matter
who they are. In this chapter, we’ll talk about some types of places to look
for, offer resources for how to find a specific place or event, and address a
few practical concerns. We’ll also talk about how to modify your activity to
make it ideal for different kinds of venues.
We introduced in Chapter 1 the work of science learning experts John Falk
and Lynn Dierking. Examining science education over the lifetime, these
scholars have found that people from all over the world enjoy a variety of
free-choice opportunities to learn about science. Relevant opportunities can

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 216 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

be found in libraries, zoos, and aquariums; and a variety of museums,

including natural history museums, children’s museums, and museums
explicitly focused on science or technology. We have also added to these
institutions some emphasis on event-based opportunities, including science
festivals but also other kinds of festivals. Arts festivals, book festivals, food
festivals, children’s festivals, and cultural or heritage festivals all have room
for public engagement around language (and activities showing off other
sciences as well).

Look Close to Home!

Many people reading this book may be affiliated with an educational insti-
tution. Although the primary business of schools is formal education, many
have a variety of programs that involve informal education for different
kinds of people. Such programs may intersect with institutions and events
such as those just noted.
One of the populations that colleges and universities care about is their
own students. Many schools have cross-campus events that aim to inform
their students about different majors or activity groups. Many departments
run events aimed at attracting new majors. Dormitories often run programs
aimed at expanding the horizons for freshmen. The engagement activity that
you put together through this book’s worksheets is likely to be a good
advertisement for your favorite science-oriented department, and can help
you attract new students and/or impress your peer group.
Another population that colleges and universities care about is school-
aged children. Many colleges and universities run summer camps for middle
schoolers and high schoolers. What’s often called a diversity and inclusion
office in the United States might run a program to expose youngsters to life
in college. There may also be on-site day care centers or after-school pro-
gramming for children connected with your institution. Ideally, you’ve made
a doable demo that supports good conversations with children of many ages,
so any of these kinds of programs could be a good place to engage
with people.
On the other end of the spectrum, many colleges and universities also have
programming aimed at older adults. These programs may involve talks on
campus, social events, or going into nursing homes and community centers.
Just as an ideal activity should allow you to talk with children of many ages,
so too should it allow you to talk with adults of many ages!
And for some colleges and universities, reaching out to the general
public is an important part of their overall mission. This is certainly true if

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 Where Can I Go? 217

Figure 18.1 Ohio State University students at Westfest, a university-sponsored science festival

you are at a large university that is part of a national or statewide (in the
United States) system. Many of these institutions have an entire office
devoted to public outreach and engagement. That kind of an office can help
you get connected with all kinds of activities happening on your campus
and in your community. If your institution supports this kind of work with
small grants, you may find opportunities to get funding for engagement
work too!
If you are yourself a member of a college or university community, getting
involved with a school-sponsored program is usually pretty easy. We recom-
mend searching through your institution’s website. Sometimes it will be
easy to find upcoming events whose organizers are looking for people
to join them. But sometimes you will instead find programs that have
happened in the past. Don’t despair if you only find old listings for programs!
Check those pages for local contacts and get in touch. Even if someone else is
now running that program, you will often be able to find them through the
former organizers. Also, it is our experience that while specific programs and
events do come and go, the people who work on them often stay the same
over time.

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 218 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

RESOURCE LIST: RELEVANT COLLEGE

AND UNIVERSITY OFFICES
Every college and university will have a range of offices that aim at connect-
ing with the general public. We have provided a few links to relevant offices
at our own home institutions, but every institution works a bit differently.
So, these are just examples to help you see the kinds of programs we
mentioned in the main text.

• Offices that target student life (incoming students, student activities,

dorm life):
https://housing.osu.edu/get-involved/
https://orientation.arizona.edu/
• Offices that target lifelong education (for seniors, for community
members, for alumni):
https://asa-tucson.org/lifelong-learning/
https://olli.arizona.edu/
• Offices that support primary and secondary school programming (after-
school programs, summer programs, events to encourage students to
come to college, programs for teachers):
https://science.arizona.edu/community-engagement/k-12-educators
• Offices that promote community engagement or outreach:
https://engage.osu.edu/
https://sbs.arizona.edu/community
• Individual departments with engagement efforts (including attracting
new majors, or engaging with the general public about their topic area):
https://u.osu.edu/apop/

Check Out Local Informal Learning Venues in Your Community

Since informal learning is something that happens (by definition!) outside of
a formal learning institution, it might also help to think about places in your
local community where people go to learn about different things.
If you want to stay close to a school or school-like setting, consider
looking into programming run by your local primary and secondary school
systems. Many schools run after-school programs and other events where
they welcome people who want to add educational value. Other places run
after-school programs as well. Consider looking at your local YMCA or
YWCA, the Girl Scouts, and local community centers. And don’t forget
about continuing education! There is also lots of programming out there

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 Where Can I Go? 219

Figure 18.2 An Ohio State University student prepared to talk about hearing loss during a Deaf
Awareness Day event at the COSI museum

for older adults through community centers, assisted living facilities, and
nursing homes.
You can also look for well-established centers of informal learning, such as
science museums and children’s museums. Many of these kinds of institutions
have volunteer programs where people regularly come and do activities with
whatever public they target. Some of these places even have special programs
aimed at bringing scientists into their space to share their work. However, even
if your local museums don’t have such programs, you can always approach
them to see if they might be interested in starting one. But be aware: Many of
these institutions will have their own activities for public engagement. Also,
their programming is typically handled by museum professionals who are
already very savvy about the emphases in this book. If you want to bring your
special science activity into their space, you will likely need to work with staff
members there well ahead of time to make sure that they are OK with it. We
hope you consider such an opportunity a privilege as well because you can
learn much of value from these professionals.
Another informal learning institution that is likely in your hometown is
the public library. Libraries do far more than lend books – they support a

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 220 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

great variety of programming relevant to the community. If you’re interested

in working with children, try contacting a children’s librarian and see if your
demo might integrate with the library’s story-time sessions. Libraries also
support programming for adults – they run book clubs, sponsor lectures,
provide skill-building classes. Language science isn’t very far away from the
core mission of libraries (spreading literacy and the joy of reading), and
many language activities will fit right in with this mission.
A relatively recent development on the informal learning scene is the
Science Café. Despite the name, these events are often held in bars and pubs.
They are fun and intriguing programs for people who just want to learn
something about science while enjoying a beer. These people are very much
like the Explorers at science museums that we talked about in Chapter 5.
Often Science Café events are officially set up as venues where you would
give a very interactive talk, but their convivial atmosphere makes them great
places to introduce more hands-on activities. Plus, you are allowed to use
adult-themed content at these venues, which isn’t something you get to do at
most informal learning locations!

RESOURCE LIST: TIPS FOR CONTACTING

AN ESTABLISHED INSTITUTION
It’s easy to identify likely institutions (e.g., schools, museums, libraries), but it
can be a little trickier to find the right person at each institution to talk with!
Ideally, you are looking for someone in charge of programming
(because you have a program activity to do), events (where your activity might
fit in), or volunteers (because that’s who you are). Alternatively, many of these
venues will have a general contact email for all kinds of open queries. It’s fine
to start there – it’s the place where you can ask who the best person to
talk to is.

Science Cafés
You can find established Science Cafés here: www.sciencecafes.org/. The
same website has information for organizers and for speakers to help you
start something up or to slide into something already set up.

Science-Specific Events
One of the easiest type of venues to get involved with is the science festival.
There are lots of these – they are affiliated with schools, communities,

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 Where Can I Go? 221

national organizations, and more. Many of them have some kind of open call
where they invite people to join them and provide programming and presen-
tations. At one of the events that include such calls, you’ll typically get
assigned a designated space where you get to do your activity. The space is
often called a booth, but in reality it might be a table or a tent or maybe even
just a taped-off bit of the floor. Whatever it is, it’s a space you get to turn into
a language science oasis.
One thing to be aware of, though, is that some events will charge a fee for
you to get a booth. These events take care of all the logistics – including the
advertising needed to bring people to them. And that advertising is worth it!
The more prominent science events get terrific attendance. If you are affili-
ated with a college or university organization, you can often get your home
institution to help with the fee if there is one (it’s good publicity for them to
have you doing science with the public). Alternatively, if you are a student,
some events will waive the fee for you.
But the great thing about going to science events is that people come to
them to do precisely the kinds of activities and have precisely the kinds of
conversations that this book concerns. Truthfully, most people don’t expect
to see language-oriented content at these locations, but they will be very
open to learning about the science of what you do!

Figure 18.3 A scene at a USA Science and Engineering Festival

Note. The University of Arizona’s booth at a festival in Washington, DC, that sees many thousands
of visitors. Thanks are due to the National Science Foundation for supporting this booth.

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 222 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

RESOURCE LIST: SCIENCE FESTIVALS

There are lots of science festivals out there – far too many to try and list them
all! Instead, we’ve provided links to some sites that provide lists of such
events (and descriptions of them) in various parts of the world. You will
surely find one near you (or near somewhere you want to travel to).

www.isbglasgow.com/18-biggest-science-fairs-and-festivals-in-the-world/
https://sciencefestivals.org/festivals/
www.astc.org/astc-dimensions/science-festivals-celebrations-of-science-
around-the-world/

Non-Science Events
We’ve emphasized the scientific study of language in this book, but of
course, language is a cultural artifact that is critical to our experience of arts
and humanities. One big advantage of this multifaceted nature of language is
that your engagement activities will fit in well in lots of venues that aren’t
necessarily oriented to the sciences. You can consider festivals and fairs
devoted to specific cultural groups, food, music, community activism, liter-
acy, art, and more. Your local county or state fair is also a great place to
consider. And don’t be afraid to get creative! You can even find booths
devoted to talking about sciences at popular culture venues, renaissance
fairs, and Star Trek conventions.
Most of these events encourage booths devoted to education and enter-
tainment, and they likely have some kind of online application for prospect-
ive programming. It’s generally good to check out their websites several
months ahead of time so you can register properly and find out more about
the schedule and other requirements for the event.
One thing to keep in mind about these kinds of events is that they will
have some stated focus, and it’s unlikely to be science. To help you keep your
activity relevant to the interests of the people at the event, you may need to
tweak it some. Often you don’t have to change very much, but these changes
will make a big difference. One thing that is easy to change is the example
items you use. If you’re going to an agricultural fair, consider using words
and sentences related to farm animals. For example, if your doable demo is
on regular rules in morphology, then you can illustrate regular plurals with
cows and ducks and irregular ones with oxen and geese! If you’re going to a
Greek festival, consider incorporating some specific Greek language facts
into your activity. For example, if your doable demo uses the International

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 Where Can I Go? 223

Figure 18.4 Teaching Navajo demo at the Tucson Festival of Books

Note. This University of Arizona student made traditional Navajo bread dough while teaching
festival-goers some words in Navajo.

Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), you could start by contrasting the English and
Greek alphabets.
We also recommend finding an educational point that is especially
relevant for the venue you are in. If you’re at a festival devoted to books,
think about what your activity has to say about literacy. If you’re at a
music festival, think about what your activity has to say about the rela-
tionship between language and music. In the Worked Example Box, you’ll
see a few ideas about how to shift your activity to connect it to different
venues.

RESOURCE LIST: CULTURAL FESTIVALS OF ALL SORTS

There are even more non-science festivals and similar events out there than
science ones! We recommend that you start with your local tourism board
to check out the ones that are in your hometown. And here are a few lists of
festivals out there in case you need some ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_festivals_in_the_United_States
www.travelawaits.com/category/3093/activities-and-interests-festivals-
and-special-events/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_festivals_in_Europe
https://allexciting.com/culture-art-festivals-europe/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_festivals_in_Asia

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 224 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Practical Concerns
As you can see, there are lots of different kinds of places where you can do
your activity. How do you choose? Here we offer some practical things to
keep in mind when you’re weighing your choices. Which ones matter most to
you will depend on who you are and what kinds of resources you have access
to. But it’s useful to think about the full range of issues so you’re making an
informed choice.

One-Time Event vs Recurring Events vs Established Venues

How often do you want to do this kind of work? If you’re just dipping a toe
into the water, you might want to start with a single visit at an annual fair or
festival that has well-established protocols for new applicants. Such an event
will likely take up one whole day (or maybe just an afternoon) of your life,
and then you can decide later if you want to do it again. But if you are trying
to develop a regular presence in some community, then you might want to
look for events that recur more often – like a weekly after-school program or
story time at the library. Working more regularly will give you more practice
(or will give your students more practice), but it means you have to put in a
larger time commitment overall.
Established venues like science museums or children’s museums often
have one-time events (like an “ask a scientist” event) where you can try
things out. But these institutions are often also open to the possibility of
creating a regular gig where you can come and do your activity on a
recurring basis. Most museums don’t have dedicated programs to help you
with that, so if you want an ongoing presence at one of their events, you will
have to do a bit of work to build a relationship with the museum staff. In
Chapter 19, we’ll talk about how to be a good partner with such venues and
the people who you collaborate with in order to participate in their program-
ming. Building a long-term connection requires you to do all the things a
good partner does, but in a somewhat more intensive manner. You should
expect that it will take a substantial time commitment.

Registration, Rules, and Fees

As we noted, going to a one-time event requires a fairly low time commit-
ment. However, you do need to make sure that you come prepared! Annual
events often require you to register months in advance, and you might even
have to submit a description of what you are planning on doing or a blurb to
be used for advertising your booth. You can’t just walk into one of these
events on the day they happen and expect to be allowed to offer your

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 Where Can I Go? 225

activity. Some events, especially large national ones, are competitive – more
people want to offer programs than they have space for. Many smaller events
are happy to have lots of activities, but they still will want to know ahead of
time who will be coming.
Also be aware that all of these places will have rules of one sort or another.
They may have a general dress code or require that you wear one of their
T-shirts. They may require that your booth be staffed whenever the event is
going on. They may only allow you in for certain hours to get set up. They
may charge you for “extras” (and those extras could be as simple as electri-
city or access to your assigned space ahead of time). They may expect you to
give away small prizes with your activity, or they may prohibit you from
giving away small prizes.
Even if you’re looking at a program in a local institution such as your own
school or a library nearby, you should expect that there will be some rules to
follow. We’ll talk a bit more in Chapter 19 about why this is so. But if you are
interested in being able to return to a venue for another event, it is critical
that you follow their rules.
In addition, many venues, especially fairs and festivals, charge fees in
order for you to work there. Fee structures vary dramatically depending on a
range of factors: How big is the event? Do they charge their audience to
attend? What kind of space are they in? What resources will they be giving
you? We have worked at events that have no fees at all as well as events that
cost us a thousand dollars to have a booth. These places aren’t shy about
what the rules and the fees are – most of it will be found on their websites or
told to you explicitly.
But don’t despair if there is a fee involved! If the fee is large, then most
likely the venue is better suited for a whole team (probably sponsored by a
faculty member or department). In that case, you may qualify for an educa-
tional discount or be able to get your home institution to pay for you to be
there. Public outreach is a desirable activity for the academy, and you might
be doing them a favor that they are willing to pay for.

Space and Other Resources

The venues we have mentioned vary dramatically in terms of the space and
other resources you will have access to. A typical sized space at a festival is
about six feet square, and you might be expected to stay inside your zone.
You’re likely to get a folding table and a few chairs to work with, but often
there won’t be a designated place for you to safely store equipment and so
on. A big tablecloth makes that space under the table useful in this regard. If
the event is indoors, you might have access to electricity, but if it is outdoors,
you might not. Usually, if you’re outdoors, you’ll have some kind of overhead

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 226 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

protection to help with the sun or rain. Internet access is also something that
varies a lot by location. You should always feel free to ask the organizers
what the situation is so you don’t have any unfortunate surprises when you
get there.
If you’re working in a venue that is not specifically dedicated to doing
these kinds of activities, like a school or library or dormitory common room
or bar, then you will have access to whatever is typically in those spaces.
Electricity is likely to be there and so is the internet. But you might need to
get creative about your physical arrangement – you could be working on the
floor or on a comfy couch surrounded by people. If your activity does have
critical physical constraints (e.g., you need a table to lay out some cards, or
electricity, or space to set up a map or a poster), then make sure you discuss
that with the venue ahead of time.

Audience
A big difference across these venues is the nature of the audience. As we
noted in earlier chapters and as the Worked Example Box shows, some of
these venues have a topical focus and you can expect that your audience is
there because they have some interest in that specific topic. These people are
very much like the Hobbyists that we talked about in Chapter 5. Different
venues also attract different audiences, so if there is some group you espe-
cially do (or do not) want to interact with, choose your location wisely.
Some audience differences will be pretty obvious – you’ll find kids at after-
school programs and library story times; you’ll find college students at
university functions; you’ll find older adults at nursing homes. And different
kinds of cultural events often attract very diverse audiences: A Juneteenth
celebration is likely to have a lot of African American attendees, while a
Cinco de Mayo festival is likely to have a lot of Mexican American attendees.
But sometimes there are other, less obvious factors that might matter to
you. Some venues attract primarily high-income attendees while others
bring in a more economically diverse crowd. For example, many museums
have high admission fees that restrict who can attend them. But many of
these same museums also run free events or have days with discounted
admission fees.
It is perfectly OK to ask the people in charge of your target venue what
kind of people you can expect to encounter. They will know if their pro-
gramming attracts low- or high-income families, monolingual or multilin-
gual individuals, old people or young people, locals or tourists. As we
discussed in Chapter 7, a great way to make your activity relevant is to

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 Where Can I Go? 227

connect it to people’s regular lives. But in order to do that effectively, it does

help to know a little bit about what those lives might look like.

Your Logistics
A final set of things to think about is what makes sense for you. You’ll want
to think about what’s involved with doing your activity and what kind of
resources you have to make this happen.
Some people have activities that are quite extensive and require special
equipment. We’ve done an activity where we record people saying their
names, make a spectrogram of the recording, and then print the image out
for them. Doing this activity requires a computer with easy-to-use speech
analysis software such as Praat, some connecting cables, a printer and paper,
extra ink, electricity, and a table to put everything on. We also find it’s useful
to have some markers around so that we (or the guest) can write extra things
on the printout (such as the person’s name in the IPA or in a traditional
spelling). And sometimes we bring along IPA charts so we can talk a bit more
about how linguists think about speech sounds with people who are
interested.
That’s a lot of stuff to bring to a venue! When we bring that spectrogram
activity to an event, we think a lot about how we’re going to transport our
materials, who’s going to carry what, and what the venue will supply
(electricity is an absolute must for this one!). We also think about how far
we might have to carry heavy things, how we’re going to protect our
materials when we take a lunch break, and how we’re going to control our
materials so little children don’t accidentally break anything.
Our answers end up largely being common sense (we like plastic bins with
labels on them, we try to find out layouts of event spaces ahead of time, and
we make sure everyone on our team knows what they are responsible for).
But having a plan for how to work the details will make everything go
more smoothly.

RESOURCE LIST: A CHECKLIST OF USEFUL THINGS

• Stay organized!
Bring a list of materials that you need to do each demo – you don’t want
to leave anything behind!
Label your pieces, including cords, boxes, folders, and miscellaneous
electronics.

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 228 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

• Scheduling your people:

Stagger people’s shifts so you don’t leave gaps and so there are no
abrupt turnovers.
Have someone in each shift who knows where all the supplies are and
how everything works.
Consider who’s comfortable with what languages.
Build in breaks so individuals can get meals and explore the venue.
• Stuff that’s always useful:
Tape – duct tape, masking tape, Scotch tape.
Power cords and/or chargers for everything you’re using. Also consider
an extension cord and power strip.
Pens, markers, clipboards, binder clips, small boxes to organize items.
Peppermints or lemon drops – and encourage people to bring water
bottles!
A large tablecloth (it makes the space look better and will help hide
your stuff ).
• Promotional items:
Consider bringing T-shirts, signs, or banners that advertise your school
(or any other sponsor you might have).
Small items related to your demo that you can give away.

You might discover that you can’t make a reasonable plan for all kinds of
venues. If you have a lot of equipment, then you might want to restrict
yourself to venues that you can drive a car to (as opposed to going by plane
or train). If your team is very small (maybe you’re a team of one!), then
maybe you want to design an activity that involves fewer items or involves
very lightweight materials. If you are terrified of working with children,
maybe you want to stay away from venues where they are the primary
audience. There is no one right answer for what makes a particular venue a
good one for you to work at. It always depends on what makes sense for you
and your team.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

When you’re looking for places to reach the general public, there are many
options. Do your homework to find out the rules, and be flexible about the
range of places you might work.

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 Where Can I Go? 229

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

How can you take an activity and modify it so that it feels more relevant
for different venues?

The McGurk effect

In Chapter 14, we laid out how to do this activity. To remind you, the
Critical Take-Home Message for this demo is that our perception of speech
sounds is not just an auditory act done by the ears; it is done by the brain,
which is integrating information across multiple domains. Here we show
how you might do the same activity in very different kinds of spaces!

1 College dorm event

Do you want to trick your brain? Can you think of any other places where
you’re matching auditory and visual speech signals? What about dubbed
movies? What about other kinds of visual information, like what a person
looks like?

2 A book festival
What can this tell us about the difference between reading a physical book
and listening to an audiobook? How does your experience of a book
change depending on how you get the words?

3 A Science Café
Ever tried to talk to your friends in a noisy bar? What do you do to help
you hear better? What kinds of things do you mishear in a noisy place?

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Find three locations or events where you might be able to do your demo! It’s
fine if you find some that involve traveling, but make sure at least one of
them is close to where you are now.
Write down what you found. Include dates (for events) and informa-
tion about who to contact for more details, as well as any requirements
that you discovered for getting into the location or event. Sketch some

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 230 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

logistical details related to your doable demo. For example, do you need to
inquire about electricity? Can you bring everything you need for the demo
into the venue on your own?

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Popular culture venues
In fact, engaging with people outside of a traditional science venue can be a good
way to expand people’s minds about science and language. Vaughn James reports
interviewing people at different sci-fi fan conventions (like Dragon Con and
Awesome Con) where science communicators had set up booths (James, 2020).
Many of the fans reported that they found it “eye-opening” to see scientists in this
context and the experience made them more interested in trying out more science
content.

2 Having a plan will make things go more smoothly

Of course, no matter how much you plan, things can still go wrong! While preparing
for the Tucson Festival of Books one year, CM’s team made a huge board for the
syntactic ambiguity demo. We got permission to set it up on the grass several feet out
from our tables under a tent that we shared with about a dozen other exhibitors. We
practiced for weeks to make sure everyone knew how to use the new and improved
board. The first day of the festival was extremely windy, and the festival organizers
brought sandbags around for everyone who had this kind of material. But it wasn’t
enough! The wind picked up our board and blew it onto one of our team. Although
we were incredibly glad the board hadn’t hit a member of the visiting public, we were
seriously concerned for the University of Arizona student (he was fine).
Another year at the same festival, we hauled a huge monitor to our area so we
could use materials like the video of the beatboxer and the opera singer more
effectively. We hadn’t tested this setup outdoors. And, even though we were shaded
by a huge tent, the light was so bright that people who could hear these amazing
sounds coming out of the speakers couldn’t see the associated video on the monitor.

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 19 Being a Good Partner

OPENING WORKSHEET

Think about some experiences where you have worked with other people –
paid or volunteer jobs, group projects in school, sports teams, and so on.
Who do you like to work with? Why?
Write down three things that people do that make them fun or easy to
work with.
Who do you not like to work with? Why?
Write down three things that people do that make them unpleasant or
hard to work with.

This chapter is about how you can be a good partner with the venues you’re
going to be working at, whether it’s a science festival, an art museum, or a
university library.

Choose Your Team Wisely

Before you start thinking about how you work with others, it’s worth
reflecting on who exactly you are. While it is possible to do public
engagement as a solo act, it generally works better as a team sport.
Working with a group of people has a lot of advantages. You get to pool
your ideas and give each other feedback on the activities you are developing.
Also, watching someone else do ‘your’ activity can teach you ways to
improve it when you do it yourself next. Plus, the best way to develop your
conversation skills is to have someone to talk with. Moreover, going into a
free-choice learning environment is probably not something you’re used to
doing and going with a group of people will give you mutual support.
A group will also make your presence more visible and more exciting: One
person doing an activity is nice; three people doing activities is an event!

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 232 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

And it doesn’t hurt that having more people will allow you to maintain a
presence even over lunch time and bathroom breaks.
But like any group activity, it will be more fun and more successful if
everyone in the group is a team player. In this case, that’s going to mean not
only that everyone comes when they say they will and prepares their activity
ahead of time; it also means that all of you are committed to providing a
good public engagement experience. You should all be striving for activities
that are interesting and informative; you should all have plans for how
you’re going to make your topic relevant and have a stockpile of juicy
questions to get people talking; you should all be enthusiastic about having
real conversations with people. You should also all strive to be supportive of
each other.
Having anyone on your team who isn’t really trying to have good conver-
sations with people, or who doesn’t really care whether people understand
what they are saying, or who is listless and bored, is no good. It’s not good
for team morale, and it will drag down your own sense of fun. It is also not
good for building a solid partnership with the venue that you’re in. Informal
learning venues want you to add value for the people who go there, and if
they don’t think you’re even trying, they won’t be enthusiastic about having
you back.

Trust Your Partner

When you’re working in an informal learning venue, remember that you’re
on someone else’s home turf. Even if you’re doing a program at your own
university, you’re still likely to be working in a part of the school that isn’t
about the formal classroom. The people who run these informal learning
spaces care about them and probably have strong ideas about how they are
supposed to work. And if that informal venue is any good, those ideas are
probably excellent.
That last bit bears repeating: Ideas about public engagement that we
learn from the people who run the very places and events we’re trying to
join are probably very good ideas! Scientists coming from an academic or
industry background have a reputation for parachuting into an informal
learning situation and assuming that they know better than do the people
who spend their lives educating the general public. Nobody questions
whether these scientists know more about their own science than the
educators at these venues. But it is critical to realize that scientists are
not experts in accessible communication. The people who run informal
learning institutions are.

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 Being a Good Partner 233

What does that mean? It means you should listen to them. In the next
section, we’ll tell you that you should follow all the practical rules they lay
down for you. But it is also important that you listen to them when they offer
general advice or feedback about your demo and your interactions with
people. If they think you are using words that their target audience might
not know, or materials that aren’t appropriate for that audience, or that your
activity takes too long, or that your materials are a choking hazard – pay
attention! They have a lot more experience than you do at working with
people who come to these places for fun and learning, and you should trust
their judgment about how your activity will go over with the audience that
they know well.
It can also help to realize that there are complicated power dynamics
between you and the staff at informal learning venues. You might feel that
you are contributing a lot: You made an awesome demo, you bring know-
ledge about your science, and most likely, you are volunteering your time.
With that in mind, you might feel like you are owed some kind of special
treatment as recognition for what you are doing.
But it’s important to think about the situation from the point of view of
your partners. They do work hard all the time to minimize risks in their
interactions with the public and to make their venue a success. If you’re
working at a one-time event like a festival, someone had to arrange the
physical space and all the booths, organize general staff for the event,
address potential safety concerns, advertise the event, coordinate with local
officials for scheduling and permits and who knows what else, fundraise to
get things going, and much more. If you’re working at an established insti-
tution like a museum, someone had to make and maintain the ongoing
functioning of the venue, train the staff, advertise for visitors, coordinate
all the different internal programming, and fundraise.
When you come into these spaces, you are adding value to their mission.
But you are just one piece in a very big puzzle. For some of these places, they
don’t actually need you in particular – they may have lots of options for
ways to bring scientific content into their space. In fact, they may see
themselves as doing a favor for you. Their job is promoting accessible
communication with the public, and they are allowing you access to their
resources so that you can promote your favorite message.
The staff at these venues won’t expect any kind of special treatment from
you, but they do deserve your respect and your appreciation. They are not
your employees who have created an entire festival just so you can do your
demo. They are your partners. Respect their expertise and their opinions
about communicating with the public. And treat them like the professionals
that they are.

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 234 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Be a Good Citizen
Nobody likes a party guest who breaks the furniture and won’t follow the
house rules. Consider yourself a guest at these venues and play nice. It also
doesn’t hurt to say things like “Please” and “Thank you” to the people who
help you out.
You should also trust the staff at these venues about how the logistics
work. If they ask for a risk assessment, then address that. If they want you to
show up at a certain time, then be there at that time. If they recommend that
you stay within your booth’s designated area, then stay there. If they don’t
want you to eat while you’re doing your activity, then take your snack and
meal breaks somewhere else. Some of their requests and rules may seem
arbitrary to you, but have some faith that they reflect lessons the venue has
learned from past experience.
Another part of being a good citizen is being positive and enthusiastic
about the nature of the place you are in. You are unlikely to be doing
language science outreach in a venue that is specifically devoted to lan-
guage. So learn to make the most of being in an environment that’s not
explicitly about language. We both do a lot of our activities at venues that
are geared toward traditional physical sciences such as biology, physics, and
chemistry. We’ve done our activities next to people demonstrating bomb-
sniffing mice and people talking about the space shuttle and people control-
ling what look like the world’s funnest explosions. If you are at a cultural
festival, you might be surrounded by sculptors, beer makers, booksellers, or
klezmer and mariachi bands.
You want to be part of the positive vibe of your venue, so be supportive
of the people around you. If you are enthusiastic about your activity,
people will come and talk with you and learn from you, no matter who
else is around you. But it will undercut your number one goal (to generate
interest and excitement) if you are dismissive (or worse, denigrating) of
the other attractions around you in the venue. At festivals, we like to
check out what is happening at other booths or tables so that we can
suggest other fun activities for people to do once they finish with us and
so that we can help them find connections to other sciences. We often get
ideas for our own work from experiencing how other scientists are sharing
other domains. In short, promoting an overall positive community helps
everybody there.
And being a good citizen can be a self-interested act. If you want to be
invited back (or allowed back) to the venue, it helps if people there remember
you well.

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 Being a Good Partner 235

It’s a Different Conversation: But It’s Still a Conversation

The key to being a good partner is, in the end, the same key to successful
communication with the public: Have a conversation. The goal of your
conversation with a museum professional or festival organizer will be a bit
different from what we’ve been discussing so far. With these conversational
partners, your goal is to make sure that each of you understands what the
other is contributing and what is expected of you. But the core principles for
having a good conversation that we laid out in Chapter 3 still apply!
The first maxim for cooperative conversation is Quality: Tell the truth. In
this context, you should be honest about both your own level of experience
and the nature of your demo. If you’re doing your demo for the very first
time, go ahead and tell your partner that! It will help them adjust the amount
of information and feedback that they give you. Also be honest about your
demo. Be clear about the things you absolutely need to make it work (a table?
internet access?) and the things that are genuinely optional (does it have to
be a big screen TV, or can you show those movies on an iPad?). Your partner
may have to do extra work to get what you ask for, so be respectful of their
contribution by only asking for the things your activity truly requires.
The second maxim is Quantity: Say as much as you need to and not more.
In this context, that means answering all the questions put to you in a
thoughtful manner – whether those questions are on an application form
or being asked in person. Don’t cut corners and assume that they don’t really
need all the information that they are requesting. Make sure that you’re
telling the venue everything they want to know.
The third maxim is Relevance: Stick to the point! For this one, it helps to
think about the venue from your partner’s perspective. Most likely, they don’t
need to know the details of the science behind your demo. But they very
likely will want to know how many people you’re going to have in their
space and when those people can be there. Try to think about what is relevant
for them, not just for you!
The last maxim is Manner: Be clear. In this context, it is very important to
remember that you are coming from a very different background from your
partner. That means that what is given and new will be very different for
each of you. For example, you may think that it is obvious (a given) what
your role is on your team, but that may be news to your partner. For
example, at a university, it’s pretty common for a faculty member to be in
charge of financing engagement activities but for a student to be the person
who is doing the organizational work. Your partner may not be clear on who
has decision-making powers and who they should be talking to about

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 236 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

different issues. On the other side, it may be obvious (a given) to your partner
that you will bring small tokens to give away to everyone who you interact
with (a sticker, a pen, a small toy), but you might not have expected that at
all. In fact, we have found that different venues have very different rules
about the use of giveaways. Some forbid it entirely, while others consider it
virtually mandatory. Your partner may not realize that you haven’t thought
about the question one way or another.
The best way to have a smooth partnership is not to have just a single
conversation, but instead to have many good conversations with your part-
ner. The more you talk with them, the better you will understand their
perspective, and that will make it easier for you to be a good citizen. The
reverse is just as true. The more you talk with them, the better they will
understand your perspective, and that will make it easier for them to provide
good support for your activity. What’s most important is that you realize that
you are partners – you’re in this together and you should be working together
to create the best experience for the public.

A Partnership Case Study

In Chapter 1, we mentioned CM’s work with Children’s Museum Tucson on a
demo about vowels and mouth shapes. The way this demo and the related
research were developed illustrates our core lessons about trusting your partner
as you build such collaborations. This museum was interested in relating play-
based engagement to science practices in two- to five-year-olds. The university
group had expertise in research and in young children’s language development.
So far, so good! But the museum’s mission and daily operations differed in
important ways from what the university-based team was accustomed to.
First, the museum’s primary audience was young children and their families.
So the demo needed to be a game that even toddlers could do and that
caretakers could appreciate as well. Also, places like museums do keep an eye
on their bottom line, so how fun it was mattered for both the children and the
adults who accompanied them. Both partners also wanted the demo to support
research on children’s science practices and on parents’ views of such activities.
Although CM’s own research focuses on syntax, she and her colleagues decided
that an activity based on mouth shapes and speech sounds would address the
museum’s interests best and that the research would be feasible through a
course giving research-focused community experience to university students.
Next, the museum wanted the university-museum co-sponsorship to be
clearly identified. Museum staff also wanted to integrate the demo and
associated research into the rest of the museum’s operations. It wasn’t going
to be a permanent exhibit, so everything associated with the demo had to fit

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 Being a Good Partner 237

onto one of the museum’s science carts. To make that happen, the university-
based team followed the museum’s protocols for its own staff who work on
roving exhibits (e.g., attire, name tags, signing in and signing out, cart
cleaning) and instantiated the museum’s core values, such as learning
through play and helping families. For example, the university students
learned the museum’s physical layout so they could direct visitors to bath-
rooms and water fountains and so on. From the perspective of the museum
visitors, the university researchers were the same as museum floor staff, and
they behaved accordingly.
Third, the museum wanted the research to maintain their standards for a
high-quality visitor experience. For example, this museum uses giveaways to
help parents take play-based learning home, so the university team
developed a miniature version of the mouth shape game that parents could
use later to guide the activities themselves off-site. The museum wanted
anyone to be able to engage with the demo when the cart was on the floor,
even if they didn’t want to participate in the research. The university team
therefore had to be able to guide the game as either a conventional science
cart activity or as a research study. That the demo needed to be an option for
all visitors also required some modifications to the research protocol. For
example, some of the museum’s visitors did not read or speak English, and
modifying the protocol to accommodate these visitors required the university
team to do extra work with their ethics review board.
Figuring out the details so they would meet the research standards of the
university team and the requirements of the museum took time. The university
and museum teams met weekly for several months, alternating locations to
learn about each other’s spaces and to gain clarity on each other’s missions.
The end result was an engaging demo about vowel sounds. A child doing
this demo chooses a face on a metal game board. After ‘discovering’ that the
face lacks a mouth, the child and the researcher then ‘read’ three mouth-
shaped magnets, being very silly while exaggerating [i], [u], and [ɔ]. Next, the
child finds the mouth shape magnets needed to say the words see, sue, and saw
and chooses one. Together, she and the researcher find more words using the
vowel represented with that mouth shape. With the [u] mouth for example,
three-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals offer words like blue, moo, tu, and
su. The research component asked parents to observe their children moving
their mouths and saying new words to go with different vowels. Parents
answered survey questions about their children while observing the demo.
The giveaways emphasized that children’s moving their mouths and hearing
what changes are examples of exploration and observation, science practices
that very young children can do and that parents can easily spot and encour-
age. If parents wanted further discussion, that conversation could also link
various ways of playing with various science practices.

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 238 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Figure 19.1 Vowel mouth shapes demo at Children’s Museum Tucson

Note. A child has just put the [ɔ] mouth shape magnet on a face (for the vowel in the word saw).
The child’s mother (with green-cased survey iPad) is leaning over to see her face as a University of
Arizona student points to the [ɔ] mouth shape because the survey asked parents to code their
children’s participation in science practices.

CRITICAL TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Be a good citizen at the informal learning venues you work at! Bring a good
team, play by the rules, and show respect.

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

In Chapter 18, we covered a few ways that you could tailor your activity to
fit with the focus of a particular venue. If you can do that, you are ahead of
the game at integrating yourself into your community.
But sometimes, you may want to go even further and choose a topic just
so that it will fit into the venue you’re working in. Here are some ways that
we’ve developed new content expressly to emphasize a connection with
where we were.

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 Being a Good Partner 239

(cont.)

• One of us (LW) works regularly in the same venue – the Center of

Science and Industry (COSI). Within the museum, there are a variety
of permanent exhibits, including one that is devoted to dinosaurs
and another one that is devoted to space travel. Neither one of these
domains is obviously about language, but interesting links can be
found! For example, you may have noticed that we have highlighted
a few activities that featured dinosaurs: In Chapter 5 we discussed
how to use dinosaur names to do a morphological analysis activity,
and in Chapter 16 we discussed an activity about nonlinguistic
communication also using dinosaurs. Both of these activities were
designed so that we could build off of a popular experience in the
museum. In both cases, museum visitors (especially children) are
drawn to the activity because they are already thinking about dino-
saurs. And they don’t seem to mind learning a little bit about
language along the way.
The space travel exhibit in the museum might also seem like a stretch
for a language-related point, but some students figured out the
angle: astronaut hand signals. It turns out astronauts use a system
of hand gestures to communicate information for when they are
floating around in space or walking around on the moon. These
signals are fun to teach and can lead to interesting discussions
about why astronauts need special modes of communication (hint:
sound waves need air to travel through!). You can read a bit more
about them here: https://mdrs141.weebly.com/blog/eva-hand-
signals.
• One of us (CM) volunteers at an agricultural heritage museum called
Mission Garden, which features edible plants of the Sonoran Desert
in Arizona, California, and Mexico. Mission Garden hosts a variety
of demonstrations, including ones about unusual domestic arts.
Even in a demonstration of how to make your own liqueur, it is
possible to add some language science fun. For example, an easy-
to-make liqueur is the Italian favorite, limoncello. In Italy, it’s
obvious what fruit is at the heart of this liqueur because limone
means lemon in Italian. Interestingly, many Americans call
this drink “lemoncello,” which suggests that people like such
names to be meaningful and also that they have done some mor-
phological analysis of the word! After trying a few other liqueurs
made from other fruits growing in this garden, people doing this
activity spontaneously name them with terms like “Mexican sweet

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 240 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

(cont.)
lime-cello” and “Seville orange-cello” and “pomegranate-cello.” Without
flashing a technical term, it’s easy for anyone in this conversation to find
other examples of the morphological process of back-formation (e.g.,
alcoholic, chocoholic, workaholic; Watergate, Volgagate, wine-gate).

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Choose one of the locations or events that you identified in Chapter 18.
Think about how you would get involved with that venue so that you could
do your doable demo. Consider the following questions:

• What are their rules for getting involved? (If you don’t know, see if you
can find out!)
• What are their goals? Do they have a mission statement or a description
of their aims that you can read?
• Who is their core audience? Who else is likely to be at this venue?
• What will they expect from you? What will they want you to do
for them?
• What will they want to know about you? What will they want to know
about your activity?
• What can you do for them? How does your activity address their goals?

This will be hard, but we’re nearing the end and you’ve thought about your
demo a lot by now. What permutation on your demo might make it fit your
target venue especially well?

Further Reading
........................................................................
1 Treat them like the professionals they are
Readers wanting to partner with museums will appreciate Alpert (2013). This
example-packed guide for starting and stewarding university-museum partnerships
also includes lessons that are useful for all partners that differ in core mission,
financial model, internal organization, daily operations, and more. One of our
favorite examples from this booklet shows how not to start (Alpert, 2013, p. 2):

Hello. My name is Professor __. I’m calling from the __ department at __

University. I was just hoping to get in touch with you today regarding this very
large grant proposal that we’re putting together and actually submitting by the

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 Being a Good Partner 241

end of the day . . . and one thing that was suggested and that would be great
would be if we could establish some links with the Museum. If you can give me a
call back . . .

As Alpert gently notes, this approach launches without a plan or a budget. It

assumes that the university-based researcher’s schedule and goal are paramount. Just
as this book has emphasized learning and respecting your conversational partner’s
perspective, Alpert’s guide suggests something similar for institutional partners.
Conversations about each other’s perspectives can function as feasibility tests and
also strengthen a budding partnership. Even if you’re not ready for the parts of this
guide concerning research and education grants, this section may help you think
about issues such as hidden labor (e.g., training university students on museum
protocols) and the value of time management and regular communication.
Another useful resource related to such partnerships is Moore (2021). Leslie Moore
is a university researcher who successfully created a partnership with a science
museum for a project looking at dual language learners in museum and educational
contexts. In this chapter, she describes how she built and maintained the relationship
over time. She presents a clear-eyed perspective on both the advantages and the
difficulties of these sorts of partnerships.

2 Venues specifically devoted to language

While venues devoted to language aren’t nearly as common as broader science
centers, children’s museums, or cultural festivals, a wide range of language-focused
venues do in fact exist around the world. In the United States, we have been excited
about Planet Word (https://planetwordmuseum.org/). And this collection from the
Centre of Norwegian Language and Literature has many other suggestions for
museums around the world that feature language (Grepstad, 2018): www.nynorsk
.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/814-20180314-Language-museums-OG.pdf

3 Connections to other sciences

Here’s an example of the serendipitous connections we often find in our booth or
table assignments. The University of Arizona team once participated in a Summer
Science Saturday emphasizing planetary sciences. We were in the Earth-Is-Special
room, which featured insects and people. Our team showed that “people are special”
because we talk, and one of our activities started with spectrograms. It being largely
an astronomy event, we emphasized how spectrograms could represent frequencies
in several types of signals and sent visitors to booths where they could see light
spectrograms. When we invited visitors to link spectrograms to their interests, some
children asked to compare the noises of the neighboring Madagascar hissing cock-
roaches to human speech sounds. The entomologists did not want to subject their
bugs to that indignity, so we did the hissing ourselves.

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 20 Finale

OPENING WORKSHEET

Now that you’ve just about finished this book, write down the most useful
thing that you learned and the thing that surprised you the most.

Our goals with this book were to inspire you to want to talk more with the
public, and to give you some tools that would help you do that in a successful
way. If you’ve been using the book systematically – and doing the work-
sheets in each chapter – you should by now have in your possession one fully
realized language science activity that you could use at an informal learning
event. We hope that you do!

Our Critical Take-Home Messages

As you probably noticed, we like distilling things down to their essence. So
here’s what we see as five Critical Take-Home Messages for this book.

1 Have a Cooperative Conversation

Formal classrooms are often about one-way communication from a teacher
to a student, but informal learning works much better when the communi-
cation is done in the form of a conversation. Great conversations are ones
where you’re truthful, relevant, and clear. They allow everybody to partici-
pate and work together to understand each other. Have that kind of
conversation!

2 Value the People You Are Talking With

The people you’re having that conversation with are worth your time. They
have important funds of knowledge, and they are worth listening to. They
will learn more from you if you pay attention to them and respect what they

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 Finale 243

say to you. Plus, you just might learn something from them if you do
those things.

3 Organize Your Information for Your Audience

Apply what language scientists have figured out about how people process
information, and organize what you say in ways that make it easy for people
to track. Find good ways to establish common ground, and provide given
information before new information.

4 Incomplete 6¼Incorrect
Don’t worry about explaining everything about your topic area to anyone!
You’re not cheating people by just giving them part of the story. It’s most
important to get them excited about your science, even if it means you’re just
sharing a basic piece of it. That excitement will provide a foundation from
which they can learn more. If your activity has motivated them to learn
more, they’ll keep going.

5 Have Fun
Seriously. We mean it. We didn’t include a whole chapter about having
fun, but we hope that you’ve figured out by now that you will be a more
effective communicator if you’re enjoying the conversations in your
public engagement. But more than that, you’re more likely to actually
do it if you have a good time. While we know that there’s no way to
guarantee that you’ll enjoy yourself, we do think it helps if you are
expecting to have fun.

It’s Not Rocket Science! (It’s So Much Harder Than That)

We don’t want to highlight stereotypes about physics vs language science vs
science communication. But we do know that rocket science is often thought
of as being extremely challenging and the kind of thing that only really
really smart people can do. And we know that people are less likely to think
you need to be a genius to study language than physics, let alone to engage
in science communication. But if you think about it, just the opposite is true.
Rocket science is relatively well understood – we actually know how to
make rockets that can launch people into space and bring them back home
again. By contrast, there is an immense amount about human language that
is still not well understood. For example, language scientists still don’t know
how children learn language, or why chimpanzees don’t, or whether the
iconic status of some signs helps signers of ASL process language more

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 244 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

efficiently. The intricacies of the human mind and how it creates and uses
language are at least as hard as rocket science.
As for science communication, it just might be harder still! We are
currently living through a period when trust in science is not high, and
science misinformation proliferates across every type of media.
Organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of
Sciences (AAAS) have been arguing for decades that we need experts who
are better skilled at communicating with the public in an accessible way
to foster trust and understanding. Despite the fact that many people have
long recognized science communication as a critical area in need of skilled
users, it is still the case that most experts, including most language scientists,
do not receive the training they need to do it well. Talking with the public
about scientific concepts is very, very hard to do well.
This book has described how to do effective science communication, but
just reading this book will not make you good at it. Communicating with the
public is a skill that requires practice. You have to do it over and over again
to become adept at it. It’s less like rocket science and more like riding a
bicycle. Or playing a musical instrument. Or becoming an athlete. You have
to actually practice science communication in order to do it well.

LAST THOUGHTS
We hope you take the lessons of this book to heart, and go out and practice
using your doable demo with people in an informal learning location near you!

WORKED EXAMPLE BOX

Share your work!

We think that engaging with the public is something our entire com-
munity should be doing. We know about some people who are already
doing it, but we always like to hear about more people doing it.
So please tell us – and everyone else – about your efforts! Please
consider making a record of your activities: Take pictures, make a video,
keep a blog, write an essay. And please consider making those records
public, whether that means posting them to a website, or putting them up
on social media, or publishing them in a journal.
Or, if you’re too shy to go public, consider just emailing us and letting
us know!

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 Finale 245

CLOSING WORKSHEET

Practice is a great thing, but practice with structured and constructive feedback
is even better! Here is a set of questions that you can give to a practice audience
to find out how well you’re doing. Remember that audience design is your
responsibility! If people can’t give you good answers to these questions, then
you need to think about how to change your activity so that your conversational
partners are having the experience that you want them to have. Do your demo
with a practice audience and then ask these questions:

(1) What do you think you were supposed to learn from this activity?
(2) Identify at least one point where my demo was interactive. That is,
when did you get to participate?
(3) What questions did I ask you? What questions did you ask me?
(4) Were any technical words used in this activity? Please list as many as
you can remember. From your list, circle the one technical word that
you think was absolutely indispensable for this activity.
(5) When were technical terms first introduced? Were they presented
before or after you understood the concept that each described?
(6) What was the most enjoyable thing about this activity?
(7) Was there anything about the topic of this activity that connected to
your everyday life? What was it?
(8) What was one thing that you found confusing in this activity?
(9) What is one thing that you would definitely change in this activity?
(10) What is one thing that you thought was done exactly right in this activity?

Further Reading
.................................................................
1 One-way communication from a teacher to a student
King (1993) referred to this approach as the “sage on the stage” and contrasted it with
an approach using a “guide on the side” analogy. In the conversations that we
encourage here, you will be that guide on the side.

2 People are less likely to think you need to be a genius to study language
The psychologists Andrei Cimpian and Sarah Jane Leslie have investigated which
fields people perceive as requiring natural brilliance or innate genius in order to
succeed, and the implications of those perceptions on who goes into those fields. In
one study they investigated people’s belief that you need “field-specific abilities” in
order to succeed, and correlated that with how many women get PhDs in the field.
The graph in Figure 20.1 is from Meyer et al. (2015); it shows that people believe

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 246 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

strongly that physics is a field where you need natural talent to succeed while
education is a field where you can succeed just by working hard (linguistics rates
between those two). You’ll also notice that there are a lot more women getting PhDs
in education than physics, which is one of the main points of this line of research.
Just in general, these researchers found that the more a field is associated with
needing a particular kind of genius or brilliance for success, the less likely women
and African Americans are to be members of that field (Cimpian & Leslie, 2017).

Figure 20.1 Relationship between perceived brilliance and women’s participation in academic fields
Note. This graph from Meyer et al. (2015) shows that the more people believe you need special
abilities to succeed in a field, the fewer women there are who get PhDs in that field. Reprinted
with permission.

3 Rocket science is relatively well understood

To be impressed with what rocket scientists can do, see this video from NASA
showing how it collected a sample from the asteroid Bennu: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=RkJo6BXfbmA.

4 Science misinformation proliferates across every type of media

If you want to know more about what the general public does and does not believe, one
source to keep an eye on is the Pew Research Center. This organization regularly surveys
large groups of people around the world about different topics, including trust in science.
In a 2020 report (www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/29/science-and-scientists-held-
in-high-esteem-across-global-publics/), Pew found that only 38 percent of Americans
trusted scientists “a lot” to do what is right, and 36 percent of Brazilians trusted scientists
“not too much/not at all” to do what is right. The picture is worse when you look at the
issue of misinformation, as Pew did in a related report: www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/
distinguishing-between-factual-and-opinion-statements-in-the-news/. Around a quar-
ter of Americans were almost totally unable to distinguish between a “fact” (something
where objective evidence determines if something is true) and an “opinion.”

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 APPENDIX
Teaching with This Book

One of our goals for this book is as a text for a university course running a
whole quarter or semester, ideally ending with an event where students do
demos that they have developed through the course. As noted in Chapter 1,
reading the book straight through presents the full story. Moreover, the book
incorporates various elements that could be used to generate homework
assignments and in-class discussions, including guiding students in helping
to improve each other’s demos. We realize that teachers have their own styles
and favorite strategies, but we wanted to lay out our ideas for how different
components of this book might be used in a course. In case you’d like to
apply some of Chapter 15’s ideas to your own course, Vanderbilt University’s
IRIS Center has excellent resources on instructional scaffolding: https://iris
.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/sca/cresource/q1/p01/.

Suggestions for Non–Language Scientists Using This Book

The title of this book includes the word language, and we emphasize
examples from the language sciences because we ourselves are linguists.
But the core lessons in this book apply to any science communication,
perhaps even to any discourse between experts in some area and people
who lack that particular expertise (but surely have some other expertise).
That is, all such communication benefits from cooperative conversations
where we are truthful, relevant, and clear. All such communication benefits
from adjustments to how people process information where we establish
common ground, provide given information before new information, and
recognize that incomplete 6¼ incorrect. Valuing whoever we engage with and
having fun while doing this work are also critical for any
such communication.
Short chapters articulate these core lessons, which should make it easy for
a teacher to choose reading assignments. Elements of the book that are

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 248 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

focused on making new demos, such as the Opening and Closing Worksheets,
have little explicit reference to the language sciences and so should be
relatively easy for anyone to use. For example, these worksheets ask readers
to reflect on stereotypes (e.g., of experts and audiences), credibility, and
misunderstandings; or they ask readers to develop concrete materials, to
organize information, and to write guidelines for their own demos. The
Worked Example Boxes that supplement each chapter’s main text can be
modified to resonate better with experts on topics other than language. As
this might be challenging for teachers who are themselves just starting this
kind of work, examples from other sciences can be found on websites and in
publications referring to the “strands of science learning.”

Opening Worksheets
The worksheets that start each chapter are designed to inspire readers to
consider their own motivations and experiences. We’ve provided a list at the
end of this section that summarizes all of these worksheets in one place.
Some of them ask people to think about things that they might find per-
sonal – their strengths and weaknesses, their experience with arguments,
their views of different kinds of people, times they have faced difficulties. We
do believe that asking students to actually write down their answers to the
prompts in the Opening Worksheets is an important way to get them to
engage thoughtfully with the questions. However, we don’t recommend
asking students to turn in anything written for the Opening Worksheets. In
fact, letting students know that you won’t collect their responses might
encourage more honest reflections. Instead, we see these worksheets as
suggesting seeds or icebreakers for class discussions. You might ask students
to volunteer answers, or offer experiences of your own to start the ball
rolling. But more important than specific answers that students put down
is getting them to think about why they (and others) gave the kinds of
answers that they did, and how their reflections connect to the text.

Main Text
We’ve written the main text in a style that we hope is “breezy” and therefore
fairly readable. We avoided on purpose sprinkling the main text with aca-
demic citations of the scholarship behind our points. Our intention, even in
the chapters discussing theoretical and empirical work related to linguistics,

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 Appendix 249

is to keep the barrier to entry quite low. We want all kinds of readers to
understand our main points!
If you stick to the main text, you will get the full story. An important part
of that story is that the language sciences make critical contributions that are
relevant for public engagement. In particular, the central themes of this book
are (1) the principles behind successful conversations (i.e., the Gricean
Maxims), and (2) the information structure underlying ideal communication
(i.e., Given before New). We return to these themes frequently, and we repeat
explicit references to our discussion of them across chapters to emphasize
how these themes underlie many different features that we discuss. But to
provide pedagogical flexibility, we wrote each chapter to stand on its own
without wobbling too much. The consistency of the themes allows the
chapters to be assigned in different orders and facilitates the use of this book
for shorter programming, such as a single module in a semester-long course
on professionalism, or in a two-week workshop on science communication,
or as a source for icebreakers during orientation to any language
science event.

Worked Example Boxes

These boxes highlight examples that unpack practical details of the lessons in
the main text. In many cases, the examples will be mentioned briefly in the
main text, and then we use the boxes to provide more relevant detail. In other
cases, we use these boxes to augment the main text. They may be thematic-
ally linked to what was discussed in the chapter, but some won’t necessarily
be discussed as such. These boxes are one of the easiest places to swap in new
material if you are so inclined. We chose examples that reflect who we are –
our own experiences, our favorite demos, our interests in language. But if
your students are more likely to resonate to different examples, by all means
use your own worked examples!

Closing Worksheets
The worksheets that end each chapter work as a coherent set and build
systematically toward the reader’s creation of a doable demo. We’ve provided
a list at the end of this section that summarizes all of these worksheets in one
place. If you do want your students to make a demo as a result of your course
(and we really hope you do!), then we strongly recommend that you assign

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 250 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

these worksheets and ask students to turn in the products. When we intro-
duce these worksheets in Chapter 1, we suggest that the reader keep a written
record of their responses. Having something written down that can be
referred to for later worksheets will help with developing the activities we
have in mind. Obviously, there are many ways to implement these assign-
ments, and the best way will depend on your specific situation. We’ve
designed these worksheets as if each student is doing their own demo, but
the worksheets also work well if you are having students work in groups. As
noted in Chapter 19, public engagement activities often succeed as a team
sport. They also work well as in-class small group activities if you are
“flipping” your class and want to use class time for hands-on work.

About the Further Reading Sections

You may notice that there is a separate section at the end of each chapter that
provides notes on additional things to read. These come in various flavors.
Some provide more information on the literature that we are breezing through
in the main text. If you’re looking for background about that literature, more
specific sources, or justifications for some of our terminology, you’ll find some
of that in the further reading notes. Other notes provide more examples. We
tried to minimize URLs in the main text, so some of them went into the
Resource Lists within the main text and the rest ended up in the Further
Reading sections. Finally, some of the notes are a bit more conversational in
nature. We had a good time writing this book, and you’ll get some hints about
our personal senses of humor through a few of these notes as well.

The Doable Demos

We use the doable demo as an organizing idea throughout this book. We
ourselves have already established venues where students can develop and
use demos like this, but we appreciate that not everyone has a science
museum on call or ongoing relationships with local festivals. The later
chapters in this book (Chapters 18 and 19, especially) are designed to help
someone get, and nurture, access to a free-choice learning environment for
themselves. In our experience, creating and building such relationships is
probably best done by a faculty or staff member – someone who has insti-
tutional stability, which most students do not have. And we strongly encour-
age you to seek out places or events where you can use these demos, not only
for the good of your students, but also for yourself! It really is fun to teach
students within these environments.

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 Appendix 251

However, even if you don’t have established access to such venues for your
students, there are many options you can use to help your students practice
their demos. You’ll notice that many of the venues we mention in Chapter 18
are relatively easy to connect with, particularly those that are already
associated with your institution. If even these seem too difficult, we recom-
mend requiring students to practice with their peers and family members, or
with any group that they individually have access to (children they babysit, a
scout troop they supervise, members of their religious congregation). The
lessons of this book are best solidified by practice, so any opportunity your
students can get is worthwhile.

Learning Outcomes
What is reasonable to expect from a student who has gone through this
book? Obviously, if you’re using the worksheets closing each chapter as we
suggest, it is reasonable to expect that your students will make a doable
demo, including some kind of written guidelines that support its use.
Moreover, we hope that your students also gain greater appreciation for
the importance of public engagement and end up with some strategies for
doing such engagement effectively. If you can provide an opportunity for
students to practice their demos (or demos that you’ve made for them) with
actual members of the general public, you can expect more substantial
learning outcomes. When one of us (LW) teaches this course, she provides
students with regular access to practice over the semester and when she
assessed the course outcomes, the number one outcome was improved con-
fidence in public speaking. She was also able to document high levels of
proficiency in communicating with the public and some mild improvements
in dispelling common language myths (you can read the details in Wagner
et al., 2021).

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 252 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Quick Guide to Opening Worksheets

Chapter
1 What does public engagement mean to you? Why are you reading this
book?
2 What does an expert look like? What are some strengths and weaknesses
of your favorite experts, and of yourself?
3 Think about a misunderstanding you’ve had and the factors that
contributed to it.
4 Compare classroom and free-choice learning environments.
5 Think about the kinds of people you might interact with and what they
would get out of your demo topic area.
6 What got you interested in your chosen language topic?
7 How might language matter (be relevant) for different kinds of people?
8 Think about a person you find credible and what makes them credible.
9 Think about what steps are really needed to explain something –
specifically, how to make lentil soup!
10 Think of questions on your topic that different audiences might have
about it.
11 Think about what information is common ground for your demo – for
people who are similar and dissimilar to you.
12 Learn about something unfamiliar. See how your knowledge changes.
13 Explain a complex diagram and think about what kinds of information
images are good (and not so good) at conveying.
14 Practice coming up with alternative words for things, including the
content of your demo.
15 Practice breaking down a topic with a Lalana Chinantec morphology
problem.
16 Evaluate the readiness of your demo’s various components.
17 Think about how your demo will work with different audiences. Consider
what audiences outside of a free-choice learning setting might be interested.
18 Where do people in your community go to learn new things?
19 Think about people you do, and don’t, like to work with. What makes
someone a good partner?
20 What have you learned from this book? What seems most useful and
what’s been most surprising?

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 Appendix 253

Quick Guide to Closing Worksheets

Chapter
1 How to use the worksheets to make a doable demo. Brainstorm topic
ideas.
2 Choose your topic!
3 Connect the Gricean Maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relevance, and
Manner to your chosen topic.
4 What funds of knowledge do others bring to your topic?
Connect your topic to at least two strands of science learning.
5 How can you make your demo interactive and fun?
Link your topic to someone who is an Explorer, a Hobbyist, and an
Experience Seeker.
6 Revise your ideas about how to make your demo interactive and fun.
7 Connect your topic to features of people’s everyday lives.
8 Identify three things that you do know about your topic area and three
things that you do not know about it.
9 Pare down the explanation of your topic.
Identify the Critical Take-Home Message of your demo.
10 Write juicy questions for your demo.
11 Write down the steps in an ideal interaction for your demo.
See what happens when you rearrange the order of these steps.
12 Find out whether key concepts in your demo are likely to be familiar to
other people.
13 Identify the materials that you will need to make your demo work.
14 Use an online jargon filter on your demo explanations.
15 Rework your demo interaction for different rungs on a ladder.
16 Create written guidelines for your demo.
17 Pitch your topic area to different audiences, such as a job interview or
your parents.
18 Identify three locations where you could take your demo.
19 What would make you be a good partner in the location you identified in
the previous closing worksheet?
20 Practice your demo with others! This worksheet has a set of structured
questions that will help you get good feedback.

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reggieugwu/what-is-indie-pop- Cognition & Emotion, 25(7),
voice#.biXnELLoX 1255–1262.
Vélez-Ibáñez, C. G., & Greenberg, J. B. Zimmer, B. (2010, June 25). On language:
(1992). Formation and Ghoti. New York Times. www
transformation of funds of .nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/
knowledge among U.S. Mexican 27FOB-onlanguage-t.html
households. Anthropology and Zimmer, E. (2016). Children’s awareness
Education Quarterly, 23(4), of syntactic ambiguity [Unpublished
313–335. doctoral dissertation]. University of
Wagner, L., Moore, L. C., & Campbell- Arizona.
Kibler, K. (2021). Training students Zwaan, R. A. (2008). Time in language,
to conduct outreach in an informal situation models, and mental
science learning environment. In D. simulations. Language Learning, 58,
Farland-Smith (Ed.), Enhancing 13 26.

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 Index

AAAS See American Association for the Berko, Jean 146

Advancement of Science Berra, Yogi 195
activism 7, 15, 209 bilingualism See multilingualism
taking the long view 7, 44, 97, 109–110 Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory at MIT
activity See demos 146
advertising 67, 82, 89, 221, 224 Buckley, Nicola 59
advocacy 209, 211, 214, See activism
Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science Carroll, Lewis 104, 107, 109, 114
190 Centre of Science and Policy 59
Ali, Muhammad 19 Chomsky, Noam 146
Allen, Sue xii, 117, 126 Cimpian, Andrei 245
Allopenna, Paul 132 clarity 33, 36, 129, 136, 173, 235, See Gricean
Allum, Nick 49 Maxims: Maxim of Manner
Alpert, Carol Lynn 240 Clark, Herbert 64
American Association for the Advancement of classroom 3–4, 14, 38–39, 67–68, 163, 232, 247,
Science 10, 23, 167, 214, 244 252
anthropology 50, 61 Clemens, Lauren 76
aphasia 25, 41, 56, 153 Clerc, Laurent 27
Aristotle 92 clothing
ASR See automatic speech recognition dress code 225
audience lab coat 98–99, 127
academic 78, 210–211, 214 T-shirt 97, 157, 193
attracting one 80, 194, 204, 206, 211, 216, 218 unusual 162, 168
defining 64 common ground 130, 136, 143, 148, 155, 163,
design 54, 62, 64, 122, 204, 206, 208, 245 181, 207, 243, 247
different ages 11, 53, 58–59, 62, 181, 206, community 7, 15, 40, 130, 215–216, 218, 236
208, 212, 226, 236 consonants 87, 152, 187, 190
Experience Seekers 59–60, 180 demo
Explorers 57–59, 180, 220 aspiration in consonants 71, 151
Facilitators 58, 180 “Diva and the Emcee, The” 187
Hobbyists 57–58, 180, 226 IPA 135
Spiritual Pilgrims 59, 180 spectrograms 85
audiology 23, 55, 152–153, 193 controversial topics 110, See Gricean Maxims:
Australian Computational and Linguistics Maxim of Quality
Olympiad 178 conspiracy theories 31
automatic speech recognition 56, 83, 89 de-escalation 127
avoid prolixity See Grice, Paul fake news 31
hot-button issues 40
beliefs and attitudes 41, 51, 96, 139, See linguistic prejudice 7, 96, 100, 209
controversial topics, See linguistic science misinformation 246
prescriptivism taking the long view 44, 97, 109–110

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 Index 263

conversation 29, 36–37, 61, 68–69, 72, 81, sign languages 21

94–97, 99, 102, 105, 109–110, 113–114, Singing Fingers 9
117, 119–122, 129, 131, 133, 138, 150, in Spanish 62
152, 154, 163–164, 192, 197, 203, spectrograms 85, 109, 151, 184, 189, 227,
205–207, 209, 211, 216, 221, 231, 241
236–237, 240, 243, 245, 249 speech production 151
audience design 60, 62, 70, 75, 203 Stroop effect 108, 115, 156, 194
cooperative 8, 30–31, 33–35, 53, 85, 116, 235, syntactic ambiguity 154, 166, 168, 176, 230
242 teaching Navajo 223
establishing common ground in 32, 43, 67, ultrasound 68, 151
144, 148, 155 vowel mouth shapes 11, 237
goals 7, 38, 44, 54, 154, 195, 210, 235 word learning 149–150, 159
having a good one 1, 18, 29, 31, 33–34, 53, 55, wug test 143, 146
67 Denham, Kristin 15
other people’s contributions to 12, 14, 19–20, dialect 9, 41, 96
41, 50, 54–55, 85–86, 122, 143, 150, 196, activism 7
242 in advertising 82
with venue sponsors 235 Arabic 2
violation of Maxims 31–32, 34 and ASR 83
Coon, Jessica 76 demo
cooperation 14, 30–31, 33–34, 67–68, 116, See English dialects 127
Gricean Maxims Spanish dialects 123, 127
credibility 91–92, 94–95, 97 English 2, 83, 87, 123, 127
crowds 4, 46, 56, 67, 151, 193, 205, 226 funds of knowledge 96, 158, 163, 168, 176,
Crystal, David 13 183, 190, 192, 196–197, 206, 215, 220,
culture 7, 15, 51, 65, 97, 113, 129, 230 231, 236, 239, 243, 250
curse of knowledge 139, 142–143, 146, 164, 177, Heathrow employees 35
181, 210 hobby 58
Curzan, Anne 100 linguistic prejudice 97
maps 153
Dawson, Emily 60, 204 in singing 87
deafness 27, 55, 89, 219 Spanish 124, 127
deficit model 40, 42–43, 49, 96 spelling 212, 214, 227
demos Dierking, Lynn 4–5, 11, 15, 215
argument dropping 71 dinosaurs
aspiration in consonants 71, 151 connecting to existing exhibits 58–59, 239
astronaut hand signals 239 demo
“Cords” 152, 160 dinosaur communication 198, 202
dialects, English 96, 127 dinosaur names 58, 60
dialects, Spanish 123, 127 fun 60, 65
dinosaur communication 198, 202, 239 Duncan, Dennis See Thank you!
dinosaur names 58–59, 239 Dweck, Carol 24, 27
“Diva and the Emcee, The” 152, 187, 230 dyslexia 41, 55, 81
ghoti 111, 212–214
give away 156, 193, 228, 236–237 Eliot, George 130
historical linguistics 118 emotions 69, 78, See memory
IPA 19, 39, 43, 93, 109, 134, 193, 212, 227 Erard, Michael 64
language lateralization 45, 47, 52 experts or expertise 1, 3, 7, 12, 17, 20, 22, 32, 34,
lexical stress 62, 65 36, 39–40, 42, 50, 59, 64, 92, 94–95,
Mayan glyphs 111, 115, 202 97–99, 102, 106–107, 132, 143, 148, 169,
McGurk effect 169–170, 177, 193, 229 198, 211, 214–215, 232, 244, 247, 252,
in Navajo 223 See funds of knowledge

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 264 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Falk, John 4–5, 11, 15, 57, 215 Gricean Maxims 31, 33–34, 36–37, 102, 129,
festivals 235, 249
AAAS Family Science Days festival 10, 167 Maxim of Manner 33, 35–36, 129, 235, 253
OSU Westfest 217 Maxim of Quality 31, 35–37, 91, 101, 105,
resource list 235, 253
cultural festivals 46, 57 Maxim of Quantity 32, 35–37, 101, 105, 235,
science festivals 10, 56 253
Tucson Festival of Books 46, 230 Maxim of Relevance 33, 35, 235
USA Science and Engineering Festival 85, Grimm, Jacob See historical linguistics
221 growth mindset 24, 27
visitors 56 Gumperz, John 35
food and drink 89, 241, See Jurafsky, Dan Gutwill, Joshua 117, 126
beer 220
gravy 35 Haskins Laboratories 191
lentil soup 101 Heath, Chip and Dan 214
limoncello 239 historical linguistics 14, 79, 90, 118, 120, 126
pecans 160 demo
tacos 63 historical linguistics 118
formal learning See classroom Honda, Maya 15
fun 4, 9, 12, 18–20, 22, 24, 26, 38, 41–42, 44, 46,
58, 63, 68, 70, 78, 82, 84, 123, 132, 137, I don’t know! 22, 93, 122
143, 145, 148, 150, 154, 156, 158, 194, incomplete ≠ incorrect 104, 110, 185, 202, 209, 243,
197, 232–234 See Gricean Maxims: Maxim of Quality
games 11, 56, 108, 126, 154 informal learning venues 232
puzzles 56, 111, 154 conventions 28, 222, 230
funding agencies festivals 4, 7, 38, 56, 59, 66, 68, 209, 215, 220,
Australian Research Council 88 222, 224–225, 229–231, 233–235
broader impacts 88 libraries 4, 56–57, 205, 216, 219–220, 224,
National Science Foundation (USA) 11, 15, 88, 226, 231
221 museums 4, 37, 39, 51, 57, 60, 65, 160, 180, 197,
UK Research and Innovation 88 202, 204, 216, 219–220, 224, 226, 240
funds of knowledge 14, 20, 33, 41–42, 44–45, Science Cafés 220
48–50, 61, 63, 96, 120, 122, 125, 130, International Linguistics Olympiad 178
143, See experts or expertise, See International Phonetic Alphabet See demos: IPA
conversation: other people’s
contributions to Jabberwocky 104, 106, 109, 114, See Carroll,
Lewis
Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins 27 jargon 8, 76, 163–175, 179, 182, 184–185
garden-path sentences 132, 134, 137, 166, 168, De-Jargonizer 175
176 Hemingway Editor 175
demo Up-Goer Five Text Editor 175
syntactic ambiguity 133, 154, 176 Jensen, Eric 59
gender 19, 84, 127 juicy questions See questions: juicy
Given before New 130–131, 164, 171 Jurafsky, Dan 88, 160
Given information 130–131, 144, 164, 171, 173,
178, 183, See common ground ladder See scaffolding
Gleitman, Lila 251 Landau, Barbara 251
Goldilocks 32, 102 language development
Google demo
Ngram Viewer 14 vowel mouth shapes 11, 237
search 56, 82, 146 word learning 149–150, 159
YouTube 83, 89 wug test 104, 143, 146
Grice, Paul 8, 30–31, 36, 91, 102, 129, 173 language disorders 55

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 Index 265

people who study it 9, 11, 106 Leslie, Sarah Jane 245

questions people have about 2, 110 linguistic prejudice See controversial topics
syntactic bootstrapping 104, 106–107, 110, linguistic prescriptivism 40–41, 99
114–115 Linguistic Society of America 76, 214
language landscape 56, 64 literacy 11, 15, 51, 223
Language Log 64, 79, 90, 176
languages maps 123
African American English 97 demo
Albanian 25 English dialects 123
Algonquin 160 Spanish dialects 123
American Sign Language (ASL) 21–22, 24, 27, Maxim See Gricean Maxims
43, 65, 243 McCulloch, Gretchen 13, 64, 89
animal communication systems 5, 198, 200, McGurk effect 169–170
202 memory 23, 69, 78, 169
Arabic 2, 157 mental models 133, 137
British Sign Language (BSL) 21, 27 MIT Media Lab 9
constructed 65 mondegreens 84, 90
Danish 51 Moore, Leslie 61, 64, 241
English 1–2, 27, 35, 37, 42, 51, 55, 61–63, 65, morphology 58–59, 81, 104, 213, 222, 239
71–72, 74, 76–77, 82, 99, 104, 121, 123, demo
129, 135, 143, 157, 165, 170, 172, 175, dinosaur names 58–59
179, 188, 203, 212–214, 223, 237 lexical stress 62, 65
Finnish 51 wug test 104
French 27, 175 movies
French Sign Language 27 Animal Crackers 176
Greek 60, 165, 222 Arrival 56
Illinois 160 Gold Diggers of 1933 153
Italian 30–31, 77, 239 His Girl Friday 125
Japanese 27, 76 King’s Speech, The 56
Klingon 65 Singin’ in the Rain 153
Korean 157 Spider-Man 99
Lalana Chinantec 178, 252 Star Wars 77, 79
Latin 37, 60, 165, 175 multilingualism 2, 12, 40, 42, 48–50, 56, 82, 96,
Lingua franca 175 116, 226, 228, 241
Mayan 76, 111–112, 115, 133, 202 demo
Navajo 56 lexical stress 62, 65
Pascua Yaqui 56 sign languages 21
Pig Latin 56, 152–153 Stroop effect 109, 157
Russian 157 vowel mouth shapes 237
Somali 56 Munroe, Randall 172, See XKCD
Spanish 12, 42, 51, 56, 61–63, 65, 121, 123, museums See informal learning venues
127, 237 Center of Science and Industry 9, 159, 219, 239
Tohono O’odham 56 Centre of Norwegian Language and Literature
Vietnamese 61 241
Xhosa 153 Children’s Museum Tucson 11, 236, 238
learning See language development, See funds COSI See Center of Science and Industry
of knowledge, See strands of science Mission Garden 11, 239
learning Mundolingua 65
children and reading 42, 51 Planet Word 65, 241
children and spelling 42 Music
implicit knowledge of rules 143, 201 Alanis Morissette 86
in school 4, 15, 20, 40, 51, 55, 66, 168 beatboxing 151, 187
vocabulary 149, 164–166 “Cords” 153

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 266 How to Talk Language Science with Everybody

Music (cont.) demo

Dire Straits 65 IPA 39, 43, 109, 134, 193, 212, 227
“Diva and the Emcee, The” 152, 187, 230 McGurk effect 169–170, 177, 193, 229
Jimi Hendrix 85 Singing Fingers 9
Kander and Ebb 6 spectrograms 85
MaYaN 134, 137 speech production 151
“Moses Supposes” 153 vowel mouth shapes 11, 237
opera 151, 187 song lyrics 86, 90
rap 84, 90 vowel space chart 182
Selena Gomez 86 Praat 85, 151, 189, 227
Taylor Swift 85, 90 practical considerations See clothing
Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Missa O Magnum cleaning supplies 194
Mysterium 152 costs 204, 221, 224, 226
“We’re in the Money” 153 electronics 194
extras 194
names and naming 9, 41, 60, 65, 82 give away 193, 225
demo location 194, 218, 221, 224–225
dinosaur names 58, 60 materials 194
IPA 41, 134 Resource List
National Research Council (USA) 67, 169 what to bring 227
National Science Teaching Association (USA) rules and regulations 224, 233–234, 236–237
115 scheduling 224, 228
Nevins, Andrew 90 prolixity See talking and talking and talking
New information 130, 132, 134–135, 144, 163, psycholinguistics 83, 137
171, 180, 207 demo
New York Times 26, 36, 89 language lateralization 45, 47, 52
nonlinguistic communication Stroop effect 108, 156
demo syntactic ambiguity 154, 168, 176, 230
astronaut hand signals 239 psychology
dinosaur communication 58 field of 23, 30
North American Computational Linguistics Open hindsight bias 142, 146
154 memory and emotion 78
nouns 82, 103, 143, 145 theory of mind 139–140, 144, 146
demo public engagement 1, 13
dinosaur names 58, 60 Pullum, Geoff 99, 176
word learning 149–150, 159
wug test 104 questions
Nye, Bill 18, 26 counting to ten after asking one 120, 127
juicy 50, 117, 119, 122, 124–126, 136, 151,
Ohio State University, The 9, 13, 98, 100, 115, 154, 195–197, 202, 205–206, 232, 245,
127, 149, 151, 217, 219 253
Okrent, Arika 64–65 Strand 3 43, 47, 206–207
orthography 42, 51, 212, See writing systems that don’t work 117–118
demo that others may ask you 58, 81, 95, 121,
ghoti 111, 212 195–196, 235
IPA 41, 134 that you don’t know the answer to 22, 49, 93,
Mayan glyphs 111 122
Oxford English Dictionary 37, 90, 165 Quine, W. V. O. 149

Pew Research Center 246 reading 51, 55, 108, 130, 133, 156–157, 213, 220
phonetics/phonology 51, 68, 74, 85, See demo
speech Stroop effect 108
allophones 71, 73, 86 Reaser, Jeff 127

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 Index 267

relevance 20, 33, 50, 81, 93, 125, 200, 209, See passive construction 100, 166, 175–176
Gricean Maxims: Maxim of Relevance relational terms 176
Resource Lists theories of 74, 146, 168
cultural festivals 223 word order 54, 76–77, 79, 202
online videos 152
relevant college and university offices 218 talking too much 32–33, 102, 105, 173, 235, See
science festivals 222 Gricean Maxims: Maxim of Quantity
tips for contacting institutions 220 Taniguchi, Ai 214
what to bring 227 Tannen, Deborah 127
Tatman, Rachael 13, 83–84, 89
Santorini, Beatrice 137 truth 31–33, 91, 101–102, 105, 168, 185, 235,
Sarver-Verhey, Abigail 115, 202 243, See Gricean Maxims: Maxim of
scaffolding 107, 180–181, 185, 207, 247, See Quality
audience design
Sedivy, Julie 64, 89 University of Arizona, The 11, 15, 46, 167, 221,
Shaw, George Bernard 212, 214 230, 238, 241
Sobel, David 160
speech verbs 72, 82–83, 176
communities 7, 56 demo
compared to singing 87 word learning 149–150
demo vocal tract 58, 65, 68, 150, 152, 183–184, 188
aspiration in consonants 71 demo
lexical stress 62 “Cords“ 152
McGurk effect 169–170 “Diva and the Emcee, The” 152
spectrograms 62–63, 85–86 vowels 11, 42, 75, 87, 152, 165, 183, 186, 190,
ultrasound 68, 78, 151 194, 237, See phonetics/phonology:
vowel mouth shapes 12 vowel space chart
perception 23, 56, 83, 85–86, 90, 169, 183, demo
187 “Diva and the Emcee, The” 187
production 54–55, 68, 82–83, 150, 183–184, spectrograms 85
187–188, 236 vowel mouth shapes 11, 237
rate 75
spelling 41–42, 55, 121, 135, 213, See writing Warneken, Felix 30, 37
systems, See orthography Webster, Noah 214
demo Wheeler, Rebecca 15
ghoti 111 Wolfram, Walt 15
IPA 41, 109, 134 word learning See syntactic bootstrapping
Sterling, Donald 86, 90 writing systems 51, 93, 157, See spelling, See
Storksdieck, Martin 57 orthography
strands of science learning 43, 45–46, 49, 51, demo
107, 171, 206–207 IPA 41, 134, 212
Strand 1 43, 45–46, 68, 181, 193, 206, 234 Mayan glyphs 111, 133
Strand 2 43, 47, 206
Strand 3 43, 47, 206 XKCD 158, 172
Strand 4 43, 47, 107, 206 Types of Scientific Paper 159
Strand 5 43, 48, 68, 107, 169, 206 Up Goer Five 172, 174
Strand 6 43–44, 48, 206
syntax Yoda 77, 79
acceptability judgments 71 YouTube See Google
argument dropping 71, 77
binding and reference 64, 81, 144, 146 Zepeda, Ofelia 15
demo Zimmer, Ben 64, 214
syntactic ambiguity 154, 168, 176 Zimmer, Elly 176

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