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It's hard to imagine a more devastating diagnosis than ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease. For most people, it means their nervous system is going to deteriorate until their body is completely immobile. That also means they'll lose their ability to speak. Voice banking, a digital technology, allows ALS patients to record their voice and key messages in preparation for that time.

Al-Sayyid is a village in Israel, populated by congenitally-deaf people. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can. Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind? ABSL offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a "language instinct" that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

While this article is directed towards teachers, students can leverage this information to their advantage. Employ the following five strategies to aid retention: 1. Teach a friend. When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016). 2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016). 3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016). 4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015). 5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II wi

Stuttering, with its characteristic disruption in verbal fluency, has been known for centuries; earliest descriptions probably date back to the Biblical Moses' "slowness of speech and tongue" and his related avoidance behavior (Exodus 4, 10-13). Stuttering occurs in all cultures and ethnic groups ( Andrews et al. 1983; Zimmermann et al.

The New York Times ran a sobering cover story today on the epidemic of gun violence in the nation titled "A Drumbeat of Multiple Shootings, but America Isn't Listening". In the piece, journalists analyzed 358 armed encounters across the country where four or more people were killed or wounded - and the results were staggering.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, ALS patient, uses an Intel microprocessor which enables him to speak. Hawking irreversibly lost speech function in 1985 as a result of a tracheotomy. Since his hands are too weak to type, Hawking uses a single cheek muscle to control the device. The device uses an adaptive word predictor from London startup SwiftKey which allows Hawking to select a word after typing a letter. Intel worked with SwiftKey, incorporating many of Hawking's documents into the system, so that, in some cases, he no longer needs to type a character before the predictor guesses the word based on context. The new version of Hawking's user interface (now called ACAT, after Assistive Contextually Aware Toolkit) includes contextual menus that provide Hawking with various shortcuts to speak, search or email; and a new lecture manager, which gives him control over the timing of his delivery during talks. It also has a mute button, a curious feature that allows Hawking to turn off his speech synthesizer.

can't access full article, but this describes how they set up research experiments to answer their questions about the relationship between speech and gesture

JRR Tolkien's classic, _The Hobbit_, is about to be issued in `ōlelo Hawai`i, thanks to the work of translator, Keao NeSmith. Hawaiian is one of the most endangered of the Polynesian languages. It's hoped that "Ka Hopita" will legitimize Hawaiian as an everyday language and boost the efforts of a new generation of Hawaiian speakers. "Ka Hopita," which is set to be published on March 25 (a date important to Tolkien fans because it's the day that Bilbo Baggins came home from his adventures), is the first Tolkien novel to appear in an indigenous language of the United States.

Let's face it: There are some things we just can't face. Life's too short. Somebody's too sensitive. And the subject - whatever it is, although lately it's been whatever - is too third-rail dangerous. Border walls, charter schools, closing Guantánamo, global warming, that Al Jazeera documentary claiming Peyton Manning used performance-enhancing drugs, Hillary Clinton, #OscarsSoWhite: Why bring any of this up?

In this article addressed to teachers, author Julia Csillag cites research on the use of wordless texts to teach students with autism spectrum disorder. Wordless texts can be used to address a variety of skills that autistic students typically struggle with, including diverse literacy skills, cognitive flexibility, and nonverbal communication. Removing words and auditory information also supports autistic students since integrating information from multiple senses can take longer in autistic individuals, particularly if this information is linguistic. Removing words can therefore positively influence processing. Using wordless books or movies can build diverse literacy skills in terms of making inferences, understanding narrative structure, and using evidence to support a claim. All wordless "texts" support individuals' ability to make inferences, which is helpful since research shows that "students with Asperger syndrome…had challenges in making inferences from the text" (Knight & Sartrini, 2014). Moreover, researchers have found that "similar processes contribute to comprehension of narratives across different media" (Kendeou, P. et al, 2009), meaning that addressing visual inferences can transfer to inferences made during reading. Images and silent books or movies necessarily require students to infer what is happening, who the characters are, etc.

Researchers have found that English has seemed to organize itself based on spelling on its own. The four suffixes (-ous like in hazardous, -ic like in allergic, -al like in final and -y like in funny) have had consistent spellings over time. Researchers looked back at samples from around 1000 years ago and found that certain suffixes won over another spelling.

Stony Brook University recently discovered that the history and spelling of suffixes of English words is more orderly and organized than previously thought. This research is now being expanded with more tests on English speakers being able to learn to read more quickly, more consistently, and more fluently.

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.

A 2022 University of Cambridge study conducted by Sahakian, Langley, Chen, et al., and published in the journal _Neurology_, shows that that social isolation is linked to changes in brain structure and cognition - the mental process of acquiring knowledge - it even carries an increased risk of dementia in older adults. Previous research established that brain regions consistently involved in diverse social interactions are strongly linked to networks that support cognition, including the default mode network (which is active when we are not focusing on the outside world), the salience network (which helps us select what we pay attention to), the subcortical network (involved in memory, emotion and motivation) and the central executive network (which enables us to regulate our emotions). This particular study examined how social isolation affects grey matter - brain regions in the outer layer of the brain, consisting of neurons. It investigated data from nearly 500,000 people from the UK Biobank, with a mean age of 57. People were classified as socially isolated if they were living alone, had social contact less than monthly and participated in social activities less than weekly. The study also included neuroimaging (MRI) data from approximately 32,000 people. That data revealed that socially isolated people had poorer cognition, including in memory and reaction time, and lower volume of grey matter in many parts of the brain. These areas included the temporal region (which processes sounds and helps encode memory), the frontal lobe (which is involved in attention, planning and complex cognitive tasks) and the hippocampus - a key area involved in learning and memory, which is typically disrupted early in Alzheimer's disease. We also found a link between the lower grey matter volumes and specific genetic processes that are involved in Alzheimer's disease. Follow-ups with participants 12 years later showed that those who were socially isolated, but not

Although a densely academic article, Professor Patrick Heinrich of the University of Venice, discusses the history of colonization in Okinawa and its detrimental effect on the indigenous languages of the region. The Ryūkyūans are a group of indigenous peoples living in the Ryūkyū archipelago, which stretches southwest of the main Japanese island of Kyūshū towards Taiwan. The largest and most populated island of the archipelago, Okinawa Island, is actually closer to Manila, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul than it is to Tokyo. Though considered by the Japanese as speaking a dialect, the Ryūkyūans speak separate languages such as Okinawan, also known as Uchinaguchi, as well as Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. All are part of the Japonic language family, to which the Japanese language also belongs, and all are recognized as endangered languages by UNESCO. Language reclamation in the contemporary Ryukyus departs from a keen awareness that language loss is bigger than language itself. Activists know that losing a language entails the loss of an entire world of symbolic representations, and therefore, of how to place oneself in the world. Concepts of self, society, and place change when one language is replaced by another (Guay 2023). Language loss is no trivial loss. Language loss and the sociocultural displacement accompanying it are responsible for many problems in endangered speech communities worldwide, including those in Japan. Endangered language communities like the Ryukyuans and the Ainu are more likely than the majority Japanese to suffer from prejudice, poverty, spiritual disconnectedness from their heritage culture, family instability, or difficulties to climb the social ladder (see Onai 2011). Language loss also causes a weakening of cultural autonomy. It becomes more difficult to support the community's self-image if majority languages are adopted (Heinrich and Ishihara 2018). Language reclamation addresses these problems and in so doing contribut