You know the story. The language you speak doesn’t determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there’s no impact on the way you see or describe the future. Language and perception are separate.
Well, maybe it’s time to revisit this. Séan Roberts and Cole Robertson are finding a cognitive connection, not with how our language makes us talk about the future, but with how our language lets us express uncertainty.
Also, Annemarie Verkerk and Hedvig Skirgård team up to test out language universals. Which ones are getting knocked over?
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:36
- News: 6:08
- Chat with Annemarie Verkerk and Hedvig Skirgård: 23:06
- Related or Not: 49:22
- Interview with Séan Roberts and Cole Robertson: 1:10:38
- Words of the Week: 2:18:09
- Comments: 2:37:20
- The Reads: 2:42:37
- Outtakes: 2:50:05
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@becauselangpod Related or not? CAST and CASTER You know, those wheels on a bed. Surely you didn't want that bed to stay where it is. From our episode 130: Back to the FTR http://becauselanguage.com
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Large linguistic models: Investigating LLMs’ metalinguistic abilities
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11022724
Wei et al., 2022. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
Enduring patterns in world’s languages: One-third of grammatical ‘universals’ stand up to rigorous testing
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-patterns-world-languages-grammatical-universals.html
Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02325-z
Greenberg’s list of universals
https://languagemiscellany.com/2025/05/greenbergs-list-of-universals/
Low-certainty modals not future tenses cause increased psychological discounting in English relative to Dutch
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106338
Language about the future on social media as a novel marker of anxiety and depression: A big-data and experimental analysis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666518223000098
[PDF] Chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets
https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf
Replicated typo: Uncovering spurious correlations between language and culture
http://www.replicatedtypo.com/uncovering-spurious-correlations-between-language-and-culture/6396.html
Seán G. Roberts , James Winters, and Keith Chen: Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132145
Spurious correlations by Annemarie Verkerk
https://humans-who-read-grammars.blogspot.com/2017/03/spurious-correlations.html
(Funny how Annemarie was writing about Roberts’ work on this in 2017, and now we have them both on this episode!)
How The Viral “Everyone Is 12 Now” Theory Just Might Explain Everything That’s Happening In America Today
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-193144275.html
@vibingranolamom All my anemic girlies this one is for you 💀 #soup #period #highiron #plantiron #vegan #veganrecipes #periodpositivity #momsoftiktok #womenshealth #anemia ♬ Little Things – Adrián Berenguer
What Is the “Bean Soup Theory” on TikTok?
https://www.insidehook.com/internet/bean-soup-theory-tiktok
The neologism ‘LLM grooming’ explained
https://englishinprogress.net/neologisms/llm-grooming-explained/
‘May I Meet You?’ The Pick-Up Line Meme, Explained
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/11/18/may-i-meet-you-the-pick-up-line-meme-explained/
Kajkavian (language) | Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kajkavian
Transcript
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