Poem

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.