Friday, October 25, 2019

Creation Moment 10/26/2019 - Lesson of the 26,000 Books

The bottom line from the article below---when the human brain develops language--a variety of languages can be made.
But more to the point of the article--people are shaped more by their environments than by language.
In other words it is the blooming rose of creation--not just linguistically--but in a variety of cultures that form and in turn form the next generation----the ability of built in variety by the Creator for that Blooming Rose of Creation...the ability of humans to bend and shape culture which stems from a component of free will.---when the authors state--"We found that the environment people are embedded in seems to shape their behavior"---people's ancestors at each stage shaped and formed that culture/environment....And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain,,, (Genesis 4:1) and we know what culture/environment Cain formed and passed along to his succeeding generations to influence...


"What can reading 26,000 books tell researchers about how language environment affects language behavior? Brendan T.
Johns, an assistant professor of communicative disorders and sciences in the University at Buffalo's College of Arts and Sciences, has some answers... "Previously in linguistics it was assumed a lot of our ability to use language was instinctual and that our environmental experience lacked the depth necessary to fully acquire the necessary skills," says Johns. "The models that we're developing today have us questioning those earlier conclusions. Environment does appear to be shaping behavior."

The models, called distributional models, serve as analogies to the human language learning process. The 26,000 books that support the analysis of this research come from 3,000 different authors (about 2,000 from the U.S. and roughly 500 from the U.K.) who used over 1.3 billion total words.
George Bernard Shaw is often credited with saying Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language.
But the languages are not identical, and in order to establish and represent potential cultural differences, the researchers considered where each of the 26,000 books was located in both time (when the author was born) and place (where the book was published).

"The question this paper tries to answer is, 'If we train a model with similar materials that someone in the U.K. might have read versus what someone in the U.S. might have read, will they become more like these people?'" says Johns. "We found that the environment people are embedded in seems to shape their behavior."

"It's a huge benefit to have a culture-specific corpus, and an even greater benefit to have a time-specific corpus," says Johns. "The differences we find in language environment and behavior as a function of time and place is what we call the 'selective reading hypothesis.'"
MedicalExpress