Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now.

David Staley  0:32  
I am pleased to be joined today over Zoom by John Grinstead, Professor and Interim Chair in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and by courtesy, the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on developmental linguistics, developmental semantics and pragmatics, and children's comprehension of collective and distributive expressions. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Grinstead.

John Grinstead  1:03  
Thank you for having me, David. 

David Staley  1:04  
Well, perhaps we might begin with your most recent project, which looks at Spanish speaking children's ability to interpret the quantifier "algunos", which I believe may mean "some", correct?

John Grinstead  1:16  
Yes, it does. I kind of got into this just trying to understand something about children's comprehension of these funny words that relate to quantity. So, everybody's familiar with the cardinal numbers, 1234, but then there's a whole range of other pieces of language, or pieces of our vocabulary that are like this, so that they're not cardinal numbers, but they're things like some all, each many, most few. And so, there are theoreticians who said, actually, these maybe fall into a kind of structure inside your lexicon, and as your lexicon, as your vocabulary, essentially, gets larger and larger, they may become to be more meaningful. And so, Spanish is interesting because it has two words that seem to be very close in meaning to some in English, and one of them seems to be associated with this some, but not all meaning, and then the other one doesn't. So, the closest analogs in English are "some" and "some", and I'll give an example. So if I say some kids went down the slide, you get a different interpretation than if I say some kids went down the slide. So, in the second example, it could be a hundred, it could be 50, you don't know, it could be all of the kids under consideration. But in the first one, where you say some kids went down the slide, you get the very definite idea that it's a subset of the total number. 

David Staley  2:42  
Not all the kids, some of them.

John Grinstead  2:45  
Exactly. So that little computation in there that you just did, where it's like not all, we think that's not actually just language itself. We think that's a sort of part of higher order reasoning, as they call it. That's the domain of pragmatics, usually, is how that's talked about, where you sort of make this very quick computation in a conversation, you say, hmm, I have the word all in my lexicon. So, even though some could be all, I bet that's not what that person meant, I bet they meant some, but not all. So that's not the most intuitive explanation, either, I realized. So, take another example: I have some cookies on a plate, and I leave them on my dining room table, and I go back into the kitchen to get a glass of milk, I come back into the dining room where that plate of cookies was a second ago that had, let's say, five cookies on it, and they're all gone. There's nothing but crumbs, and my daughter is sitting there next to the plate of cookies with cookie crumbs all over her face. And I say, Alicia, what happened to those cookies? And she says, well, I ate some of them. Now, is she lying? Logic would say no, because if you ate all of them, it's also true that you ate some of them, in the same way that if you ate five of them, it's also true that you ate three of them. People have to live with this implication sometimes a little bit, kind of mull it over to let it sink in. But children, apparently, by the time they're eating four or five in Spanish, seem to get this, and it's kind of impressive in a way, because that's quite a computation to make very implicitly right. Grown ups definitely are not aware that they're doing this, but also have super categorical judgments about it. So what we're trying to kind of study is how language on the one hand, sort of your vocabulary, and then these funny kind of higher order reasoning computations interact with each other as kids language and non linguistic cognition sort of emerges. So, that's why it's interesting, is it's a couple of different areas of cognition coming together.

David Staley  4:48  
So, well... why? Why are children so good at this, why are they able to do this?

John Grinstead  4:54  
Well, there's a couple of candidate explanations in the literature. The one that flows from the work of Noam Chomsky, starting in about 1959 is because they're wired to do so, like you're basically programmed genetically to learn really quickly what language consists of. That's the nature version, and then the nurture version is you have super duper learning mechanisms that somehow, you know, put you in a position to just learn this kind of thing really fast. So, I'm a product of Chomsky and, you know, background, but the way that the debate, I would say, is sort of shaped up over the years is there's at least some of us who feel pretty strongly that there's a very big biological component to all of this, but that it's also important to spend some time thinking about how this biological basis interacts with learning to produce what it is kids know. So if you just sort of say, well, it's biological, then there's no research left to be done. Like you sort of have to ask yourself questions about how is that biology interacting with the sort of environment to produce what shows up. And so what we've tried to do in our most recent paper is model a number of different domains of linguistic and non linguistic cognition and show how they interact to produce these sorts of interpretations in children. And so, you know, the structure of vocabulary itself, that seems to be a really big deal in kids learning this their non linguistic number ability, kind of the same quantity sort of ability that guppies and pigeons and deer have. You know, it's not species specific. We think that kind of feeds your judgments inside your vocabulary of what number words mean. So to sort of know what the word more versus the word less means you got to have that at least Guppy sense of, you know, what's more and what's less. So in our model, we include that, and it's predictive, especially in Spanish of kids vocabulary development.

David Staley  6:54  
So what's your method? What's your research method? How do you find this out? Do you observe like children in a classroom setting, that sort of thing?

John Grinstead  7:01  
Well, in this project, we had a lot of experimental measures. So some of them are sort of the same kind of standardized measures that, you know, speech language pathologists and child psychologists and teachers will use to measure how many, you know, vocabulary words you have. And so you sort of show kids, you know, a picture that has four animals on it, you say, Point to the cow, and that's how you tell that they know cow. And you have enough of those kinds of items, and then you can sort of tally up a score. Another way of doing it is just having a kid talk for 20 minutes, and then there are computer programs that will go through and tell you how many unique words the kid used in that period of time, those numbers on the really, you know, the spontaneous speech kind of measure, turn out to correlate mathematically with the other kind of, more standardized measures. So we have a fair amount of confidence about what we're trying to say about vocabulary development, because we ended up with six or seven different measures in this protocol that we ran in Mexico City over the course of about four years. And then there's other, you know, if you're going to measure comprehension, which is over going after of, you know, algunos, some quantifiers, you have to show a pragmatic context and then present a sentence in that context and see if the kid says yes, that matches what I just saw, or no, it doesn't. And that leads us to CCAD here in Columbus, the Columbus College of Art and Design, where my 10 year old, a really long time ago, took a stop motion animation class.

David Staley  8:37  
Interesting.

John Grinstead  8:38  
Yeah. So how do you represent pragmatic context in these experiments? Well...

David Staley  8:43  
When you say pragmatic, what do you mean by that in this context? 

John Grinstead  8:46  
Well, if I'm going to ask you, you know, did all the kids go down the slide, you better be able to look at something and sort of size up. You know, what does all consist of here? Is it 125, you know, like, what? So I got to be able to show you something that provides enough context, I guess, that you can look at it and say, Okay, I feel confident I can make a judgment about that sentence I just heard either being adequate description of what I'm looking at, you know, like what I just saw, or not so anyway to do that, and this is one of the places that experiments sometimes fall down they don't provide enough context, like they'll just show A static image. And kids are kind of like, Yeah, could be this could be that, I don't know, right? But if you show them a little movie for this kind of experiment, it seems to work pretty well. So my kid, who's an artist, kind of got into manipulating clay, you know, the Wallace and Gromit type of, right? Yeah, right. My kids were fascinated with that, so he he made a bunch of videos. So I showed this to a graduate student about, I don't know, 10 years ago, and he was like, Oh my God, that's totally what we need to do to present these contexts. So he made some initial attempts with clay, which were not pretty well. So we switched from that to the. Minions from Despicable Me. And so we started having the minions move all over the place and do all of these different things. And it actually worked quite well. So that's kind of been our labs. You know, signature methodology is stop motion of, you know, some little plastic figurines or other doing something. And then you the kid watching the video has to decide, was it time? Was it all? Was it algunos? Was it todos? So anyway, experimentally, that's one of the things that we've gotten a real kick out of.

David Staley  10:27  
Well, I'm interested in another study that you're working on, on the relationship between the quantity of sleep and how it affects student Spanish learning. And this just sounds fascinating, but I've never, never thought of this connection before.

John Grinstead  10:41  
Well, okay, so now we're definitely switching gears. So we were talking mostly about child language acquisition, and before kids learn their first language, or languages, which is actually the most common situation worldwide, you know, they're really primed to learn their first language systems. And you know, they do it really rapidly. And, you know, and so that's one thing. Another thing is what happens to us when we're adults. For example, you know, an undergraduate taking Spanish three in our department, or something like that, you come to that learning task already having at least one first language, maybe a couple. And now things aren't implicit. Now things are kind of explicit. And you know, how motivated are you, you know, to learn that language? All of these factors that sort of don't arise for children, are suddenly hugely important. And the undergraduate adults who we're working with are learning to kind of, you know, navigate the world and become grown ups. And so there's a whole bunch of factors that are under their control that may or may not help them learn so one of them is anxiety, and so anxiety is much worse now in the general population than it was 20 years ago. It's much worse in our youth population now than it was 20 years ago. Interestingly, foreign language anxiety, which is how anxious you are when you go in a foreign language class is the same as it was 30 years ago. That hasn't changed at all, which is kind of cool in a way, right? It's like people are no more freaked out in our Spanish classes now than they were in 1983 so you know, that's kind of nice. That is a factor that negatively predicts your learning we showed so you're learning of morphosyntax, you're learning of vocabulary. The more anxious you get in a classroom, the worse your learning is going to be. So thinking about like, how do we reduce people's anxiety, is one of the things we're concerned with. Okay, so that's one factor. Another factor maybe, is sleep. Now, this is a totally incipient project, the idea of an undergraduate Spanish and psychology major named Laura de Oliveira. And this is her undergraduate honors thesis. And so there's something called the Pittsburgh sleep quality index. And so she dug this up and found it cited in lots of studies looking at things like, what was your overall course grade in this ESL class? The measures of language were very gross. They weren't, you know, down at the level that a linguist would be interested in, sort of like, well, how's your Morpho syntax, how's your phonology, how's your vocabulary, the things that we, you know, kind of worry about. So she said, I could do that. I could just use one of those more specific measures of language, and then ask about people's sleep and see if there's a predictive relationship or not. So we don't actually know if there is one yet, but what this thing's supposed to measure is the quantity of sleep that students are getting, and then the quality. And so the little survey has a number of questions about this that Laura found, and it seemed really promising. So again, we're kind of backing out a little bit from looking at aspects of language that predict other aspects of language, the kind of thing that I would worry about with children. And we're sort of asking ourselves bigger questions about, okay, you're an 18 year old at Ohio State. How much sleep you get? All right? You're an 18 year old at Ohio State. How anxious Are you? You know, in general, how anxious Are you in language classrooms? We have another study that our PhD students working on, looking at attitude and motivation. So what's your feeling about Spanish speakers on a scale of one to seven? How favorably, or, you know, disposed Are you towards them? I'm happy to report that our undergraduate students in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, on the scale of one to seven or 6.58 favorably, you know, oriented towards Spanish speakers, and that turns out to be not negatively predictive, but positively predictive of their language learning outcomes. I wanted to sort of emphasize the fact that after four years of you know what we went through with the last administration, having students who have that kind of attitude towards Spanish speakers is something I'm quite proud of and quite happy to have as many undergraduates associated with as possible. I mean, I'm not pretending that we're causing that attitude. We may just be attracting kids who already have that kind of an attitude, but either. Way I'll take it, and the more of our undergrads that can be around it, the better. So yeah, so there's a number of factors here. They're not sort of internal to cognition itself. Maybe they're more kind of these experience factors that nonetheless, end up having an impact on what you're able to learn. And we'll find out about sleep, right? We don't know yet, so more on that later.

David Staley  15:22  
Well I am, I'm very curious to learn how that turns out. You had talked about reducing anxiety in a Spanish classroom. How do you do that? How do you reduce anxiety?

John Grinstead  15:31  
Well, we haven't tested this yet, but in the field of positive psychology, there's a technique called validation, and we have a very brilliant professor in the Psychology Department here named Jennifer chevins, and she has a lab that focuses on this, and she has experimental findings that show, for example, complex executive function tasks. Okay, what's executive function? This is the idea, basically, that you can pay more attention to what's going on, inhibit things you're not supposed to be paying attention to and your auditory your listening, working memory is better, right? So tasks that involve those kinds of things, when you have been validated, you tend to do better on so what does validation means? Well, validation doesn't mean you tell people, oh, you're great. Everything you say is brilliant. Everybody else is wrong and you're right, critically, you have to be validating something that has a kernel of obvious truth to the person you're speaking to. So for example, in a Spanish class, we're going to learn direct object pronouns. I recognize that direct object pronouns are really hard in Spanish. They're very different from English, which is the native language of most of you out there listening to me in my Spanish class today. So I recognize that this is hard, but we're going to try it anyway, and we'll see how you do. Probably you'll do fine, but let's just start with the acknowledgement of this undeniable truth. This is going to be hard. So that may sound sort of, I don't know, trivial, it turns out to be really impactful. You do something like that, and it opens people up to possibilities that otherwise they seem to shut down. So we have not proven this. We've not integrated this into an instructional methodology yet, but we want to, so that is definitely on our agenda in terms of stuff we want to do our do in our lab, and sort of do a comparison of, you know, classrooms where you do and classrooms where you don't. And it's not magic, but it does seem to be this thing you can do to reduce anxiety. So Professor chevons obviously isn't developing this for language teaching. She's working on it for things like people who have borderline personality disorder and this kind of thing, right? Or emotional dysregulation. It's called sometimes, where you can kind of reduce the anxiety that those conditions produce and allow people to sort of be more functional, and problem solving and this kind of thing. So we think it might have an application in language teaching, and we would like to explore it.

Eva Dale  18:05  
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David Staley  18:31  
Well, I know you have a long term project that is studying child language disorders in Spanish, and I'm interested to hear about this research.

John Grinstead  18:41  
Okay, well, so the disorder I'm interested in is particularly interesting to linguists because it seems to only affect language. So this has been called specific language impairment. It's also currently referred to in the big book of diagnoses called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The current version of it, it's called developmental language disorder. So the thing about it is that it's genetically rooted, so you can inherit it, right? And it's sort of more prominent, you know, in families or pro bands, they call them that people do the genetic kind of work on this. So the reason to be concerned about it, I mean, I'm interested in it because it just affects language, because I'm a linguist, but the reason to be concerned about it socially is that it expresses itself like if you diagnose a kid during the preschool era with this, they get to school and they're very likely to have a diagnosis of dyslexia. Now, dyslexia in Spanish isn't exactly like dyslexia in English, because the writing system in Spanish is much closer to the sounds that you produce, you end up just reading more slowly. You don't actually switch letters around in English and in French, on the other hand, you're going to have the sort of classic dyslexic kind of outcome where you do actually switch sounds around from where they appear in the word as letters. So for kids. Who are Spanish speaking. There's a social concern or motivation for studying it, which is, United States has a not very pretty history of diagnosing all language minority children. So not just Spanish speakers, but children who speak African American Vernacular English, Native American languages, kind of all non dominant languages, they tend to get over diagnosed and are overrepresented in special education classes, right? So problem with that is, you know, because one's reaction might be, oh, special education, that's great. It's not great if you don't belong there, and you could be in an educational track, that's going to orient you more towards high, you know, performance, you know, lucrative professions, college readiness, this kind of thing. And so the sad history in the United States is of tracking kids who are language minority. So we could worry then about Spanish speaking children who have this disorder. In the sense of, let's figure out exactly what this disorder looks like in Spanish. So if you show up and somebody says, I don't know about this kid, they're not really understanding English very well. You can look at their Spanish and say, they're fine. Give them a minute to go through normal second language acquisition processes of English. They're going to catch up. They're going to be fine, as opposed to, yeah, actually, that kid seems to have kind of an incipient language disorder. Let's definitely get them into some services where speech language pathologists can help them learn to cope with this sort of thing they've inherited genetically so that they can, you know, figure out ways to kind of work around it and nonetheless be productive.

David Staley  21:40  
I'm curious to know how you ended up as a linguist, as opposed to, I don't know, as opposed to an historian, or as opposed to a musician or something like that. Why linguistics?

John Grinstead  21:49  
It's interesting that your last option was musician. So I got into UCLA as a music major, as a voice major, no kidding, yeah, and I was getting some C's in my music theory classes because I was not, you know, like a lot of singers, I didn't have very good musicianship, and so I wasn't doing well in those classes. I had no background in piano skills, and I was spending three hours at night in the, you know, piano practice room and that kind of thing. On the other hand, I was getting A's in my Italian class, they were making me take and the next semester or quarter, I guess at UCLA, I got an A in my French class. And at that point, I kind of decided, you know, I think the reason I like these classes, they remind me of Spanish, so I switched into Spanish, kept getting good grades. And, you know, this is my message to my undergrads. Your transcript will speak to you. And if you are getting A's in something, you need to pay attention to that, because getting a high grade point average in the undergraduate level, that's the gateway to whatever it is you want to do next, and beating your head against a major where you get a 2.0 because somebody told you it's practical. It's like the worst idea possible. So, so anyway, big advocate of quitting things. I'm a quitter. Yeah. So I quit the music major and switched first to Spanish literature, because that seemed interesting. And then I took a linguistics class, and it was just kind of all over. I was like, oh my god, this is so fascinating. And this was really at the moment when, for example, Chomsky in linguistics was really ascending, and there was just a lot of work on theoretical syntax and this kind of thing. And the milieu I was in at UCLA, was all of these MIT graduates who'd studied with Chomsky. And so I was taking, you know, one class after another, taught by these people. And it was very exciting time. I studied abroad in Barcelona, and the University where I studied there was also full of MIT grads who were teaching the same kind of thing, but in Spanish and in Catalan. And so I was kind of like, oh boy, you know. So I came back fascinated with syntax and with phonology and this kind of thing of Spanish and of Catalan, and at the usual question you get from your parents, what are you going to do with that? So I went to work as an interpreter in the court in Southern California, in the criminal courts, and I did that off and on for 10 years. But anyway, got into graduate school and started messing around with teaching English as a second language, and then finally ended up in a program looking at language development in children, and did a little work on child Catalan, mostly on child Spanish. And then later, I've gotten involved in some of this work with language disorders and some child English in there as well. And that's kind of the story.

David Staley  24:26  
Before we started recording this, you had said something that...well, I thought was very interesting. You said Ohio State is a place where they don't put obstacles in your way, if what you want to do is research. Tell us what you meant by that. 

John Grinstead  24:41  
Well, anybody who's ever had the experience of trying to do research and finding, you know, just one kind of stumbling block after another in your way. Ohio State is not the first place I worked as a professor, and so, you know, there's a huge Institute. Additional review board here. They're very efficient. You know, they get your submissions and, you know, all professors want to do is complain about, oh, they're standing in my way, and I can't move forward. You haven't tried it somewhere else, if that's what you're saying, Ohio State is very, very efficient about that. There's all these little internal grants for doing research so you can get things started. Here's actually my sort of parade. Example of it, the institution where I used to work before, to get online, to get your ID, to get, you know, connected to Wi Fi, to do all that kind of stuff. It took weeks right here. Took forever. I got to Ohio State in 2004 I walked into a computer lab and Baker systems. I don't know if you've ever been there, but I have on the top floor, there's a computer lab now at the place where I worked before, you know, the tables are all the same height, and they were this lovely color that matched the wallpaper and the and the chairs were all very uniform looking, and the upholstery was very appealing and everything, but it was open, like four hours a week or something, and it was not there for you to use, really. So I think I walked into that Baker systems computer lab on, like a Sunday, and there's two undergrads sitting there who are obviously like, this was their job running this computer lab. None of the tables were the same. I The paint was peeling. There was a vacuum cleaner sitting in the middle of the room for no apparent reason. But there were people in there working on a Sunday. And I asked the kid, you know, like, Hi, I'm new here. I can't imagine you can help me out with this much. But, you know, I've got my Buck ID. I need to get connected to, you know, Wi Fi, that kid had me up and running in like, five minutes and that feeling I've never forgotten.

David Staley  26:46  
Well, tell us what's next for your research, please.

John Grinstead  26:50  
Well, there's a couple of things we have, some long term projects still in Mexico, that we're interested in, in terms of just sort of creating a more precise profile of the grammatical characteristics of children who are monolingual Spanish speakers and who have this language disorder, developmental language disorder, that we're interested in that's one direction. Another direction is sort of continuing with this work on adult second language acquisition of Spanish and what the factors are that predict, you know, kids success in the sort of more instructed second language acquisition type of environment. So, those are two big projects. Yeah, those are the big things our lab is sort of engaged in right now.

David Staley  27:33  
John Grinstead, thank you.

John Grinstead  27:35  
Thank you, David.

Eva Dale  27:36  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer. Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai