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Summary: A new AI-based system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity -- while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story -- into a continuous stream of text. Unlike other thought decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive.

"Neural processing that goes into deciphering simple two-word phrases is different from what happens when decoding complete sentences and other more complex linguistic expressions."

This was a very interesting article about how to read body language, specifically if you are in sales and work on a commission.

This article is about how scientists are discussing an A.I. that could translate thoughts into speech through MRI scans. A study was done on three people and analyzed their brain patterns as they listened to words and phrases in order to understand what part of the brain lights up when that word/phrase is said. They also used an A.I to translate MRI scans into words and phrases. However, the A.I.'s translation is doesn't make sense. While the result wasn't perfect, it discovered that the A.I can also decode meaning and imagination. While this is beginning of this kind of A.I. technology, it's possible that in the future, they will be able to decode our thoughts.

This article covers how language isn't just a form of communication but is a tool used to define identities, influence power dynamics, and express thoughts, emotions, and ideas. Language is monumental to society as it brings people together and is the bridge between people.

Researchers in Sichuan, China, believe they have decoded the meaning behind frequently used types of panda language (from bleats to meows).

Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. "What is virtually certain," writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is "that the first written symbols began life as pictures." Pictograms-i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun-were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time.

emojis were born from a man named Shigetaka Kurita back in the late 1990s. They came up with emojis as a way to appeal to teens. Emoji which is a japanese neologism means "picture word". A bunch of different emojis can actually be traced back to some Japanese custom or tradition.

"Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. ... In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds. ... With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen. They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant. ... The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality." Full study: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

Speech must be decoded by systems for semantic memory and syntax. Speech is open, inventive, improvised; it is rich in ambiguity and meaning. There is a huge freedom in this, making spoken language almost infinitely flexible and adaptable - but also vulnerable to mishearing.

"The Assyrian Dictionary is not simply a word list. By detailing the history and range of uses of each word, this unique dictionary is in essence a cultural encyclopedia of Mesopotamian history, society, literature, law and religion and is an indispensable research tool for any scholar anywhere who seeks to explore the written record of Mesopotamian civilization"

"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail - or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author's idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?"

Psychology professor Rachel Albert studies babbling, which until recently was considered to be mere motor practice, something babies did to exercise their mouths. Few people thought of it as a vocabulary all its own. But parents, take note: All those repetitive syllables are an important signal. Albert says they tell us that babies are "putting themselves in this optimal state of being ready to learn." Babbles create an opportunity for a social feedback loop - also known as a conversation. And if you listen closely, you can even decipher a babble's four distinctive categories, from the whiny "nasal creaking" of newborns to the more mature bah-bahs and dah-dahs of older babies. But Albert says if you can't tell your "quasi-resonant vocalizations" from your "canonical syllables," don't worry too much. All you really need to know is this: babbling equals learning.

When Nicaraguan teachers failed to communicate with their 200 deaf students, the students worked together to create a linguistic structure of their own. Judy Kegl, a sign-language expert was contacted to try and decode their new language.

Researchers from King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans. They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibres connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain, allows the 'sound' of a word to be connected to the regions responsible for its articulation. Differences in the development of these auditory-motor connections may explain differences in people's ability to learn words. Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing. In participants able to learn words more successfully their arcuate fasciculus was more myelinated i.e. the nervous tissue facilitated faster conduction of the electrical signal. In addition the activity between the two regions was more co-ordinated in these participants. Dr Catani concludes, "Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children."

Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child." People use an array of strategies to make sense of confusing statements. This article reveals the different strategies brains use to create a correct sentence based on semantic expectations.

Teachers can use music to deepen the learning environment in a literacy classroom. Many commonalities exist between music and literacy, especially in the pre-K to second grade years, and therefore music education is a vital element in children's literary development. Here are some areas that reading and music both address: 1. Development of auditory processes 2. Visual decoding processes 3. Vocabulary growth occurs whenever students are exposed to new material, like a story or a song. Putting new information into a musical context can also help student memory. 4. Poetry: vocal music is essentially poetry set to a melody 5. Building confidence in performance, whether it's vocal or instrumental.

Today, people who can't speak or write because of paralysis have very limited ways of communicating, e.g. using a pointer to touch words or letters on a screen or having computers track their eye movements. In a medical first, researchers harnessed the brain waves of a paralyzed man unable to speak - and turned what he intended to say into sentences on a computer screen. Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, led the work in developing a "speech neuroprosthetic" -- decoding brain waves that normally control the vocal tract, the tiny muscle movements of the lips, jaw, tongue and larynx that form each consonant and vowel.

The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. A new app, is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences - machine-learning algorithms - to decode animal communication. The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined "intent," such as happy, resting, hunting or "mating call." It then displays a conversational, plain English "translation" of whatever intent it detects. MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong. In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing "happy" and "pain," according to the results. Dogs could soon have their own day. Zoolingua, a start-up based in Arizona, is hoping to create an A.I.-powered dog translator that will analyze canine vocalizations and body language. Still, even sophisticated algorithms may miss critical real-world context and cues, said Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition at Barnard College. For instance, much of canine behavior is driven by scent. "How is that going to be translated, when we don't know the extent of it ourselves?" Dr. Horowitz said in an email.

This article writes about the complexities of animal communication and how elephants are able to use low frequency sounds to stay in touch amongst each other. Generative artificial intelligence is able to help humans generate an algorithm that is capable of detecting animal calls, grumbles, grunts, squeaks etc and translate it into a language that humans are comfortable interpreting.