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Lara Cowell

The Art of Condolence - 1 views

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    Offering a written expression of condolence (from the Latin word condolere, to grieve or to suffer with someone) used to be a staple of polite society. "A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical - never mind," advised the 1960 edition of Emily Post. "Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value." But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. Just over two and a half million Americans die every year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and we buy 90 million sympathy cards annually, a spokeswoman for Hallmark said. But 90 percent of those cards are bought by people over 40. Take-away tips from the article: 1. BEING TONGUE-TIED IS O.K. 2. SHARE A POSITIVE MEMORY 3. NO COMPARISONS 4. DON'T DODGE THE 'D' WORDS 5. GET REAL. 6. FACEBOOK IS NOT ENOUGH
Peyton Lee

Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Regain Language - 2 views

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    Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, are treating stroke patients who have little or no spontaneous speech by associating melodies with words and phrases. "Music, and music-making, is really a very special form of a tool or an intervention that can be used to treat neurological disorders, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel and Harvard University.
Brad Kawano

Time for a Difficult Conversation? on ADVANCE for Health Information Professionals - 2 views

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    "No matter whether you're a new hire or a veteran professional, at some point you're going to have to initiate a 'difficult conversation' with a boss, co-worker or colleague. This conversation could be between you and one person, or it could be between you and an entire group of people."
Brad Kawano

Ten Famous Speeches in American History - 1 views

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    Slightly more narrow survey of speeches compared to any of the earlier posts. Still I see that all of the speeches use great diction and word choice and center around topics that were and remain highly controversial and powerful even in today's society.
Ryan Catalani

The Upside of Dyslexia - NYTimes.com - 5 views

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    "But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. ... Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you're adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you're likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery. ... Although people with dyslexia are found in every profession, including law, medicine and science, observers have long noted that they populate fields like art and design in unusually high numbers. ... in some situations, it turns out, those with dyslexia are actually the superior learners."
Parker Tuttle

Can Facebook Save A Dying Language? @PSFK - 6 views

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    Margaret Noori, a professor at the University of Michigan is exploring the implications of bridging the digital divide to use social media as a linguistic preservation tool. Noori's studies are centered around Anishinaabemowin, the native language of the Ojibwe, Michigan's indigenous population.
Lara Cowell

Chimps Can Use Gestures to Communicate - 0 views

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    Researchers at Georgia State University's Language Research Center examined how two language-trained chimpanzees communicated with a human experimenter to find food. Their results are the most compelling evidence to date that primates can use gestures to coordinate actions in pursuit of a specific goal. Dr. Charles Menzel, a senior research scientist, notes, "The chimpanzees used gestures to recruit the assistance of an otherwise uninformed person and to direct the person to hidden objects 10 or more meters away...the findings illustrate the high level of intentionality chimpanzees are capable of, including their use of directional gestures. This study adds to our understanding of how well chimpanzees can remember and communicate about their environment."
Lara Cowell

Grasping Metaphors: UC San Diego Research Ties Brain Area To Figures Of Speech - 3 views

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    According to research led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, a region of the brain known as the angular gyrus is probably at least partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor. Ramachandran and colleagues tested four right-handed patients with damage to the left angular gyrus. Fluent in English and otherwise intelligent and mentally lucid, the patients showed gross deficits in comprehending such common proverbs as "the grass is always greener on the other side" and "an empty vessel makes more noise." Asked to explain the sayings, the patients tended give responses that were literal. The metaphorical meaning escaped them almost entirely.
rtakaki16

Conexx event bridges U.S.-Israeli business gap - 1 views

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    How can Americans and Israelis best conduct business? That was the central question at the opening session of the 19th annual Professional & Business Seminar presented by Conexx: American Israel Business Connector on Wednesday, Sep. 30. The event at Northpark Town Center aimed to discuss the differences between American and Israeli business cultures and explore methods to expand business partnerships between the two countries.
Ryan Catalani

Radiolab podcast: "Words" - 1 views

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    Three amazing stories about language: "We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago." (also, the transcript is here: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/)
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    i'm enjoying it right now! check out the video, too. i'll try to bookmark it (my first!).
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    Ahh...I see Ryan found it first! Thanks, Ryan!
Lisa Stewart

Primate Gesture Center | Publications - Homo sapiens - 0 views

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    good bibliography on primate gesture
Lisa Stewart

Gestural Communication Paper - De Waal « Language Evolution - 0 views

  • “Gestures are used across a wide range of contexts whereas most facial expressions and vocalizations are very narrowly used for one particular context,”
  • Although all primates use their voices and facial expressions to communicate, only people and the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutan and gorillas — use these types of gestures as well. De Waal noted that great apes first appeared about 15 to 20 million years old, meaning such gestures may have been around that long. “A gesture that occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees as well as humans likely was present in the last common ancestor,” Pollick said in a statement. “A good example of a shared gesture is the open-hand begging gesture, used by both apes and humans.” This last common ancestor may date to about 5 million to 6 million years ago.
  • He added that when the apes gesture, they like to use their right hands, which is controlled by the left side of the brain — the same side where the language control center appears in the human brain.
Ryan Catalani

Futurity.org - To read words, brain detects motion - 1 views

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    "An area of the brain called the Visual Word Form Area, or VWFA, is activated whenever it sees something that looks like a word-and is so adept at packaging visual input for the brain's language centers that activation happens within a few tens of milliseconds. ... Instead of being "luminance-defined," words can be "motion-defined," distinguishable from their background not by color or contrast, but by their apparent direction of movement. Against a field of dots moving one way, words made up of dots moving in the other direction will "pop out" to most viewers, even if the word and background dots are the same shade."
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    Example of the motion-defined words used in the study: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/september/videos/973.html
Kathryn Murata

The International Journal of Language, Society and Culture - 10 views

  • second language
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      What second languages are most popular among the Japanese? Does learning certain languages pose more benefits than learning others?
  • apply the principles of first language acquisition to their second language learning experience
  • bilingual upbringing
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • area of the brain
  • second language development in Japan.
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      What about learning second languages in other countries?
  • Broca’s area
  • native like quality exposure
  • six year period
  • how much exposure to a second language should a kindergarten-aged child receive in order to develop native like competency or at least reduce such barriers?
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      Does that mean that we were capable of learning a second language like a native language in kindergarten?
  • English as a second language in Japan
  • motivation to continue studying English throughout the secondary school years will be much higher
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      Maybe this is true for music, sports, etc. too
  • decline in learning abilities from puberty
  • critical period for second language learners
  • it is possible for adult learners to achieve native like performance
  • alternative to the critical-period hypothesis is that second-language learning becomes compromised with age
  • children growing up without normal linguistic and social interaction
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      Reminds me of the Forbidden experiment
  • 20 months until age 13
  • inconceivable mental and physical disabilities
  • syntactic skills were extremely deficient
  • Genie used her right hemisphere for both language and non-language functions
  • particularly good at tasks involving the right hemisphere
  • 46 Chinese and Korean natives living in America
  • three and seven years of age on arrival did equally as well as the control group of native English speakers. Those between eight and fifteen did less well
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      It would be interesting to replicate this experiment here where we have mixed ethnicities.
  • regardless of what language is used elevated activity occurs within the same part of Broca’s area
  • early bilingual subject
  • For monolingual parents living within their own monolingual society it is possible to raise a child bilingually
  • 95% of people the left hemisphere of our brain is the dominant location of language
  • two specific areas that divide language by semantics (word meaning)
  • People with damage to Broca’s area are impaired in the use of grammar with a notable lack of verbs however are still able to understand language
  • actual development of our language centers begins well before birth
  • supports the notion of speaking to your child before birth
  • Japanese babies can detect the difference between the /l/ and /r/ sounds which proves most difficult for their parents
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      Can Japanese people still pronounce sounds like "L" at any age?
  • survival of the fittest
  • critical period of development is when there is an excess of synapses and the brain plasticity remains at a maximum
    • Kathryn Murata
       
      Connections between science and language, Darwin's theory of evolution (survival of the fittest)
  • importance of experience during sensitive period of language development
  • age related factors may impair our ability in acquiring a second language
  • child’s parent’s own 2nd language ability
Steve Wagenseller

Independent thinking -- corpus callosotomy video - 2 views

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    In the 1960s, Michael Gazzaniga with Roger Sperry & Joseph Bogen pioneered split brain research. This video shows how one patient's language centers for comprehension and speech are now distinct due to the cutting of his corpus callosum.
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    Wow! I think the students will find this fascinating.
Brian Piper

Do weight loss and weight gain affect the voice? Laryngology Los Angeles - 0 views

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    About the Author Dr. Reena Gupta is the Director of the Voice and Swallowing Center at OHNI. Dr. Gupta has devoted her practice to the care of patients with voice and swallowing problems. She is board certified in otolaryngology and laryngology and fellowship trained in laryngology, specializing in the care of the professional voice.
Lara Cowell

This Is What It's Like To Be Awake During Brain Surgery - 0 views

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    The recent advent of brain-mapping technology-which allows doctors to create a precise digital replica of a person's brain cartography--has made more surgeons comfortable with the concept of keeping patients awake while they operate. This article profiles a woman, Brittany Capone, who's having open-brain surgery to remove a tumor that's dangerously close to a region in the brain that controls speech and the ability to comprehend language. By doing the operation while she is awake and speaking, her surgeon, Dr. Philip Gutin, can figure out exactly where the offending growth ends and the area of the brain called the Wernicke's center begins. This way, Gutin can see how close he can cut without permanently affecting his patient's ability to talk. What neurosurgeons are learning through mapping and documenting their experiences is also informing general knowledge about where brain structures are located and the slightly different positions they can take in different people.
Lara Cowell

Neural sweet talk: Taste metaphors emotionally engage the brain - 0 views

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    New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."
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