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This article talks about when the cutoff age to learn a new language is. Studies show that youth are proficient in learning a new language until the age of 18 but if they want to understand and learn the fluency of a native speaker it is best to start by the age of 10.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

According to science and psychology, the easiest time to learn a second language is during childhood. This is because the brain at that age is a sponge for absorbing new information. Also children are more eager to learn than adults and they have more time for it. In general, all learning becomes harder with age.

Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language. While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages. "Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i

This article discusses how being able to speak multiple languages can slow down the speed at which your brain ages.

Linguist David Crystal opines that one of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying. The period - the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages - is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age. The conspicuous omission of the period in text messages and in instant messaging on social media, Crystal says, is a product of the punctuation-free staccato sentences favored by millennials - and increasingly their elders - a trend fueled by the freewheeling style of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

LONDON - One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying The period - the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages - is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the

Pretty much anyone can become fluent in pretty much any language at pretty much any age. It's not even true that young children learn languages faster than older children or adults: if you expose different age groups to the same amount of instruction in a foreign language, the older ones invariably do better, both initially and in the long run. Learners of any age can achieve a brilliant, even native like, command of the vocabulary of another language, including such challenging structures as idioms or proverbs.

This article talked compared the learning of language between adults and children. There were various studies that took place in this article. They concluded that there was an age cutoff at 17 to learn a new language. They also talked about when the "critical period" is. Overall, they compared age with how well the person could pick up the language.

This article is about a chinese man who started learning english at the age of 93 despite his age. He says that its never too late and currently he can semi speak the language. I think this article was unique because we have been talking about how one needs to learn a language when they are young but this man is showing that it is never too late to do it!

Nice overview of the neurological and other benefits conferred by bilingualism. Being fluent in two languages, particularly from early childhood, not only enhances a person's ability to concentrate, but might also protect against the onset of dementia and other age-related cognitive decline. More recently, scientists have discovered that bilingual adults have denser gray matter (brain tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers), especially in the brain's left hemisphere, where most language and communication skills are controlled. The effect is strongest in people who learned a second language before the age of five and in those who are most proficient at their second language. This finding suggests that being bilingual from an early age significantly alters the brain's structure.

This article talks about the difficulty of learning new languages at a certain age. It explains how there are different beliefs as to when it becomes difficult for us to become fluent in a second language. Some scientist say the age of 10 is when our ability to learn drops, others say 17-18. This is still an undiscovered mystery in the linguist world.

This study, published in the acclaimed science journal _Nature_, examined how age and exposure to different types of COVID-19 (mis)information affect misinformation beliefs, perceived credibility of the message and intention-to-share it on WhatsApp.

Three University of Southern California professors offer their thoughts on whether print media and traditional books will survive this digital age, or whether they will become obsolete. "Today, practically anyone with online access can blog or tweet to a worldwide audience. This has both democratized writing and, in some ways, devalued it. At the same time, the rise of digital books and online mega-sellers like Amazon means more writers can self-publish their books, and readers can order books instantly with the push of a button. But authors are getting a smaller piece of the economic pie. Then there's the halo effect of social media. Some authors build strong followings on Twitter and Facebook, which bring writers closer to their readers-turned-fans. In this swirling media landscape, what will happen to the book as we know it?"

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

Michael Everson, a linguist living in Ireland, is responsible for helping the literary history of the human species survive in the digital age. He is also responsible for helping you give somebody the finger through your iPhone.

Michael Everson, a linguist living in Ireland, is responsible for helping the literary history of the human species survive in the digital age. He is also responsible for helping you give somebody the finger through your iPhone.

Israeli scientists have discovered for the first time an instance of viruses leaving messages for other viruses. What makes the discovery remarkable is that scientists expect such communication systems to exist among other kinds of viruses. Rotem Sorek of Weizmann Institute of Science and his research team have found the protein that viruses used to communicate: arbitrium, which is Latin for "decision." Even though viruses are the most primitive form of life, they infect and harm millions of people every year. The possibility of tapping into viral communication has many scientists excited, because it offers new ways to build drugs that could defeat viruses.

A new prospective study of six-month-old infants at high genetic risk for autism identified weak head and neck control as a red flag for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and language and/or social developmental delays.

"Tweenage girls who spend endless hours watching videos and multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful with social and emotional development ... The girls' answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences and sleeping less. ... The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8 to 12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age. ... Higher levels of face-to-face communication were associated with greater social success, greater feelings of normalcy, more sleep and fewer friends whom parents judged to be bad influences. Children learn the difficult task of interpreting emotions by watching the faces of other people, Pea said. ... For the negative effects of online gorging, "There seems to be a pretty powerful cure, a pretty powerful inoculant, and that is face-to-face communication," Nass said."