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Interesting NPR story on the use of "ax"--apparently not simply the oft-maligned African-American Vernacular English version of "ask". That particular pronunciation of the word has a more distinguished pedigree, dating back to Chaucer.

Science writer Virginia Morell, in her wonderful new book Animal Wise, describes an experiment involving horses and whinnies - whinnies being very like names. She also cites the research of ornithologist Karl Berg, who states that while most people might think, 'Well, all those [bird] calls are just noise, but I think they're having conversations." Berg has listened to so many parrots in so many nests for so long, he has been able to identify that weeks after birth, these little birds begin to use very specific peeps to identify themselves to others. Not only that, they learn the peeping "names" of their parents, brothers, sisters, and use them in conversation, as in, "Peep-duh-dee-Peep, is that you?" Apparently, dolphins also use particular clicks and whistles to designate particular individuals.

2006 NPR interactive news special on the social underpinnings of language, containing short sound bites with various language researchers. 5 topics are covered: the importance of context in helping deduce meaning, social connections and language, Theory of Mind (how humans observe each other, gauging the effect that words are having on listeners, in order to assess others' beliefs, intentions and desires), and empathy. The video clip of Kanzi, the bonobo ape, cooking hamburgers with his human friends is a classic!

This article looks in on parents teaching a second language to their toddler which is the ideal time for kids to pick up a second language. 

We start building our sense of people's personalities from the first words they utter. Phil McAleer, of the University of Glasgow, ran an experiment where he recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth. Interestingly, participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices. What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. "Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted." (Perhaps a reason to avoid uptalk, if you're female?)

This study shows the science behind first impressions, and how certain voices can affect first impressions.

This was a really interesting interview with an admission committee, more specifically an extremely picky admission committee at Amherst College. It was really eye-opening to see some of the students that were getting turned down, or set aside. There were these students that seemed to have done everything "right", like getting good grades and taking hard class and doing community service, but still didn't get accepted. It's decisions like this that make applying for college and submitting these college essays such a daunting task, as you really don't quite know exactly what will read well for the admission committee. Therefore, applicants are stuck with the options, to be extremely honest and personal but risk saying something that reveals a bad quality, or to be rather general and play it safe, but risk the lack of individuality.

Has American English become homogenized? Have our regional ways of saying particular things - sometimes in very particular ways - receded into the past? Or do we talk as funny as ever?

Bilingual TV shows and networks have just begun popping up in the past few years. For some, it's important to serve the bilingual audience. For others, it seems unnecessary because bilingual people can already enjoy both Spanish and English-language shows.

"A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community that subsists on farming and hunting." Also has sound samples.

Prof. Jeff Zachs: "When they're reading the story, they're building simulations in their head of events that are described by the story... language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there's an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other's brains."

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

"Susan Levine finds that simply repeating the numbers isn't as good as helping kids understand what they mean... "Counting objects and saying, 'Oh, you have four cars: one, two, three, four,' while you point at them - seems to be better," Levine says."

See also the graphs at the bottom of the page. "Perhaps the biggest collection of words ever assembled has just gone online: 500 billion of them, from 5 million books published over the past four centuries... The words make up a searchable database that researchers at Harvard say is a new and powerful tool to study cultural change... You can, for instance, type in a word or a short phrase, and the database produces a graph - a curve that traces how often an author used those words every year since 1800."

"Chinese speakers can download nine numbers in two seconds, English speakers only seven. Dehaene thinks our brains scoop up information in two-second gulps, or loops, so the Chinese are regularly getting a number-retention advantage just because their number words are shorter."

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