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Reaching for the right words (Image: Jean-Luc Chapin/Agence VU/Camera Press) LAST month, a New York court ruled that Hercules and Leo, two research chimps at Stony Brook University, had no right to legal personhood. But the fact that such a case made it through the courts at all shows our new willingness to consider the issue of personhood for other species.

This article talks about emojis and why they are not good to use when texting someone. An edition of the newspaper USA Today last week chose to supplement all its front-page stories with Facebook's new "emoji reactions"*. Of course, the internet's response was largely one of horrified bemusement (currently we lack an emoji for "horrified bemusement" so, apologies readers, you're going to have to do the hard work yourselves by reading the words the old-fashioned way).

"Talk to your baby," Dr. Cutler said. "Your baby is picking up useful knowledge about language even though they're not actually learning words." Before, many believed babies did not learn sound until six months of life. However, studies now have shown that "newborns can recognize the voices they've been hearing for the last trimester in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers, and prefer those voices to the voices of strangers." In addition, the language heard before birth and in the first months of life affect sound perception and sound production. These two discoveries have led to a better understanding of language learning and brain development in babies.

This article explains what Braille is: a system of raised dots that can be read with the fingers by people who are blind or who have low vision. Braille is not a language, but rather a code used to represent language in literacy. Braille is often written in 'uncontracted braille,' which is more common in younger kids or newly blind/visual impaired people and included entire words represented in braille, whereas 'contracted braille' is a shortened form that can use just the first and last letters of a word, respectively.

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

According to a new study, twenty-five percent of Hawaii's citizens speak a non-English language at home. (For contrast, the national average is 21%.) The number of non-English speakers in Hawaii has risen by 44% over the last thirty years, proving Hawaii's language diversity.

"The field of natural language processing doesn't usually get showcased in a widely watched game show, but that's exactly what happened on Jeopardy! over the last three evenings, as IBM's Watson supercomputer squared off against the two best humans ever to play the game."

The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii's native speakers on Ni`ihau. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that Niihau speakers use different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement, a.k.a. "university Hawaiian"?

Hillary CLinton's change in body language has played an important role in her turnaround. That's something that women notice more than men. But, as research shows, men as well as women make split-second, and often long-lasting, judgments about others based on how they carry themselves -- before even hearing them speak.

This article talks about a study of the effect of language used during debates and its effect on the polls. It was written right before the last of the 2016 presidential debates. "Linguist style matching" is a trick that linguists have studied, and it focuses on how candidates state their points, not what their points are.

The alveolar trill (rolled R) is a very difficult sound to produce and is often one of the last sounds that Spanish speaking children learn. The sound is also extremely prevalent in most romance languages and as a result special focus is applied to it in the classroom. The range-mapping technique is a very effective way to learn the rolling R. It is based off of cognitive research that suggests that having variation within the full range of a motor skill allows for better learning. The steps are as follow: develop tongue and mouth awareness, learn to create vibrations, and use the trill in words.

Article discusses the findings of researchers who've documented and categorized the utterances of the dying (morbid, but true!) Author Michael Erard notes that more research should be done in this area, because "Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people's fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients."

The Apostrophe Protection Society was disbanded last year after they "failed their mission," but does it really matter? Does something as minor to the English language like an apostrophe actually important enough to deserve a protection society?

It was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months.

Researchers looked at international adoptees (babies that were adopted at a couple months old and grew up hearing a different language than they heard while in the womb) and were able to see what babies hear in the womb and soon after birth has an affect on how they perceive sounds. Newborn babies can actually recognize the voices they've been hearing for the last three months in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers. When born, babies prefer these familiar voices to strangers voices. Babies can also detect rhythm and prefer other languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with different rhythms.

Expressing thanks may be one of the simplest ways to feel better. In positive psychology research, gratitude is consistently associated with happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. Two psychologists, Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami, asked participants in their study to write a few sentences each week, focusing on particular topics. After 10 weeks, those who wrote about gratitude were more optimistic. Another leading researcher in this field, Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, tested the impact of various positive psychology interventions on 411 people, each compared with a control assignment of writing about early memories. When their week's assignment was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who had never been properly thanked for his or her kindness, participants immediately exhibited a huge increase in happiness scores. This impact was greater than that from any other intervention, with benefits lasting for a month. Overall, gratitude is a quality that one can successfully cultivate further with more practice.

An article on how many endangered languages are dying out

Article discusses the importance of preserving endangered indigenous languages: it's not only the languages at risk but also the world views they express - tens of thousands of years of accumulated ecological, biological and cultural knowledge. "Every last word means another lost world," is how the Living Tongue Institute for Endangered Languages puts it.

In the last half century, much effort has been placed into teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. However, successes have been limited: animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life. Here are some things that differentiate humans from animals: 1. The fact that animals don't ask "why?" shows they don't aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification. 2. The inability of animals to use negation shows they lack basic logical abilities. 3. Another essential characteristic of human language is its normativity-namely, the fact that there are right and wrong uses of a word or phrase. Animals lack this capacity.