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How language transformed humanity [video] | GrrlScientist | Global | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...1 language brain science
shared by oliviaodon on 05 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.
  • [Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery
  • language is a "social technology" that allows for cooperation between unrelated individuals and groups. According to the archaeological record, it was this cooperation and sharing of ideas that preceded human migration around the planet and the ensuing human population explosion.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft and to exploit cooperation and exchange
  • Humans use discrete pulses of sound -- their language -- to alter the internal settings inside someone else's brain to suit an individual's interests. Because language is not a solitary pursuit, language is a form of social learning.
  • thousands of languages evolved
  • Can humans afford to have all these different languages, asks Professor Pagel. In a world where we want to promote cooperation, in a world that is more dependent than ever on cooperation to maintain and enhance humanity's levels of prosperity, multiple languages may not be practical.
  • languages reflect the myriad ways that the human mind perceives and responds to the world, and to lose any of them is to (slightly) diminish and limit the variety and expressive depth of human intellectual, creative and experiential capacity.
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Comment: If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different | SBS News - 1 views

www.sbs.com.au/...-mandarin-your-brain-different brain science language
shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • We speak so effortlessly that most of us never think about it. But psychologists and neuroscientists are captivated by the human capacity to communicate with language.
  • Untangling the brain’s mechanisms for language has been a pillar of neuroscience since its inception. New research published in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences about the different connections going on in the brains of Mandarin and English speakers, demonstrates just how flexible our ability to learn language really is.
  • Victims of stroke or traumatic brain injury to either of these crucial areas on the left side of the brain exhibited profound disabilities for producing and understanding language.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • six to ten months children have already learned to be sensitive to the basic sounds, known as phonemes, that matter in their native language.
  • language requires real-time mappings between words and their meanings. This requires that the sounds heard in speech – decoded in the auditory cortex – must be integrated with knowledge about what they mean – in the frontal cortex.
  • Modern theories on connectionism – the idea that knowledge is distributed across different parts of the brain and not tucked into dedicated modules like Broca’s area – have compelled researchers to take a closer look.
  • Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language in which the same basic sounds can refer to vastly different things based on the tone with which it is spoken
  • non-tonal language such as English, tone might convey emotional information about the speaker, but indicates nothing about the meaning of the word that is spoken
  • found that these differences between Mandarin Chinese and English change the way the brain’s networks work.
  • researchers took advantage of the basic differences between Mandarin Chinese and English to investigate the differences between the language networks of native speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages. Thirty native Chinese speakers were matched on age, gender, and handedness (they were all right-handed) with a sample of native English speakers. All participants listened to intelligible and unintelligible speech and were asked to judge the gender of the speaker.
  • The first difference was the operation of the brain networks shared by English and Chinese speakers
  • English speakers showed stronger connectivity leading from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area. This increased connectivity was attributed to English relying more heavily on phonological information, or sounds rather than tones.
  • Chinese speakers had stronger connections leading from an area of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus – which has been identified as a “semantic hub” critical in supporting language – to both Broca’s and Wernicke’s area.
  • increased connectivity is attributed to the enhanced mapping of sound and meaning going on in people who speak tonal languages.
  • second difference showed activation in an area of the brain’s right hemisphere, but only among the Chinese speakers
  • findings emphasise the importance of developing a bilateral network between the two brain hemispheres to speak and understand languages, particularly for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese.
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The World's Most Efficient Languages - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...489389
shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • But languages are strikingly different in the level of detail they require a speaker to provide in order to put a sentence together.
  • Other languages occupy still other places on the linguistic axis of “busyness,” from prolix to laconic, and it’s surprising what a language can do without.
  • Moreover, anyone who has sampled Chinese, or Persian, or Finnish, knows that a language can get along just fine with the same word for “he” and “she.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian, also known as Circassian and spoken in the Caucasus, would win
  • The prize for most economical language could go to certain colloquial dialects of Indonesian that are rarely written but represent the daily reality of Indonesian in millions of mouths
  • Experiments have shown that this is often true to a faint, flickering degree a psychologist can detect in the artifice of experimental conditions
  • In a language where final sounds take the accent, such sounds tend to hold on longer because they are so loud and clear—you’re less likely to mumble it and people listening are more likely to hear it
  • When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself
  • Even if languages’ differences in busyness can’t be taken as windows on psychological alertness, the differences remain awesome
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Learning a new language changes the brain's division of labor: Adult language learning ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201117122840.htm
shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Learning a language later in life changes how the two halves of the brain contribute.
  • Learning a language later in life changes how the two halves of the brain contribute.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Language is something that we've talked in depth about in class. We talked about how it sways perception, and I'm interested to hear more about the effects of language.
  • but the right hemisphere can take over after an injury to the left.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. I didn't know the brain had the ability to adapt like that.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The right hemisphere can also contribute when learning a new language, making it unclear if the left hemisphere is actually specialized for language.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      From this info, it does seem like labelling the left as the language side is a bold statement.
  • In the earlier stages of language learning, native and new languages looked quite similar in the brain, but in advanced learners, the two languages were more distinct.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I wonder if that comes from the two languages slowly working more and more independent from each other.
  • This may explain why it is more difficult to learn to speak a new language as an adult, even though it is possible to learn to understand it quite well.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interesting! I'll make sure to learn all of the languages I want to learn before I get too old :)
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The Linguistic Colonialism of English - Brown Political Review - 0 views

brownpoliticalreview.org/...linguistic-colonialism-english
shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.
  • As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.
  • The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.
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  • Processes of violent imperialism have paved the way for the cultural pandemic originating in the West
  • Most former British colonies now use English as their official language (e.g. Ghana and South Africa). Ever since the US colonized Puerto Rico after winning the Spanish-American war (note the absence of Puerto Rico, or Cuba, in the name of the war), the official languages on the island became Spanish and, of course, English.
  • Today, English is the third most spoken language in the world and tops the list of second languages. English is a necessity for studying at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, a ticket to working almost anywhere in the world, and an instrument enabling a livelihood in the wealthiest nations.
  • This phenomenon feeds into the growth of social inequality linked to globalization. The majority of the time, English learned as a second language in public schools does not create a proficiency level adequate for working, studying, or relying on the language in daily life.
  • People dedicate their time and resources to learning and perfecting their understanding and knowledge of English, rather than preserving their own customs and culture.
  • The process of globalization leads people to visualize an array of opportunities and an exponentially better future linked to the English language. A language is not only an instrument of communication, however. It is also the tool of a society, made up of its culture, traditions, and sets of religious and ideological beliefs
  • English has also become the main language used in science. Doctors around the world use English to communicate their findings. Most research papers are written in English as a way to facilitate international scientific cooperation.
  • Although this may seem like a necessity to promote scientific discovery, the resulting gap is problematic. The researchers who have not had the chance to learn English are at a disadvantage.
  • These processes suggest a disconcerting implication – globalization is simply a more “socially acceptable” means of imperialism, without violence
  • Globalization and the expansion of the English language have resulted in oppression and inequality.
  • If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances.
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Language Shapes the Way People Think and Behave - 0 views

www.daytranslations.com/...language-shapes-thinking
shared by caelengrubb on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language is part of culture and culture has an effect on the way a person thinks, which initiates behaviors
  • The researcher found out that the linguistic discrepancy shows economic differences as well.
  • Several languages have grammatical gender systems, which the English language does not have. For example, inanimate objects have genders in German, Russian, Spanish or French.
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  • Colors are distinguished differently in other languages. In some languages, there are no separate names for orange and yellow even if the people know that there are differences between these two colors
  • The difference in the way languages define colors directly affect the way speakers give meaning pertaining to colors
  • The way speakers interpret the things they feel, hear and see can be complicated because it is influences by personal experiences, norms, cultural rules, traditions and languages. Thoughts come from words and these thoughts initiate behaviors.
  • International communication and global business are also affected by languages, thus the pressing needs for localization. To effectively do business in other countries, a company must be able to deliver messages to their employees and target audiences in a language that can be correctly and clearly understood
  • If you look at the similarities and differences between languages, you’ll be able to discover clues on what constitute proper and improper behaviors.
  • People use language daily in order to celebrate, communicate, negotiate, learn, legislate, document and argue. You use language each time you need to express something
  • The study of linguistics opens a way to better understand languages – how they are spoken and the people who speak them, which lead to an understanding of how society operates. Linguistics also helps to improve society.
  • Linguists combine different methods from several scientific fields of study such as computational, biological and psychological techniques, aside from the theoretical or documentary field.
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Hand gestures point towards the origins of language - 0 views

phys.org/...2019-08-gestures-language.html language research brain science
shared by johnsonel7 on 16 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Communication gestures used by humans and our primate relatives are providing clues about how our species' ability to use spoken language evolved.
  • But human language is one such oddity. Our ability to use subtle combinations of sounds produced by our vocal cords to create words and sentences, which when combined with grammatical rules, convey complex ideas.
  • "The idea is to look at language, not just as speech, but seeing it as a constellation of many cognitive properties,"
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  • In human babies, which learn to gesture at objects before they can speak, the left side of their brain seems to be engaged when they do so. Certain regions on the left side of our brain, such as Broca's area, are especially important when we speak.
  • Prof. Sandler is exploring the relationship between physical communication and the composition of human language. She believes sign languages can provide some clues to the structure of human language and how language may have emerged in our ancestors.
  • Prof. Sandler is exploring the relationship between physical communication and the composition of human language. She believes sign languages can provide some clues to the structure of human language and how language may have emerged in our ancestors.
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The Phrase Putin Never Uses About Terrorism (and Trump Does) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-donald-trump-terrorism.html new york times language social media
shared by sissij on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • once famously saying he would find Chechen terrorists sitting in the “outhouse” and “rub them out.”
  • He and President Trump, notably dismissive of political correctness, would seem to have found common language on fighting terrorism — except on one point of, well, language.
  • criticized President Obama for declining to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
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  • He has never described terrorists as “Islamic” and has repeatedly gone out of his way to denounce such language.
  • a group he often refers to as “the so-called Islamic State,” to emphasize a distinction with the Islamic religion.
  • Mr. Putin spoke of terrorists who “cynically exploit religious feelings for political aims.”
  • and added that “their ideology is built on lies and blatant distortions of Islam.”
  • He was careful to add, “Muslim leaders are bravely and fearlessly using their own influence to resist this extremist propaganda.”
  • Instead, Russian counterterrorism strategy focused on financing and militarily backing moderate Muslim leaders
  • “He cannot say ‘Islamic terrorism’ for a simple reason. He doesn’t want to alienate millions of Russians.”
  • In a phone call on Friday, President Trump and Mr. Putin discussed “real cooperation” in fighting terrorist groups in Syria. They could agree on an enemy. But the Kremlin statement described a “priority placed on uniting forces in the fight against the main threat — international terrorism.”
  • sissij on 02 Feb 17
     
    I find this article very interesting because it does some analysis to the language president use in politics. It sort of related to the language topic we discussed in TOK. President is a job that has to make sure he get the majority right, so what language he uses is very important. In this article, Putin's language when he addresses the terrorism of Islamic extremists is very interesting. Russia is a country with a lot of Muslims, so he has to be careful about not to labeling the entire religious groups as terrorists. Whenever he describe the group, he carefully distinguish the moderates from the extremists to keep the support from the majority of Russian. Trump should do some thinking on the language he is using since he is a president now. --Sissi (2/2/2017)
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Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-save-a-language.html language Science knowledge education
shared by jlessner on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the looming extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which are spoken by small groups of indigenous people
  • Certainly, experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.
  • In Mandarin Chinese, for example, you can express If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant with the same sentence you would use to express the more basic If you see my sister, you know she’s pregnant.
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  • But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?
  • First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like.
  • Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.
  • Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.
  • Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.
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What's Lost When a Language Disappears | The New Republic - 0 views

newrepublic.com/...g-reauthorization-act-congress language culture history
shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The cultural practices and locales that define the hundreds of Native communities dotting the North American landscape are grounded in languages. Each is unique, with distinct dialects, accents, and slang. There are words, phrases, and concepts that do not exist in the American English lexicon, that confounding colonizer speech that Native Americans were forced to adopt and master. And nearly all of them are in danger of going extinct. In 1998, there were 175 Indigenous languages still in use within the United States. Today, there are 115. With each passing year, as elders are laid to rest and new babies are born, Native people lose their tongue.
  • Learning a Native language is not only about knowledge or authenticity; it extends a symbol of a thriving and unique culture to the rising generation. It’s the cadence of survival. And if it goes silent, a great tradition is broken.
  • The latest version of the bill, coming at the tail end of what the United Nations has dubbed the Year of Indigenous Language, will seek to lower the bill’s previous class-size restrictions, which were preventing tribes from obtaining federal grants to establish their own language programs because many smaller tribes had lower enrollment numbers than what the grant applications required.
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  • The general experience of losing one’s language to American preference is not unique to being Indigenous. It’s an American philosophy, one that is echoed in the experience of the children of immigrants whose parents do not teach them their language, in an attempt to shield them from racism. The president enforces a regime of assimilation when he declares, “This is a country where we speak English. It’s English. You have to speak English!”
  • Many of these languages are not even a full lifetime away from disappearing. They exist for as long as the heart of the elder who carries the words continues to beat. One day, that heart will stop, and so too will the language.
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Psychological nativism - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Psychological_nativism psychological nativism psychology
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.
  • Some nativists believe that specific beliefs or preferences are "hard-wired". For example, one might argue that some moral intuitions are innate or that color preferences are innate. A less established argument is that nature supplies the human mind with specialized learning devices. This latter view differs from empiricism only to the extent that the algorithms that translate experience into information may be more complex and specialized in nativist theories than in empiricist theories. However, empiricists largely remain open to the nature of learning algorithms and are by no means restricted to the historical associationist mechanisms of behaviorism.
  • Nativism has a history in philosophy, particularly as a reaction to the straightforward empiricist views of John Locke and David Hume. Hume had given persuasive logical arguments that people cannot infer causality from perceptual input. The most one could hope to infer is that two events happen in succession or simultaneously. One response to this argument involves positing that concepts not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.
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  • The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued in his Critique of Pure Reason that the human mind knows objects in innate, a priori ways. Kant claimed that humans, from birth, must experience all objects as being successive (time) and juxtaposed (space). His list of inborn categories describes predicates that the mind can attribute to any object in general. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate categories to one—causality—which presupposes the others.
  • Modern nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor (1935–2017), Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), and Steven Pinker (b. 1954), who argue that humans from birth have certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow them to learn and acquire certain skills, such as language.
  • For example, children demonstrate a facility for acquiring spoken language but require intensive training to learn to read and write. This poverty of the stimulus observation became a principal component of Chomsky's argument for a "language organ"—a genetically inherited neurological module that confers a somewhat universal understanding of syntax that all neurologically healthy humans are born with, which is fine-tuned by an individual's experience with their native language
  • In The Blank Slate (2002), Pinker similarly cites the linguistic capabilities of children, relative to the amount of direct instruction they receive, as evidence that humans have an inborn facility for speech acquisition (but not for literacy acquisition).
  • A number of other theorists[1][2][3] have disagreed with these claims. Instead, they have outlined alternative theories of how modularization might emerge over the course of development, as a result of a system gradually refining and fine-tuning its responses to environmental stimuli.[4]
  • Many empiricists are now also trying to apply modern learning models and techniques to the question of language acquisition, with marked success.[20] Similarity-based generalization marks another avenue of recent research, which suggests that children may be able to rapidly learn how to use new words by generalizing about the usage of similar words that they already know (see also the distributional hypothesis).[14][21][22][23]
  • The term universal grammar (or UG) is used for the purported innate biological properties of the human brain, whatever exactly they turn out to be, that are responsible for children's successful acquisition of a native language during the first few years of life. The person most strongly associated with the hypothesising of UG is Noam Chomsky, although the idea of Universal Grammar has clear historical antecedents at least as far back as the 1300s, in the form of the Speculative Grammar of Thomas of Erfurt.
  • This evidence is all the more impressive when one considers that most children do not receive reliable corrections for grammatical errors.[9] Indeed, even children who for medical reasons cannot produce speech, and therefore have no possibility of producing an error in the first place, have been found to master both the lexicon and the grammar of their community's language perfectly.[10] The fact that children succeed at language acquisition even when their linguistic input is severely impoverished, as it is when no corrective feedback is available, is related to the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, and is another claim for a central role of UG in child language acquisition.
  • Researchers at Blue Brain discovered a network of about fifty neurons which they believed were building blocks of more complex knowledge but contained basic innate knowledge that could be combined in different more complex ways to give way to acquired knowledge, like memory.[11
  • experience, the tests would bring about very different characteristics for each rat. However, the rats all displayed similar characteristics which suggest that their neuronal circuits must have been established previously to their experiences. The Blue Brain Project research suggests that some of the "building blocks" of knowledge are genetic and present at birth.[11]
  • modern nativist theory makes little in the way of specific falsifiable and testable predictions, and has been compared by some empiricists to a pseudoscience or nefarious brand of "psychological creationism". As influential psychologist Henry L. Roediger III remarked that "Chomsky was and is a rationalist; he had no uses for experimental analyses or data of any sort that pertained to language, and even experimental psycholinguistics was and is of little interest to him".[13]
  • , Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument is controversial within linguistics.[14][15][16][17][18][19]
  • Neither the five-year-old nor the adults in the community can easily articulate the principles of the grammar they are following. Experimental evidence shows that infants come equipped with presuppositions that allow them to acquire the rules of their language.[6]
  • Paul Griffiths, in "What is Innateness?", argues that innateness is too confusing a concept to be fruitfully employed as it confuses "empirically dissociated" concepts. In a previous paper, Griffiths argued that innateness specifically confuses these three distinct biological concepts: developmental fixity, species nature, and intended outcome. Developmental fixity refers to how insensitive a trait is to environmental input, species nature reflects what it is to be an organism of a certain kind, and the intended outcome is how an organism is meant to develop.[24]
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Is It Possible To Think Without Language? | Mental Floss - 1 views

mentalfloss.com/...ossible-think-without-language Language knowledge brain science thought feeling
shared by kortanekev on 27 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • There is also evidence that deaf people cut off from language, spoken or signed, think in sophisticated ways before they have been exposed to language.
  • The philosopher Peter Carruthers has argued that there is a type of inner, explicitly linguistic thinking that allows us to bring our own thoughts into conscious awareness. We may be able to think without language, but language lets us know that we are thinking.
  • kortanekev on 27 Nov 16
     
    This short article begins to describe the fascinating interplay between language and thought- the contrast between unconscious, instinctual sensation that is undefinable or ungraspable in terms of language, versus the conscious feelings and thoughts we use language to attempt to define, primarily for ourselves. One can apply definitions to certain anecdotes to make sense of them.. but it doesn't mean our sense about them is accurate.  (Evie 11/27/16)
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Last words? Phone app bids to save dying aboriginal language - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html words app language cnn knowledge
shared by summertyler on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • A smartphone app has been launched to help save an Australian indigenous language that is in danger of disappearing.
  • aims to prevent the extinction of the Iwaidja language
  • "People have their phones with them most of the time, the app is incredibly easy to use, and this allows data collection to happen spontaneously, opportunistically,"
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  • "We believe the tools we are developing will exponentially increase the involvement of the Indigenous people whose languages are threatened, without the need for difficult-to-attain levels of computer literacy,"
  • Until now endangered aboriginal languages were recorded in the presence of a linguist and selected native speakers with recording equipment
  • indigenous people whose languages are threatened can record and upload languages at their own pace and at times which suit them, he says, without requiring the presence of a specialist holding a microphone
  • "The ability provided by the tools we are developing to easily create, record and share language, images, and video, at the same time as building sustainable databases for future use, involves and empowers speakers of indigenous languages in a way which has not been possible before."
  • summertyler on 02 Jun 15
     
    Language is a barrier, and people are trying to break down these barriers.
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A guide to raising bilingual children - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html bilingual cnn psychology language
shared by summertyler on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Simone's mom reads, sings and talks to him in French.
  • The goal? To raise him to be bilingual.
  • If you've ever thought about raising your kid to be multilingual, now's the perfect time to start. "Babies are wired for language,"
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  • "The earlier they're introduced to a second language, the easier it will be for them to pick it up." Knowing a second (or third!) language could one day give your child an edge in an increasingly global workforce.
  • tend to have superior reading and writing skills in both languages, as well as better analytical and academic skills,
  • "Learning a language is a question of repeated high-quality exposure,"
  • "If a family reads a book to their child in Spanish as part of a bedtime routine, that's a lot of reading and a lot of learning over an extended period of time."
  • What you can expect: Results range from recognizing the language when it's spoken to being able to converse casually. The more time the child spends with the nanny or in bilingual daycare, the greater the proficiency. "It all depends on the amount and quality of the child's exposure,"
  • What you can expect: A bilingual tot, in time. Don't worry if he doesn't speak either language as adeptly as his monolingual peers at first. If your child is exposed to both languages the same amount, he will be able to speak both equally well by the time he goes to school.
  • summertyler on 02 Jun 15
     
    Language can help a child advance in school. This is an example of language not creating barriers, but actually helping a person.
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Opinion | Is Computer Code a Foreign Language? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...code-foreign-language.html language computer knowledge psychology humanity social
shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • the proposal that foreign language learning can be replaced by computer coding knowledge is misguided:
  • It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages.
  • more urgent is my alarm at the growing tendency to accept and even foster the decline of the sort of interpersonal human contact that learning languages both requires and cultivates.
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  • Language is an essential — perhaps the essential — marker of our species. We learn in and through natural languages; we develop our most fundamental cognitive skills by speaking and hearing languages; and we ultimately assume our identities as human beings and members of communities by exercising those languages
  • Our profound and impressive ability to create complex tools with which to manipulate our environments is secondary to our ability to conceptualize and communicate about those environments in natural languages.
  • Natural languages aren’t just more complex versions of the algorithms with which we teach machines to do tasks; they are also the living embodiments of our essence as social animals.
  • We express our love and our losses, explore beauty, justice and the meaning of our existence, and even come to know ourselves all though natural languages.
  • we are fundamentally limited in how much we can know about another’s thoughts and feelings, and that this limitation and the desire to transcend it is essential to our humanity
  • or us humans, communication is about much more than getting information or following instructions; it’s about learning who we are by interacting with others.
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LANGUAGE HAS THE POWER TO DIVIDE AS WELL AS UNITE - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

www.chicagotribune.com/...92-06-09-9202210199-story.html language divide research
shared by sanderk on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Hungarians tend to speak softly and in something of a monotone. This could reflect their language, every word of which is accented on its first syllable. Furthermore, Hungarians must know that theirs is a strange language. Well, aren`t they all, to everyone who does not understand them? And isn`t calling a language ''strange'' a sign of cultural imperialism?
  • we have one reasonable excuse and one bad one. The bad one is that education in America seems interested in almost everything except passing on detailed information at the cost of arduous application. The acceptable excuse is that it really is less important for Americans to learn languages. Most of us live far from places where people don`t speak English.
  • The other cause of awkwardness is that the foreign language almost everyone learns these days is English. This is convenient, but it enhances the likelihood that the rest of the world will consider Americans arrogant.
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  • If, eventually, everyone speaks his own language and English, is it only a matter of time before the other languages are forgotten, except by scholars, sentimentalists and curmudgeons?
  • While the worlds of science, commerce and popular culture unite around English, people are killing each other because they speak different languages.
  • Language divides as much as does land or blood, and almost as much as religion.
  • Such is the power of language that it can be used to make division where it barely exists. Ethnically, Belorussians are all but indistinguishable from Russians. Wanting independence from Moscow, the Russians who live around Minsk claim that theirs is a separate language, though many scholars consider it
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How does mother tongue affect second language acquisition? - Language Magazine - 0 views

www.languagemagazine.com/ct-second-language-acquisition
shared by tongoscar on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Because cues that signal the beginning and ending of words can differ from language to language, a person’s native language can provide misleading information when learning to segment a second language into words.
  • “The moment we hear a new language, all of a sudden we hear a stream of sounds and don’t know where the words begin or end,” Tremblay said. “Even if we know words from the second language and can recognize them in isolation, we may not be able to locate these words in continuous speech, because a variety of processes affect how words are realized in context.”
  • Other cues, such as intonation, are harder to master and are more likely to be influenced by a speaker’s native language.
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  • One of the more interesting findings is that when languages share more similarities but still have slight differences, it can be harder for second language learners to use the correct speech cues to identify words.
  • “For English speakers, the differences between English stress and French prominence are so salient that it ought to be obvious and they ought to readjust their system,”
  • Researchers also found that native French speakers who lived in France did better than native French speakers who lived in the U.S. at using French-like intonation cues to locate words in an artificial language.
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Your Dog Remembers More Than You Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dogs-memory.html brain science language research
shared by sissij on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • In people it is called episodic memory, and it involves a sense of self. In animals, it’s called episodic-like memory, because it’s difficult to try to plumb something as elusive as self without the aid of language.
  • Dr. Fugazza and colleagues reported online in Current Biology that this showed that the dogs remembered an event they hadn’t been concentrating on, the trainer’s action. She said one aspect strengthened that conclusion: The dogs tended to lie down immediately when they got back to the mat, suggesting that their heads were in “lie down” mode, not “do it” mode.
  • He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.
  • sissij on 24 Nov 16
     
    I found this experiment very interesting because it shows some aspect of how animals memory works. The result can be used to see how memory work without language. I think language and memory have an intertwined relationship because sometimes I can feel that the information stored in my brain is in language rather than abstract form such as knowledge. For example, my memory of chemistry knowledge is stored in English, so when I am reading a chemistry related book in Chinese, I would usually get lost because there aren't any vocals on Chemistry in Chinese in my memory. It would be a very interesting question to consider that how our memory will construct if we don't have a language. There is a kind of mental disease called "aphasia", meaning the loss of ability to understand language. How do they remember things when they lose the ability to assign meanings and communicate? --Sissi (11/24/2016)
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China: A Modern Babel - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hina-a-modern-babel-1487202893 china mandarin language
shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The oft-repeated claim that we must all learn Mandarin Chinese, the better to trade with our future masters, is one that readers of David Moser’s “A Billion Voices” will rapidly end up re-evaluating.
  • In fact, many Chinese don’t speak it: Even Chinese authorities quietly admit that only about 70% of the population speaks Mandarin, and merely one in 10 of those speak it fluently.
  • Mr. Moser presents a history of what is more properly called Putonghua, or “common speech,” along with a clear, concise and often amusing introduction to the limits of its spoken and written forms.
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  • what Chinese schoolchildren are encouraged to think of as the longstanding natural speech of the common people is in fact an artificial hybrid, only a few decades old, although it shares a name—Mandarin—with the language of administration from imperial times. It’s a designed-by-committee camel of a language that has largely lost track of its past.
  • The idea of a national Chinese language began with the realization by the accidentally successful revolutionaries of 1911 that retaining control over a country speaking multiple languages and myriad dialects would necessitate reform. Long-term unification and the introduction of mass education would require a common language.
  • Whatever the province they originated from, the administrators of the now-toppled Great Qing Empire had all learned to communicate with one another in a second common language—Guanhua, China’s equivalent, in practical terms, of medieval Latin
  • To understand this highly compressed idiom required a considerable knowledge of the Chinese classics. Early Jesuit missionaries had labeled it Mandarin,
  • The committee decided that the four-tone dialect of the capital would be the base for a new national language but added a fifth tone whose use had lapsed in the north but not in southern dialects. The result was a language that no one actually spoke.
  • After the Communist victory of 1949, the process began all over again with fresh conferences, leading finally to the decision to use Beijing sounds, northern dialects and modern literature in the vernacular (of which there was very little) as a source of grammar.
  • This new spoken form is what is now loosely labeled Mandarin, still as alien to most Chinese as all the other Chinese languages.
  • A Latin alphabet system called Pinyin was introduced to help children learn to pronounce Chinese characters, but today it is usually abandoned after the first few years of elementary school.
  • The view that Mandarin is too difficult for mere foreigners to learn is essential to Chinese amour propre. But it is belied by the number of foreign high-school students who now learn the language by using Pinyin as a key to pronunciation —and who bask in the admiration they receive as a result.
  • Since 1949, the Chinese government, obsessed with promoting the image of a nation completely united in its love of the Communist Party, has decided that the Chinese people speak not several different languages but the same one in a variety of dialects. To say otherwise is to suggest, dangerously, that China is not one nation
  • Yet on Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic in a Hunan accent so thick that members of his audience subsequently differed about what he had said. He never mastered the Beijing sounds on which Putonghua is based, nor did Sichuanese-speaking Deng Xiaoping or most of his successors.
  • When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced. “At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!” One leader down, only 400 million more common people to go.
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Quantum Gravity Loops Back To Ancient Atomic Logic, and The Big Bang Becomes A Big Boun... - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-cutting-edge-science-problems logic language science quantum
shared by sissij on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Greeks had the “first true alphabet”: a “universal” writing system that used a few letters to encode the infinite variety of all possible utterances. Similarly, all matter is written in a "language… of atoms."
  • Mysterious “meanings” still surround 100-year-old quantum mechanics equations
  • Their meaning/function/grammar is relational and sequential and word-like. The information encoded in matching sequential text-like compositions matters (DNA—>RNA, letters—>“social cartesian” lexicon).
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Beyond the grammars of geometry and algebra lies a domain of not math-like but text-like compositions and meanings (of semantics beyond mathematics).
  • 17. Word and world both have grammars that don’t fit our available mathematical rules.
  • 18. Reality is relational, and not entirely objective. Subject and object aren’t separable, they’re entangled, inescapably. “Objective” is always relative to some other system/observer. 
  • sissij on 28 Feb 17
     
    I find it very interesting that the author is trying o look at the world from a different perspective than mathematics. He thinks atoms as a language that have grammar and meanings. He thinks mathematical rules cannot fully explain our world because it is too objective. He involves the idea of language to describe how the world is entangled and relational. As we learned in TOK, language is an important AOK that shows human civilization in a very complicated way. Language is flexible, emotional and relational. It gives things meaning as human likes to assign meaning and pattern to things around. The world around us are not just cold fact, we as observers give them meaning to exist. In that sense, the concept of language can better help us depict the world. --Sissi (2/27/2017)
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