Group items tagged

"EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries." Interesting data, especially about how different factors correlate with English ability. Direct link to report: http://www.ef.com/sitecore/__/~/media/efcom/epi/pdf/EF-EPI-2011.pdf

"If the word of the year is supposed to be an item that has actually shaped the perception of important events, I can't see going with anything but occupy. ... The word itself can take credit for a lot of its success - this isn't an item like "debt ceiling," that just happened to be hitched to a big story. But give props to the magic of metonymy ... And talking about "the one percent" has its advantages. It seems to put things on an objective basis and strips away the vagueness and the emotional overtones that go with talking about "the rich.""

"Dr. Lera Boroditsky tells us about a language in Australia in which a pigeon-like ability to orient yourself is so crucial...you can't even say hello without knowing exactly which direction you're facing." Part of this podcast: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/

"Research suggests that bilingual people can hold Alzheimer's disease at bay for longer, and that bilingual children are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking." See also: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/100218-bilingual-brains-alzheimers-dementia-science-aging/

Ryan, you're the best!

"Did occupy occupy your attention? Were you talking about tiger moms or tiger blood? Or were you paralyzed by the condition known as FOMO (fear of missing out)?"

Online magazine for teen girls: founded and edited by girls. Takes submissions.

"Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists.... Piantadosi and colleagues suggest that the relationship of word length to information content might not only make it more efficient to convey information linguistically but also make language cognition a smoother ride for the reader or listener."

"Word usage in 40 speeches given at graduations this year."

If you're looking for the species that most closely matches our linguistic prowess, surprisingly, you won't find it in the apes, the primates, or even in the mammals. You have to travel to a far more distant relative, all the way to a family of birds known as the songbirds. The vocal life of a songbird is similar to ours in many ways. They learn songs by imitating their elders. Like human speech, these songs are passed down from one generation to the next. Songbirds are also best equipped to learn songs in their youth, and they have to practice to develop their ability. They can improvise and string together riffs into new songs, and over generations these modified songs can turn into new dialects. And like us, they come hard-wired with 'speech-centers' in their brain that are dedicated to language processing. An experiment from 2009 by Fehér and colleagues took newly hatched songbirds of the zebra finch species and raised them in sound proof chambers. They did this during their critical period of language development. Surprisingly, this culturally isolated generation of birds began to develop their own songs. These songs were less musical than your typical songbird song - they had irregular rhythms, they would stutter their notes, and the notes would sound more noisy. But the researchers were curious where this would lead. They listened to the songs of the next few generations of pupils, the offspring of these children of silence. What they found was quite amazing. In just two generations, the songs started to change in unexpected ways - they were becoming more musical. In fact, they started to converge upon the song of the wild songbirds, even though none of these birds had ever heard the wild songs. The Feher study suggests, but does not prove, that songbirds must have an innate understanding of the structures of their language. In other words, they seem to have a built-in intuition about grammar. Over time, they may be using these intuitions to develo

Great explanation for how to do a one-person experiment on yourself using the n=1 experimental design principles.

A South African scientist who was pregnant wanted to document what sounds actually reached the fetus during pregnancy. She designed a waterproof microphone that was put inside next to the fetus' neck. Outside music was recorded by the microphone proving that music can be heard in the womb. Music also stimulates the brain more than anything else scientist have tested and has been used in some cases to coax parts of the brain to take over the job of other, dead parts of the brain in stroke patients

This article talks about how texting can affect a teenager's brain

This article has a video of an experiment that the Mythbusters conducted. Their test subject submerged her arm into ice water, the first time around she could not swear, and the second time around, she could swear. They tested how long she could keep her arm in each time.

Though newspaper style guides attempt to steer writers and editors through the trickier waters of the English language and try to confer consistency in grammar, punctuation and spelling, their well-intended prescriptivism may result in confusion and controversy. Take, for instance, the term "actor".

Here are seven random numbers. Sort of like a telephone number, but arranged vertically. Take a glance - just a glance - then pause, take out a piece of paper and see how many you can recall. Done? According to the French neurologist and mathematician Stanislas Dehaene, about 50 percent of English speakers can remember all seven numbers.

This is about how text messaging has been affecting a student's way of writing in the classroom.

Slang and other text-talk terms have been making their way into student's academic essays and even their college essays. Students have stopped capitalizing words and stopped using punctuation altogether. While the future is unclear, it may be possible for academic writings to learn to accept this new way of writing.

An interesting (if crass read) about how Chinese Internet users have circumvented governmental censorship via homophonic, sometimes cross-lingual puns, often taking the form of Internet memes, in order to talk about forbidden topics, use taboo words, or criticize the government.