The Lemma Project
You must recall from days of yore
If you are old enough,
Picking up a big fat book,
When a word you read was tough.
If not, you must be young and new
But you know of it all the same
That google will help you with the meaning
when you search for a word name.
With meaning comes a lot else though,
Like how to say a word right,
That E-I-G-H-T is eight,
Even though H-E-I-G-H-T is height
And if you look up a Dutch word,
You also know the gender rule,
That het goes with bureau,
But de goes with bureaustoel,
By now you know what I am talking about
A dictionary! A woordenboek!
It tells you meaning, sound, spelling and gender
If you ever wanted to look.
But what happens when you don’t have one
How do you understand these talks?
Or watch a movie, or read a paper
Or chat on nice long walks
Duh! You know the words of course
You hold them in your brain
So you can gush about your precious dog
Or whine about the late train.
Do you have a lexicon then,
Imprinted in your head?
So you know what meows “de kat”
Or that you sleep on “het bed”.
There is a brain region above your cheek
Where word meanings are stored
And another above your ear
Where their gender is floored
And a third right between them
Is where you store spoken word forms
So when you see those squiggly red things in the mud
You can squeal “earthworms”
But then there must be a way
-A brain network composition
How meaning connects to gender of a word
Or to its pronunciation
And there is! suggest some wise men,
Indeed such a linking system
The lemma is what rules them all
and in the darkness binds them.
But where, we wonder, is this lemma
This mysterious brain dictionary
This is what my project is about
And we are still to see.
In this project, I look for the lemma
By proceeding in this manner
I ask some nice Dutchies to help me
By laying down still in a scanner
In the scanner I show them some pictures
And we play a little game
They have to be as fast as they can
to say aloud the picture name
I also make them listen sometimes
And press a button on having heard
To show their judgement of the concept
Or the gender related to the word
And then I will take their brain scans
And put them all together
To see if I can find the lemma in the brain
And then we will know better.
-- I wrote this poem as a 3 minute science pitch for the Radboud Talks competition keeping in mind an audience who is unrelated to my field of research.