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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

This study examines how bilingualism affects the wages of Asian and Hispanic workers using 2000 Census data. In contradiction to the general belief that bilingualism can provide a competitive advantage in the labor market, we find no evidence that 1.5-generation and U.S.-born Asian and Hispanic bilingual workers generally have higher wages than their English monolingual co-ethnics; in some cases, in fact, their wages are significantly lower. In search of specific circumstances under which bilingualism might provide an economic advantage, we also examine interactions of language with such variables as education, employment in the public rather than the private sector, and the size of the population of mother-tongue speakers. With limited exceptions, we find no sign of greater economic returns to bilingualism. Since bilingualism requires considerable effort to maintain across generations in the United States, we conclude that the virtual absence of economic rewards for it creates pressure for linguistic assimilation.

Article looks at the linguistic shift away from the older generation "you're welcome" to "no problem" or "no worries." The article notes that formal language is unquestionably falling by the wayside, likely due to the increasing use of digital technology. Instant messaging and texting have compelled many young people to forgo punctuation altogether, since receiving a message with a period or question mark at the end of it can induce anxiety for some. This is because punctuation is now considered "formal," which roughly translates to "serious."The same is true for "you're welcome," according to linguists, and it might explain why younger generations are using less formal phrases when someone thanks them. While some people might mistakenly think that doing so suggests that the service was irksome or inconvenient, the linguists cited in the article contribute this phenomenon largely to linguistic mirroring. This basically means if the people you interact with on a day-to-day basis often say "you're welcome" or "no problem," then you'll likely mirror whatever phrase is more frequently being used around you. "I believe that this is just part of the evolution of language," adds Saccardi. "The majority of speakers will not intellectualize the connotative meanings of their utterances. Rather, they are more likely to just use particular phrases instead of others because that's what they have grown into." Interestingly, the phrase "you're welcome" has acquired a new meaning for younger generations, as many use it sarcastically to point out that another person forgot to thank them, as in Maui's song in _Moana_.

This article talks about how AI-generated texts can be distinguished from human writing. It explains why it is essential for us to tell them apart and why it is still not able to perfectly mimic humans.

This article discusses some of the ways AI-generated text can differ from sentences written by humans.

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.

This article focused on the impacts that technology has had on the writing for younger generations. The style of writing that is used for social media has become known as "Netspeak" and typically consists of shorter sentences and phrases, as well as shortening of words through abbreviations or substitutions. ie. lol for laughing out loud, or w8 for weight. These came about as ways to fit the short character limits set by many sites, however this style of writing has been observed to start affecting other more formal forms of writing. Although this is something that some people have become aware of, there are still many people who do this without thinking, and don't realize that they have started to use netspeak in writing for papers

Not about linguistics, but of general interest to students. Talks about genetic basis for test anxiety--and under which conditions it is advantageous. This article is long but gets more interesting the further you read.

The Waverly Pilot is claimed to be the first "smart earpiece" capable of translating between two languages, similar to the BabelFish in Douglas Adams' sci-fi novel, _The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy_, providing instantaneous translation to its wearer. While this first generation device works only when speaking to someone also wearing an earpiece, future generations could listen to everything happening nearby, so pairs of devices won't be needed. It is designed to work offline so it won't incur data charges when used overseas.

This advice is really, really helpful. I agree that it's important to focus on something specific that you're passionate about. At the same time, it's hard to expand on this and be detailed/focused throughout the entire essay. I like the advice of being humble and not showing off because the way you write and your topic can tell a lot about who you are as a person.

I think the best bit of information i took from this article, is showing how the struggle of overcoming some great difficulty. On a general sense, if I were to do an essay on some type of failure, I think the best way to continue the essay would be to show how I was able to push past this downfall, and learn from it. It's important to let the reader understand the hardship you went through and show them how you made the best of a seemingly terrible event.

I think this tip sheet really summed up most of the other articles into a concise, helpful article. Overall, I learned that, in terms of the essay, colleges don't really care about any particular achievements. Instead, the colleges are looking at your voice to see what type of person you are. You should stray from writing about others and focus more about your own feelings and thoughts. Finally, college essay readers have seen all of the generic essays before, so there are more pros than cons in taking a risk by saying something controversial.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they're passed on, they're changed beyond recognition - as psychologists' investigations of how rumors evolve have shown. In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, "Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person's memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations… Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material." What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics - memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it.

French and German, like other Romance language, have masculine and feminine forms of nouns, and "when referring to several people by their role... and the gender of that group is either not known, irrelevant or mixed," they will use the masculine form. However, the masculine form used in this way is traditionally thought to be generic - but "the French and German participants took longer to say that the second sentence made sense if it referred to women."

"In its contentious half-century, "could care less" has probably generated as much usage comment as aggravate has in 150 years."

Provides information on pitch in general and its relation to learning language, particularly pinpointing areas of the brain that process and interprets pitch in language.

The new generation is a technological generation. This new digital age has introduced a new medium for communication, texting. Is texting destroying language or creating a new one?

Generalized benefits of learning a foreign language.

Logical Fallacy: Hasty Generalization Babies can do easy things + Etrade is an easy thing The hasty generalization is that Etrade is so easy a baby can do it. This is not true because babies can't go online and invest. However it makes the consumer think about how easy etrade is to use.