Essays and Articles

Julie Sedivy has written for outlets such as Nautilus,  Discover, Scientific American, and the delightfully geeky Language Log. Here is a sampling of her pieces:

The Strange Persistence of First Languages (Nautilus)

Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the next morning lying amidst the sheets like his own stone monument.

It was hard for me not to take my father’s abrupt exit as a rebuke. For years, he’d been begging me to visit him in the Czech Republic, where I’d been born and where he’d gone back to live in 1992. Each year, I delayed. I was in that part of my life when the marriage-grad-school-children-career-divorce current was sweeping me along with breath-sucking force, and a leisurely trip to the fatherland seemed as plausible as pausing the flow of time.

Now my dad was shrugging at me from beyond— “You see, you’ve run out of time.”

His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue. Czech was the only language I knew until the age of 2, when my family began a migration westward, from what was then Czechoslovakia through Austria, then Italy, settling eventually in Montreal, Canada. Along the way, a clutter of languages introduced themselves into my life: German in preschool, Italian-speaking friends, the francophone streets of East Montreal. Linguistic experience congealed, though, once my siblings and I started school in English. As with many immigrants, this marked the time when English became, unofficially and over the grumbling of my parents (especially my father), our family language—the time when Czech began its slow retreat from my daily life. (Read More)

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Defamiliarizing the Mother Tongue: On Immigration’s Impact on Learning and Losing Language (Literary Hub)

One summer when I was eight years old, I returned from camp sick with longing for home and my parents and found my mother not quite as I remembered her. Her features were unchanged and when I buried my face in her neck, she smelled as she always had—but something unfamiliar had stolen into her voice and mannerisms. There was a slight jitter in the alignment between my memory of her and her actual presence.

I remember in those first days back home being cautiously formal around her, observing her closely, as if this version of my mother might behave in ways I could not predict. This feeling dissolved within a week, as the gap between my mind’s image of my mother and the reality of my mother gradually filled in. But I would remember it years later, as shocking evidence of how quickly memory estranges you from even the ones you know most intimately, when I heard a widow talk about the memory of her husband beginning to fray.

A similar feeling, around the fraying of my mother tongue, has followed me throughout my adult life. Czech is the language I was born into, the language of my first words and sentences. It is also a language from which I have been separated for much of my life. The slippage between this language and my memory of it, complicated by the profound attachment I have to it, continues to define my relationship with Czech. It has also come to shape my practices as a writer. (Read More)

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When Kids Talk to Machines (Nautilus)

To learn language—to enter that doorway into collective human intelligence—children need conversation. Lots of it.

Until recently, people have been the sole source of their linguistic interaction. Now kids talk to machines. When Siri or Alexa were introduced into households, children began talking to them about science, the weather, and their favorite Disney princesses. Technology has found a home in the classroom too. Many educators use tools powered by artificial intelligence, such as interactive games that engage kids in math and reading.

It’s not hard to imagine a future in which a parent tucks in a child in at bedtime with an app that not only reads a story but draws the child into gentle back-and-forth conversation about it. Or a kindergarten teacher who, instead of herding a gaggle of kids into a circle on the rug, sets each child up with a tablet that teaches the lesson in a way that responds to the child’s own vocabulary size, level of English proficiency, and attention span.

As children’s language environment changes, new questions arise. Like so much in our society, language is not equitably distributed. Affluent parents tend to have more time to talk with children for the sake of talking, and they can better afford higher quality childcare. Decades of research have shown that many children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to be steeped in richly varied and interactive language.

These differences are consequential. Children’s language development is dependent on their environment, and in turn, the language skills of children entering kindergarten, as measured by vocabulary size and grammatical complexity, are predictive of their later academic achievement.

Nationwide, teachers are burned out and quitting the profession they once loved. But schools in high-poverty areas have far greater trouble attracting and retaining teachers than schools in affluent neighborhoods, which may enjoy a surplus of teachers. For some teachers stretched to the breaking point, an artificial teaching assistant may seem like their best hope for giving their students the help they need.

But does language generated by a bot find the same fertile soil in a child’s mind as language produced by another person? The answer is far from obvious. It hinges on the fact that children’s learning is strikingly different from how chatbots learn. The essential difference is that while chatbots are built to learn entirely from linguistic data, children are built to learn from people who use language. (Read More)

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Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (Nautilus)

Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders, written in about 1230. The first sentence bristles with purposeful action: “King Harold proclaimed a general levy, and gathered a fleet, summoning his forces far and wide through the land.” By the end of the third paragraph, the king has launched his fleet against a rebel army, fought numerous battles involving “much slaughter in either host,” bound up the wounds of his men, dispensed rewards to the loyal, and “was supreme over all Norway.” What the saga doesn’t tell us is how Harold felt about any of this, whether his drive to conquer was fueled by a tyrannical father’s barely concealed contempt, or whether his legacy ultimately surpassed or fell short of his deepest hopes.

Jump ahead about 770 years in time, to the fiction of David Foster Wallace. In his short story “Forever Overhead,” the 13-year-old protagonist takes 12 pages to walk across the deck of a public swimming pool, wait in line at the high diving board, climb the ladder, and prepare to jump. But over these 12 pages, we are taken into the burgeoning, buzzing mind of a boy just erupting into puberty—our attention is riveted to his newly focused attention on female bodies in swimsuits, we register his awareness that others are watching him as he hesitates on the diving board, we follow his undulating thoughts about whether it’s best to do something scary without thinking about it or whether it’s foolishly dangerous not to think about it.

These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?

Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn’t have to be. When people’s choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one’s own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions.

But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters’ inner experiences may sharpen readers’ general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that’s the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous. (Read More)

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Can a Wandering Mind Make You Neurotic? (Nautilus)

I have two children, and they are a study in contrasts: My son works at a gym designing and building rock-climbing walls; In his spare time, he climbs them. My daughter is a Ph.D. student in immunology; In her spare time, she writes novels. My son is the sort of person you want around in a crisis, cool-headed and springing to action. Let’s just say my daughter is not. My son spends money as soon as he earns it. My daughter manages to sock money away into a retirement fund, even on a student income. My son shrugs off unexpected misfortunes, declaring that there’s “no point” in brooding over them. My daughter can worry herself to exhaustion over misfortunes that will never happen. Though both were classified as “gifted,” my son was bored and alienated at school, while my daughter flourished.

I’ve puzzled over their differences throughout their lives—how can two siblings contrast so completely along so many traits? It turns out that many of the personality divergences between my two children may boil down to the fact that, while my son’s mental life is closely connected to the outside world, my daughter spends much of her life inside her own head. (Read More)

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Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness—It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick (Nautilus)

Many of us have been taught that pronouncing vowels indistinctly and dropping consonants are symptoms of slovenly speech, if not outright disregard for the English language. The Irish playwright St. John Ervine viewed such habits as evidence that some speakers are “weaklings too languid and emasculated to speak their noble language with any vigor.” If that’s so, then we are swimming in a sea of linguistic wimpiness; Keith Johnson found that speakers relaxed or dropped sounds in more than 60 percent of words spoken in conversation. Happily, the science of mumbling offers a far less judgmental—and more captivating—account of our imperfectly crisp pronunciations.

Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, dropping or reducing sounds displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs. These algorithms trim down the space needed to digitally store sounds and images by throwing out information that is redundant or doesn’t add much to our perceptual experience—for example, tossing out data at sound frequencies we can’t hear, or not bothering to encode slight gradations of color that are hard to see. The idea is to keep only the information that has the greatest impact. (Read More)

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One Fracking Word or Another (Language Log)

I live in Alberta, where the oil and gas industry takes up a good chunk of daily media coverage. Since I sometimes get asked to comment on the persuasive effects of various wording choices by politicians or companies, I was especially interested to come across claims of evidence that public opposition to the method of natural gas extraction known as fracking might be bolstered by its problematic name. (Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, and the process involves injecting a highly pressurized fluid underground to create fractures in rock layers to release gas.) The finding originates from a survey conducted by the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University, which, as stated in the report, was designed to investigate the following:

It was hypothesized by the Public Policy Research Lab that the actual word “Fracking” may have a negative connotation that is separate from the environmental concerns that often accompany discussions of the process. Due to the harsh consonant sounds in the word itself, and an undeniable similarity to a certain other four letter word starting with the letter “F”, it seemed plausible that some of the negative public sentiment about “Fracking” may result from how unpleasant the word itself sounds. (Read More)

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The Unbearable Loss of Words (Language Log)

Everyone has a private terror—often abetted by a checkered family medical history or having witnessed the torment of a loved one—of being struck with some particular affliction. For some, it’s the ravages of a slow and painful cancer. For others, it’s being caught in a freak accident that renders them quadriplegic in their prime. For me, it’s the fear of surviving a stroke that blasts away tracts of neural tissue in the left hemisphere of my brain, leaving me with profound aphasia.

As usual, the degree of fear is based on a calculus of probability and of loss. In my case, there is the specter of probability: My father suffered a fatal stroke in his sixties. His own father, unluckier, was bedridden after a stroke in his early forties until another one finished him off a few years later. But it’s the prospect of the loss that is overwhelming. How could I, ardent worshipper at the altar of language, ever cope with being left unable to talk or write fluently about language or anything else? For that matter, would I even be able to think about language? Or think in any meaningful way at all? It’s the afflictions that strip you of who you are that seem most unthinkable.

So it was a sense of morbid attraction that led me to Diane Ackerman’s newest book One Hundred Names for Love, in which she documents the stroke and subsequent language deficit suffered by her husband, novelist Paul West. (Read More)

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How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language (Scientific American)

What defines who we are? Our habits? Our aesthetic tastes? Our memories? If pressed, I would answer that if there is any part of me that sits at my core, that is an essential part of who I am, then surely it must be my moral center, my deep-seated sense of right and wrong.

And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I’m a slightly different person in each of my languages—more assertive in English, more relaxed in French, more sentimental in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I’m using at the time?

Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. Several recent studies have focused on how people think about ethics in a non-native language—as might take place, for example, among a group of delegates at the United Nations using a lingua franca to hash out a resolution. The findings suggest that when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue. (Read More)