Measured Words

Though the interests of science and art frequently seem to inhabit opposite poles, The Measured Word assembles a brilliant anthology of twelve essays that illumine the historic--and newly emerging--relationships between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Assembling the writings of leading contemporary poets, essayists, and thinkers, Kurt Brown highlights ways in which poets use scientific discoveries and mathematical ideas to their artistic advantage--and offers insight on the recently apparent integration of technology and other discoveries into the postmodernist poetry. Here are meditations on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imagination; on the poetic use of fractals; on hypertext; on the changing shape of poetry in the scientific age. Commentary by Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub, Paul Lake, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Alice Fulton, Forrest Gander, and Stephanie Strickland, among others, presents a diverse selection of opinions. These viewpoints are complemented by many careful, innovative readings of individual poems informed by the sciences. The writings in this collection not only celebrate the advent of a new age of discovery but also identify the need for a revision of the western thinking that separates the mind and the heart--replacing division with the reciprocity of mutual communication.

Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the time: Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti’s treatise on cryptography and Pacioli’s design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia’s poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta’s dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.

Measured Language presents studies using forms of measurement and quantitative analysis current in diverse areas of linguistic research from language assessment to language change, from generative linguistics to experimental psycholinguistics, and from longitudinal studies to classroom research.

This volume establishes how English language constructs were measured in Cambridge English examinations over the period 1913 to 2012. An addition to the Studies in Language Testing series, this volume provides an overview of English language testing over the last century, with coverage of key theoretical and practical aspects of the assessment of reading, listening, writing and speaking skills. It includes examples of the Cambridge English exams, old and new, and is the first volume to describe in a systematic way the different theoretical influences which have shaped the development of the constructs underlying Cambridge English exams in the last 100 years.

This study deals with the historical, sociological, economic and political aspects of language testing in the 20th century. It examines the quest for objectivity and the rise of public and institutional tests, as well as future developments in the field of English language testing.

An argument that the way we listen to speech is shaped by our experience with our native language. Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language. Cutler describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field.