Group items tagged

Language is common to all humans; we seem to be "hard-wired" for it. Many social scientists and philosophers say it's this ability to use language symbolically that makes us "human." Though it may be a universal human attribute, language is hardly simple. For decades, linguists' main task was to track and record languages. But, like so many areas of science, the field of linguistics has evolved dramatically over the past 50 years or so. Today's science of linguistics explores: -the sounds of speech and how different sounds function in a language -the psychological processes involved in the use of language -how children acquire language capabilities -social and cultural factors in language use, variation and change -the acoustics of speech and the physiological and psychological aspects involved in producing and understanding it -the biological basis of language in the brain This special report, compiled by the National Science Foundation, touches on nearly all of these areas by answering questions such as: How does language develop and change? Can the language apparatus be "seen" in the brain? Does it matter if a language disappears? What exactly is a dialect? How can sign language help us to understand languages in general? Answers to these and other questions have implications for neuroscience, psychology, sociology, biology and more.

A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.

This article describes the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world's languages. It considers model population size and the proportion of second language speakers in the speech community as sociolinguistic predictors, and other factors that have recently been suggested to influence typological and sociolinguistic language variations.

Code-switching involves moving freely between two different languages or dialects of a single language. Many people of color, especially mixed-race and multi-cultural people naturally code-switch. This article shows us Sheena Cobb as an example because she uses both the American Sign Language (ASL) and Black ASL depending on who she is with. Elements of black culture appear in Black ASL such as religious practice, cooking, humor, music, hairstyles, words and phrases typically used in the black communities. People who use Black ASL tend to sign with two hands, in different positions, in a larger signing space and with more repetition than with regular ASL signs.

Ironically, native L1= English speakers are worse at delivering their message than people who speak English as a second or third language. Non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. L2=English speakers generally use more limited vocabulary and simpler expressions, without flowery language or slang. Consequently, their language tends to be shorter, clearer, and more direct. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang, references, and baffling abbreviations specific to their own culture. "The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others." When trying to communicate in English with a group of people with varying levels of fluency, it's important to be receptive and adaptable, tuning your ears into a whole range of different ways of using English, Jenkins says. "People who've learned other languages are good at doing that, but native speakers of English generally are monolingual and not very good at tuning in to language variation."

Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance. Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much. Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks." The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages. "Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

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"?

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.

I thought this was an intersting article that builds upon the topic we've learned in class. With the evolution of language overtime, there is a trend that it get simpler and simpler. It's fascinating to see as we look back on past variations of English to see how complicated it is for us to understand but 200 years from now, people will be looking back at our time and wondering why we spoke the way we do now.

How environmental factors come to shape the emergence of linguistic This article describes how environmental motivations drive the emergence of different communicative conventions.

This article explains language variations and behavioral differences with the presence of a large group and without the presence of a group at all.

This article writes about the variation in speech rate. Some languages tend to have more syllables per a second. For example, French, Japanese, and Spanish speakers tend to have speak more syllables per a second (almost 8/s) than German, Vietnamese, or Mandarin speakers (roughly 5/s). Although stereotypes exist relating to speech rate, there is no connection between intelligence and speech rate. One significant and consistent variable in speech rate is age. Children speak slowly, then speed up until their 40s, then slow down again in their 50s and 60s.

"Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female. ... The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. ... Some colleges, too, are starting to adopt nongender language."