ESP Biography



JOSH MARTIN, PhD in Linguistics from Harvard University



Major: Linguistics

College/Employer: Invited to participate by MIT prof; PhD from Harvard '22

Year of Graduation: G22

Picture of Josh Martin

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I did my undergrad in Linguistics & Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley and my PhD in Linguistics at Harvard, focusing on theoretical semantics and syntax. These days, I work as a researcher for Spotify studying people's music behavior, but I still have a passion for teaching linguistics when I can and am thrilled to bring that to Splash 2023.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

S15756: Linguistic Relativity in Splash 2023 (Nov. 18 - 19, 2023)
Does the language that you speak change the way you think? If you speak a language with more color words, can you see more colors? If your language has gender markers, do you think about gender differently? Are there really languages without numbers? Do the Inuit people really have 100 words for snow? This class will explore the controversial idea that your particular language affects your cognition and perception, the hypothesis known as linguistic relativity. We'll bust some popular myths about language, recreate some classic experiments, and learn how linguists do research and what happens when scientific research goes wrong.