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When a human baby is born, its first cry is a normal sign of good health. Having never taken a breath before, the baby signals its first inhalation and exhalation-in the form of a screech. How do babies know to create a sound they've never made before? And is their first yelp truly the start of speech development? As it turns out, human babies may be practicing how to cry long before they ever make a sound. That is, if they're anything like marmosets, humans' primate cousins. A study of marmosets by Daniel Takahashi, a co-author of the study and an animal behaviorist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. shows fetal monkeys practicing crying in the womb. Takahashi notes, "marmosets are monkeys that we know vocalize a lot, and they share a lot of features with humans." For instance, both male and female parents raise their offspring together, and unlike other primates, marmoset babies are relatively helpless when they're born, like human infants. Takahashi says the central finding will help illuminate when speech development begins, and that studying pre-birth-rather than the moment of birth-may help identify speech or motor development problems earlier. "There are a lot of things going on in the womb that might be relevant to what's going on afterwards," he says.

SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT. There is no English translation that I know of for this article. Comprised of eleven interviews of fairly "high-class" individuals (including authors, journalists, doctors, lawyers, professors, religious officials, and more), the focus of this article is profanity, and whether or not said individuals use profanity while speaking. Interestingly enough, eight out of the eleven individuals used profanity fairly regularly. Most of those eight were fairly shameful about their use of profanity, or only used them in particular contexts-including, interestingly enough, during homilies/sermons. Only one person (Pilar de Río) declared that they used profanity freely and enthusiastically, while others, though admitting the merits of such language (particularly its expressive power), did not view them in such a positive light. Two additional members of the eleven interviewees primarily used "muletas" or "muletillas," or, as we know them in English, crutches or filler words. This article is quite interesting if examining profanity in different cultures and languages, as it is a Spanish-language article from El Ciervo, the longest-running magazine in Spain's history. Do note, again, that this source is a SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT, and that some proficiency in the language will be needed to interpret this text, even with the help of online dictionaries.

In this article, the author explains that on top of body language, some language cues can also detect a liar. It mentioned things like liars trying not using first person pronouns and increased use of negative statements that could be subconsciously mirroring the negative emotions a liar may feel such as fear or guilt.

Steven Pinker, a famous Canadian-American cognitive physiologist, linguist, and author, talks about the five functions of swearing.

Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own. Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that's sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia. Tian, a computer science major who is minoring in journalism, spent part of his winter break creating GPTZero, which he said can "quickly and efficiently" decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay.

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of "Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy," reviews the research on how to retain learning and also read and study more effectively and efficiently.

The notion of a "gay lisp"-an offensive stereotype to many people-has been a confusing phenomenon for linguists. For decades, popular depictions of gay men have sometimes portrayed them pronouncing the letter "s" as more of a "th" sound-even though studies have failed to find "lispier" speech in gay men than in straight men. Now, however, preliminary data from a small study presented here last week at the biannual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) show that young boys who don't identify with their assigned gender use "th"-like pronunciation at slightly higher rates than their peers who do, although they seem to grow out of that tendency. The authors speculate that stereotypes of gay adults may be rooted in the speech of boys who go on to identify as gay.

Konglish is the term used to describe the variety of English unique to Korea. It is just one of many varieties of the English language that exists far beyond the borders of so-called "inner circle" Englishes - those spoken in countries such as Britain and the US, for example. The author takes umbrage against those who argue that Konglish is incorrect. From a linguistic standpoint, deeming only one variety of grammar and vocabulary usage as correct is, nonsensical. Rather, Konglish reflects cultural identity, connects with linguistic diversity and above all, is already used to communicate in Korea, which is the ultimate purpose of language.

This paper written by Kamehameha School's Research & Evaluation division, explores the revival of 'Ōlelo Hawai'i, one of two official state languages of Hawai'i (alongside English). Authors Ng-Osorio and Ledward dive into the history of the Hawaiian language, it's decline and marginalization, as well as the efforts toward its revitalization.

This opinion article entails accents, and how they are interpreted. The author, a Spanish immigrant who works at Dartmouth as a language professor claims that accents are universal. He states that everyone has an accent, but here in the US people who don't have the "normal" or "regular" accent are viewed as different. He goes on to say that Americans tend to discriminate against people with accents different from their own more than in other countries. He wants to remind people that accents are irrelevant, and urges people to accept all accents no matter how different from their own.

This is a thesis paper exploring the various theories regarding the evolution of Chinese characters. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese took inspiration from the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which may have formed at around the same period in time. The author makes the claim that while it is true that Chinese characters may have started off as drawings or pictographs, in the most ancient form of the script, the characters are far from any recognizable images of items. It is very likely that the Chinese script went through a similar evolution process as to the Mesopotamian cuneiform, but no such archeological evidence for this theory has been found.

This article explains the evolution of language and the influence AI has on modern language. Author Rob Toews gives his insight into the dangers of AI (bias and toxicity) and possible trends in AI linguistics.

The author examines the meaning of rizz, which is derived from "charisma." This term, rizz, proves how dynamic language is. Rizz also emphasizes the role of online platforms, such as TikTok, where younger people can own and coin their linguistic expressions.

The author delves into the nuanced role of swear words, exploring how they can forge social bonds and emphasize points in conversations. However, how acceptable these words are varies based on how they are used, as there are a number of reasons one may swear.

The author of this article discusses the study she conducted that explored how punctuation is used in texts to convey tone. The participants in the study consisted of 122 college-aged students (mostly from Boston College), and they were surveyed to gather data and responses. The discussion of the study shows trends in how text messages are interpreted and how subtle changes in text punctuation can alter the meaning or tone of the message.

Thanks to Gabby Gonzales '24 for this site! Programmer Thomas Dimson, author of Instagram's original content-ranking algorithms, created this website which uses GPT-2 algorithm to generate words that sound like they should exist, but don't, along with definitions and examples. Example: downage (verb) dow·nage obtain or retain (something) at a reduced price "the team had to downage contracts after a series of sellout losses"