Group items tagged

Ever get the feeling that presidential candidates talk down to voters? That may be because they're speaking at a 6th grade level.

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.

The experts weigh in on the American penchant for creating new words, expressions and distinctive ways of speaking. Have we become too informal? Are we lowering our standards? Can we control language change? The answers may surprise you. The Truth About Change Language sows its own seeds of change; social context gives it the fertile ground to grow and spread.

Essays should be more about how an experience affected a writer, and should give insight about the writer than just telling a story. Doing so will personalize the essay more and let the reader set the writer apart from the other thousands of applicants.

The writer can make their essay sound more personal by focusing on specific events or qualities within a larger event.

The writer needs to be able to convey how they changed or show specific qualities that they gained from events that impacted their lives. rather then just explaining a story in their lives because the admissions officer wont be able to know the real you.

This was interesting because the children speak their own animal language.

Strange but true story with interesting connections to the "Genie" case and the critical period hypothesis. In 2008, in Amstedten, Austria, two brothers, age 5 and 18, were discovered. They were being held captive in a cellar with their mother. The boys use animalistic noises rather than words to communicate with each other. Other than their mother, age 42, who'd lost most of her reading and writing skills after being imprisoned 24 years ago, their only source of linguistic input was a TV. A police officer who met the two boys noted they communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing. "If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate, which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."

"For years, the Web's lingua franca was English. ... For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has [now] become a lifeline. ... Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. ... Though most of the world's languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. ... Africa is the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. ... for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past."

The Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world's most irregularly spelled language. Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters. As there's no systematic way to learn to read or write modern English-people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed--English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. Moreover, English-speaking children then spend years progressing through different reading levels and mastering the spelling of more and more words. That means it typically takes English-speaking children at least 10 years to become moderately proficient spellers-memorizing about 400 new words per year-and because they forget and have to revise many of the spellings they've previously learned, "learning to spell is a never-ending chore."

@kbendernyc *originally published 09/08/2014 AT 04:45 PM EDT Ben McMahon of Melbourne, Australia, can't remember the serious car accident that left him in a coma for over a week, but what he recalled upon waking up is truly astounding. McMahon awoke from his coma with the ability to speak near-perfect Mandarin, reports .

270 Catholic bishops from around the globe, representing 13 different language groups, will be convening for a week-long meeting this month. Their goal: to come up with a single document of their findings to present to Pope Francis. The final version of that document will be written in the lingua franca of the Catholic Church, which is Italian. Italian has not been the official language for all synod business for very long. Pope Francis changed the official language of synod business from Latin to Italian a couple of years ago. In the past, when the bishops gathered for a synod, they produced documents in Latin. Unlike Latin, Italian is a living language of the real world, and arguably a more neutral linguistic choice than English. However, much controversy has arisen over both translation and ideological issues, and what true meaning and intent is being conveyed by document language and wording. Massimo Faggioli, a theology scholar, noted that under previous popes, the synods worked very differently. Bishops used to gather for the purpose of rubber-stamping Vatican policy. There was no real debate over the true meaning of the official text. "But now, these texts matter," Faggioli says. "[The bishops] know that if they vote on one text or another, that might change the direction of the Catholic church on some teachings, which was not something anybody was thinking about under Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict." Pope Francis has said he wants a more decentralized Catholic Church. And he has encouraged the bishops at the synod to speak boldly, even about subjects on which they disagree. Some of the most contentious issues at this synod are about whether or not to allow Communion to people who've been divorced and remarried, premarital cohabitation, and how the Church should talk about gays and lesbians.

If you want your kids to learn to talk in the best possible way, a new study suggests you should ditch the baby talk and speak to them in normal sentences. The findings suggest that videos that claim to teach toddlers, or flash cards for tots, may not be the best idea.

Elise Piazza, lead author and a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, said, "Motherese contains exaggerated pitch contours and repetitive rhythms that help babies segment the complex noises around them into building blocks of language." She added that the speaking style also helps parents capture the attention of their babies and engage them emotionally.

This article was very interesting because it analyzed the way President Trump delivers his speeches. The linguist talks about how many perceive the way he talks as "uneducated", however, this is not the case. He speaks the way he does because he wants to talk like a normal person and therefore be relatable to everyday Americans.

The key takeaways: 1. Ensuring rich, socially-contextualized language exposure in both languages. Pediatricians advise non-English-speaking parents to read aloud and sing and tell stories and speak with their children in their native languages, so the children get that rich and complex language exposure, along with sophisticated content and information, rather than the more limited exposure you get from someone speaking a language in which the speaker is not entirely comfortable. 2. Exposure has to be person-to-person; screen time doesn't count for learning language in young children - even one language - though kids can learn content and vocabulary from educational screen time later on. 3. It does take longer to acquire two languages than one, says Dr. Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist who specializes in early language development. "A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you're either hearing English or Spanish," Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. They may mix the languages, but that doesn't indicate confusion. "Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it's a sign of language ability," she said. 4. If exposed to the target languages at a younger age, children generally will sound more nativelike. On the other hand, older children may learn more easily. Gigliana Melzi, a developmental psychologist and associate professor of applied psychology, states, "The younger you are, the more head start you have," she said. "The older you are, the more efficient learner you are, you have a first language you can use as a bootstrap."

Author Sena Moore writes about how music can re-wire our brains for speech. Singing and speaking activate similar areas on both sides of the brain, primarily in the motor production and sensory feedback areas. Singing, however, also activates the right hemisphere in some areas more strongly than the left. Speech is a left-hemisphere-dominate function. In other words, similar networks in the brain associated with vocal production are activated when a person is singing and when s/he is speaking. And the "stronger right hemisphere" activation supports the clinical observation that those who cannot speak because of damage to the left hemisphere speech areas known as Broca's area can still produce words by singing them.

The invention of new ways of speaking is one surprising consequence of migration to Europe.

This article speaks of the ways people of different areas shape their mouths in order to speak. This is what particularly forms accents. For example, A cocky London accent could be replicated by elongating the mouth when saying "I". The muscles and ways the mouth is formed is different for each language and should be noted. However, beware not to fall into offensive stereotypes.

The Yaaku tribe, of Kenya's Rift Valley, number only around 4,000 people. And only seven people, all over the age of 70, can speak the tribe's native language, Yakunte, fluently. As the number of Yakunte speakers has dwindled, various efforts have been made to save the language.

Singing is a form of communication that uses language and adds a beat. There are countless people who advocate that the power of music helped them get through rough times because if helped them verbalize their emotions. Music and singing can evoke such strong feelings in humans. By contrast, gesturing also seems quite natural. After all, before we can convey our thoughts to other fluent speakers, we rely on gesturing. This article explores how singing and signing have influenced our speaking. Moreover, which one came first?!

What makes people who can fluently speak about six languages or more so special? One of the most famous hyperpolyglots in history Emil Krebs, had mastered 65 languages by time of death. After years of study, scientists have figured out that hyperpolyglots have distinct differences in their brains' neural activity.