There’s quite a fracas brewing out there in the world of academic publication, as the world moves towards open access for journals. Despite the publishing industry realizing that they too can buy congressmen, it seems increasingly like the academic community is deciding not so much whether to keep the closed-journal model, but what to do in a post-closed-journal world.

This left me thinking about Peer Review, and what it really accomplishes. In my eyes, peer review (at least in the Linguistic world) accomplishes three things:

1) It weeds out papers which are clearly unfit for publication (due to bad science, missing data, or overall crank-ish-ness.

2) It improves the quality of papers by forcing needed revisions before papers can see the light of day.

3) Most importantly, it’s establishing a web of trust, in this case, between the journal and the reader, that the contents represent good scholarly work.

The third point is, to my mind, most interesting. When I read a paper from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, I trust that it is reasonably likely to be describing sound (sorry, bad pun) research. I can assume that somebody with some expertise on the matter has read the paper, and that if it had major faults, it wouldn’t have gotten through the black-box review process. I then, as an academic, decide whether each individual journal is worthy of my trust. I may decide that although JASA is worthy of my trust, a trade journal for hearing aid companies may not necessarily be, and in doing so, I develop a web of trust.

Another prominent web of trust

This is somewhat analogous to the way that PGP‘s Web of Trust is structured. Using PGP, let’s say I want to check whether a given cryptographically signed email really comes from John Q. Smith.

Well, if I know John personally and have exchanged (and signed) each other’s PGP keys in person, I can just check to see if the key I have directly from him matches the key which signed the email. If it matches, no problems.

However, you’ve not met everybody you might want to receive ID-confirmed email from. So, the Web of Trust comes into play. Imagine instead that John Smith is a good friend of Jane Doe, who is a good friend of yours. John and Jane, may have exchanged keys at some point, and in the process, Jane would have signed his key (a complex process which doesn’t merit full explanation here), asserting that that key really belongs to John. Jane and I, being friends, would have exchanged and signed keys as well.

When I get the email from “John”, my PGP software will look to see whether I’ve signed and trust John’s key. If not, it’ll see whether anybody I do trust has signed the key as actually belonging to John. In this case, because Jane says that it’s really him, and I trust Jane, I trust the key on the incoming email, and I can say (reasonably) that the email comes from who it says it does.

How do these ideas mix?

Right now, the journal system is oddly equivalent to the above web. I may have never met the author(s) of a given paper, and I have absolutely no idea whether their work merits discussion, examination, or citation. However, because JASA has, in effect, signed the work by publishing it, I choose to trust a given work as being of a better, citation-quality nature than the same paper floating around an author’s personal website. An author who publishes frequently in a journal I trust then earns trust for future publications.

Revocation of trust happens, too (see what happened with the (bogus) Wakefield Vaccine study and The Lancet), but by and large, academic journals serve as the foundation for the academic publishing Web of Trust.

That’s what people don’t want to lose

For many of us, raised in open-source culture and working on projects funded by government grants, it seems bizzarre to consider signing one’s work over to a journal which will make large amounts of money by restricting access to our work, not a dime of which will ever reach us. So, the idea of open-access and the elimination of paywall-based journals is an attractive one.

However, simply cutting these journals out of the loop would, overnight, destroy the web of trust around which we have so far built our academic community. Without a replacement we’re left only able to trust the work we’ve explicitly and carefully reviewed, or which comes from authors whose work we inherently trust.

The democratization of academic publishing isn’t just about open access or reducing journal bureaucracy. Instead, it also has to be based on the opening (and increased transparency) of the review process, a more efficient and open way of choosing which articles are worthy of note, citation, or derision.

A half-baked proposal

Imagine a system in which a paper is submitted to an online archive, and considered by anybody who cares to review it. If a paper is found to be sound by a given reader or reviewer, it can be signed (much like in the PGP sense above) by that person. Then, if I decide to search for a paper, I can find first papers trusted by people I know and trust. Then, if I find none, I can start the more arduous process of fully examining papers which are signed by people I don’t trust, or which aren’t signed at all. Then, if I find a paper reliable enough, I sign it, and so the web expands.

This, unfortunately, has many downsides. It does away with anonymous peer review, allowing tensions and malice to build quite easily between reviewers and authors. This, though, may not be a terrible thing, as the most picky, unpleasant, or theoretically-encumbered reviewers would easily fall to the side.

It also doesn’t allow for revisions as easily as the journal model, and doesn’t provide a mechanism to drop the lowest quality work outright. That said, potential, higher-profile signers could certainly request certain revisions before signing. This, in turn, could very easily lead to inequality among reviewers, with big names able to push for specific changes (to better support their own work, say) before signing.

Also, you would get people who sign for pay, for reciprocation, due to pressure from others, or who just don’t give a damn about the quality of the paper and sign for some other reason. These people, especially if prominent in the field, could very easily pull down the fabric of the system, and allow bad work through for their own theoretical, political or personal reasons. So, this system requires a degree of objectivity and sense of what’s best for the field which many humans may lack.

Finally, it requires more participation and thought about trust than most are willing to put in. You need to ask yourself uncomfortable questions about who you trust, whose papers really are well written, and how much you need to know about a person’s integrity and work before their research is beyond question.

But most of these are actually failings which are already in the existing system, but are masked by the journal process.

I’m not saying this is the way of the future, nor that it’s even a good idea, but I am saying that perhaps the academic community has a lot to learn from the world of cryptography, where trust is examined more closely and pondered more abstractly than it currently is in the world of academic and scientific publication. You’ll just have to trust me about that.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Tirades | 1 Comment


Only yesterday, I briefly mentioned Mondegreens, where a song lyric is misheard as some other homophonous (identical-sounding) phrase (“killed him and laid him on the green” vs. “killed him and Lady Mondegreen”). This gave me cause to mention Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze” and its famous Mondegreen. The original lyric is:

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky

But many people hear the last line as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”, and that misperception actually reveals something very interesting about how English consonants work.

What makes /k/ different from /g/?

Both /k/ and /g/ are what linguists refer to as “stops”, they’re consonants where the airstream out of the mouth is completely obstructed, and actually, both /k/ and /g/ are “velar” stops, made with the tongue up against the soft palate, or velum. Try it, making a /k/ as in “cap” and a /g/ as in “gap”, one after the other, and you’ll notice that your tongue isn’t changing position when you switch from /k/ to /g/ at all.

The simplistic explanation is that /k/ is a voiceless sound (meaning that our vocal folds/cords aren’t vibrating while we make the closure), and /g/ is a voiced sound, involving glottal vibration during the closure. Unfortunately, like most things in phonetics, it’s not quite that simple or easy.

Voice Onset Time

In reality, stop consonants are classified by their voice onset time, the amount of time that elapses between when the stop is released (when the tongue stops blocking airflow) and when the voicing starts (when the vocal folds start vibrating) for the following vowel. By looking at voice onset time (VOT), we can actually classify consonants in three different ways. (I’ve actually discussed voice onset time before, but now that I’ve already made nicer looking graphics for teaching, it seems worth doing again.)

First, [kʰ]. In English, any voiceless stop that’s at the start of a syllable (so the /k/ in “cap”, but not “pack”) is “aspirated”, meaning that there’s a considerable time gap with a burst of air between the opening of the stop and the start of voicing (it has a positive voice onset time). In the word “cap” /kæp/, we bring our tongue back to the velum to make a closure, we release that closure, and then, around 100 ms (milliseconds) later, we start voicing for the vowel /æ/. Viewed in terms of the acoustical waveform of speech, here’s what aspiration and VOT looks like in [kʰa]:

[g], on the other hand, is a voiced stop, where voicing actually starts during the closure. So, the tongue moves up to the velum, the vocal folds begin vibrating, and then, when the stop is released, the vowel begins immediately. The voice onset time is negative, as the voicing started before the closure. See yet another waveform diagram below, this time showing /ga/:

There’s a third option. Imagine that you started voicing at the exact moment that you released the stop, as shown below:

Then what you have is [k], what linguists refer to as a “voiceless unaspirated stop”, with a voice onset time of 0 (or close to it).

So, we have three stop choices: Voiced stops, voiceless unaspirated stops, and voiceless aspirated stops, which are all used differently in the different languages of the world. But how does this affect Jimi Hendrix?

English makes stops oddly

Our problems with Jimi Hendrix kissing guys (not that there’s anything wrong with that) come from three fundamental oddities in the way that English produces stops.

First, English only distinguishes between Aspirated and Voiced stops. “cap” starts with a /k/, which is produced with aspiration, and “gap” starts with /g/. We don’t have a three way contrast between voiced [g], voiceless unaspirated [k], and voiceless aspirated [kʰ]. Korean, as I’ve mentioned before, has that three way contrast.

Second, English word-initial (at the start of a word) voiced stops are actually produced as voiceless-unaspirated stops, with a VOT of ~0. This is because we, as English speakers, have really strong aspiration in our voiceless stops, so even if we produce something without much voicing during the closure, listeners will still be able to understand that it’s not aspirated, so clearly, the speaker must be intending to express voicing. Here’s a waveform of the word “guy”, to prove the point. Note that there’s a very little VOT here.

Finally, when following an /s/, English voiceless stops are not aspirated. So, in the word “sky”, we have an unaspirated stop, rather than the normal, aspirated [kʰ] which our writing system would lead us to expect. Here’s a waveform showing the very small VOT in “sky”:

So, in effect, the /g/ in “guy” and the /k/ in “sky” are the same sound! Still don’t believe me? Well, first listen to sky, then listen to guy, then listen to “sky” where I’ve digitally removed the /s/. Your writing system has been lying to you!

So what does Jimi Hendrix kissing men have to do with Stop Acoustics?

When we look at the acoustics of “guy” and “sky”, it’s very easy to see that the difference the two different perceptions of the lyric (“kiss the sky” and “kiss this guy”) are incredibly similar. When we realize that in English, [k] and [g] are functionally the same thing, the difference between our two choices:

… is seen to be only a question of where you put the /s/, and thus, really, no difference at all.

So, we see that not only are sounds in English not what our writing systems makes them out to be, but that this “error” of perception is not only understandable, but linguistically fascinating as well.

So, next time you find yourself listening to Purple Haze, Thank Jimi Hendrix for providing one of the best examples of the perceptual troubles which can come from our lack of a voiced/voiceless-unaspirated contrast in the English language. Or, curse me for linguistically corrupting an otherwise good song. Either or, really.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language and Music, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Speech and Grammar Errors | Leave a Comment


One of my favorite expressions (stolen from House MD many years back) is “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not Zebras”. The general idea here is that if you see something, and you’re not sure what it is, don’t anticipate something odd or rare when there’s a more common explanation. Well, I was reminded of that this afternoon when I stumbled upon this quote in a forum I frequent:

“Without further a due, you can get the latest nightly builds [at this website]“

This is a form of phonological re-analysis. When we re-analyze a word or phrase, we’re usually replacing an uncommon or non-transparent word with something that’s phonologically similar (that sounds alike), but is much more common or makes more sense. These are also referred to as “eggcorns”, a term coined by Geoff Pullum.

So, the speaker stumbles with “Ado” is a Middle English word, according the New Oxford American Dictionary, “from northern Middle English at do ‘to do,’ from Old Norse at (used to mark an infinitive) and do”). Rather than using “further ado”, the speaker (typer?) replaces it with a phonologically identical pair of words (“ado” /ədu/ “a dye” /ə du/) which are much more common in the English language. In short, the speaker replaces the word “ado”, a certified Zebra, with a common set of English words, “a due”, and thus, thinks horses.

A whole herd of Zebras, all horsed

We really like, as speakers of language, to turn zerbras into This happens relatively frequently, with varying degrees of phonological similarity. I’ve seen “do process” for “due process” (homophones like above), “play it by year” instead of “play it by ear” (/plej ɪt baj iɹ/ vs. /plej ɪt baj jiɹ/), where word segmentation makes the difference. Google gives 216 hits for “Torn ass under”, a (creative!) re-analysis of “torn asunder” (/tɔɹn əsʌndəɹ/ vs the original /tɔɹn æs ʔʌndəɹ/) to get around the ambiguity of “asunder”, meaning “into various pieces”. Entertainingly, this same “sunder” root causes yet another Zebra reanalysis. Not infrequently, you’ll hear people talking about “various insundry goods” in case of “Various and Sundry Goods” (/vɛɹiəs ɪnsʌndɹi ɡʊds/ vs. /vɛɹiəs ən sʌndɹi ɡʊds/). “Sundry” is definitely a zebra if you’re not familiar with “sundries”, items of various kinds, although interestingly, here, it’s replaced with another zebra, “insundry”.

With a bit more phonological difference, we get the reanalysis that many love to hate: “all intensive purposes” can be swapped for “all intents and purposes” (/ɑl ɪntɛnsɪv pəɹpəsɪz/ vs. /ɑl ɪntɛns ən pəɹpəsɪz/). And if we do this at a whole-phrase level while listening to music, we can get Mondegreens, a term for misheard song lyrics (hearing Jimi Hendrix’ “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”).

So, this is a relatively common phenomenon, and gives us great information about how speakers are coping with the amount of homophony in our language. In closing, thanks for reading Lingua Stick Miss Tick, and more importantly, thanks for not spelling it that way.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Etymology, Language Change, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Speech and Grammar Errors | 1 Comment

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