twowo

The site is very slow. Here is a mirror: http://gnodevel.ugent.be/crr.ugent.be/archives/1628

What is interesting about this research is that, unlike in many psychological papers, the effect sizes are relatively large. That means that this research may actually have some practical consequences.

Although the authors do not report effect sizes directly it seems that, in many cases, walking shifted the distribution at least one standard deviation in a direction of higher creativity (that is a lot).

At the same time I wish the results were reported better, in many cases they do not even report the mean and standard deviation of different experimental groups.

It is probably not centred around encouraging discussion but it reminds me of a beautiful piece from Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

It's an interesting problem to try to determine what are the limits of a language and what is a word and what is not. Corpus studies are not sufficient for that purpose as you will always end up with a large number of hapaxes. Because language is based on social consensus, the most common sense approach to the problem would be to determine 'wordiness' of a string by checking how many people consider it to be a word.

We are trying to do something like this with large-scale studies for English and Dutch. As it is very related to the problem I will allow myself to share the links: http://vocabulary.ugent.be http://woordentest.ugent.be