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In this NPR interview, Trinidadian-American Lyiscott reflects on a moment where she'd been termed "articulate," a loaded term that got Lysicott reflecting on the ways certain varieties of language are privileged over others, and also the way "articulate" also suggests a perceived mismatch between the appearance/race of the person and their use of langugage, also how people judge others' intellect and capacity, based on how they speak.

Teaching a baby to speak is more art than science. It begins with babble and almost like magic the child says mama and dada, then no, uh-oh, mine, especially mine. But sometimes children struggle to learn to speak. A team of linguists, computer scientists and psychologists in Britain think robots might help explain why that happens. They've created the world's first baby robot, DeeChee; white plastic skin and a smile of red lights and articulated hands that grab and gesture almost like an infant. Now, scientists hope that DeeChee's silicon brain will help explain what's going on in the minds of human babies, specifically, how sensitivity to particular sounds helps infants learn words.

In 2010, two articulate powerhouse linguists, Lena Boroditsky, of Stanford, and Mark Liberman, of U. Penn., squared off on the above topic. Boroditsky advanced the Neo-Whorfian position that language does indeed shape thought. Liberman countered, noting that thought also shapes our language we speak, and the way we live shapes both language and thought. When we encounter or create new ideas, we can usually describe them with new combinations of old words. And if not, we easily adapt or borrow or create the new words or phrases we need. As Edward Sapir once put it, "We may say that a language is so constructed that no matter what any speaker of it may desire to communicate … the language is prepared to do his work."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American's ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino's ability to speak English without an accent.This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour - microaggressions - used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.

This is a TED Talk of Jamila Lyiscott's "3 Ways to Speak English." She discusses the three different types of English she uses -- one with her parents, one in the classroom, and one with her friends. She then expands upon the evolution of each of these languages and what it means to be articulate.

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. And refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

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."

Neuroscientists are testing the embodied cognition metaphor theory articulated by Lakoff and Johnson using fMRI technology. Lakoff and Johnson argue that human cognition is embodied-that human concepts are shaped by the physical features of human brains and bodies, or as Lakoff puts it, "Our physiology provides the concepts for our philosophy."

This is a study that looks at speed of speech, across many different languages, as people prepare to say nouns and verbs. They found that regardless of what language a person speaks, the majority of people slow down (in pauses and articulation) significantly more before a noun than they do before a verb. The study suggests that this is because nouns always contain new information and therefore require more planning than verbs, which don't always contain new and important information.