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"Two vital parts of mentally organizing the world are classification, or the understanding that similar things belong in the same category; and induction, an educated guess about a thing's properties if it's in a certain category. ... 'For the last 30 to 40 years it has been believed that even for very young children, labels are category markers, as they are for adults,' explains psychologist Vladimir M. Sloutsky ... To test their hypothesis, the psychologists showed pictures of two imaginary creatures to preschoolers and college undergraduates. Both animals had a body, hands, feet, antennae, and a head. ... The difference arose when the head was a jalet's but [the] label was "flurp," or vice-versa. Then, most of the adults went with the label (we accept that a dolphin is a mammal, even though it looks and swims like a fish). The children relied on the head for identification. Regardless of its name, a thing with a jalet's head is a jalet." Link to the study (PDF): http://cogdev.cog.ohio-state.edu/Papers/2011/SD-VS-PsychScience.pdf

Research from Columbia Business School professors Adam Galinsky and Michael Slepian shows that merely saying a name aloud sparks an instant connection to a specific gender, evoking a cascading pattern of stereotypical judgments about the masculinity or femininity of an individual, often in the first second of hearing a spoken name. "Names give cues to social categories, which in turn, activate stereotypes," says Slepian. "By considering how names symbolically represent stereotypes, we link sounds to social perception. The most basic social category division is gender and the most distinction between phonemes (the sounds that make up words) is voiced versus unvoiced. We found that female and male names differ phonetically." The Columbia Business School researchers believe that names become established as for males or females through their spoken sounds. They conducted eleven studies focused on distinguishing the different sounds of spoken names. The findings provide consistent evidence that voiced names (those pronounced with vocal cord vibration which often sound "harder") such as "Gregory," "James," and "William" are given more frequently to males, and unvoiced names (those pronounced without vocal cord vibration which often sound "softer" and breathier) such as "Heather," "Sarah," and "Tiffany" are more frequently given to females. These name assignments fit stereotypical gender categories - men as "hard" and tough, and women as "soft" and tender. The researchers also noted other naming trends, namely 1. A rise in gender-neutral names. 2. Parents are more likely to give their baby a name that has recently grown in popularity. 3. Parents often give names that phonetically resemble their social category. 4. Female names go in and out of style faster than male names. 5. Current naming inspiration includes social media and technology, celestial themes, and royal birth announcements.

This article defines what self-talk is, how it's important and why it's important. Self-talk is "the endless stream of unspoken thoughts than run through [our] heads". If these thoughts are more positive can offer multiple health benefits, such as increased life span and increased immunity. The article also covers the four categories of self-talk (calming/relaxing, instructional, motivational, focus) , what to say to yourself (instructional self-talk or motivational self-talk), and when to say it.

That agonizing moment when you know precisely what you want to say but you fail to produce the word or phrase is known as a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment. Lise Abrams, a psychology professor at the University of Florida has studied the phenomenon for 20 years. Researchers have even found occurrences among sign language users--termed "tip-of-the-finger" states. Key findings: 1. Low-frequency use: We're more likely to draw blanks on words we use less frequently - like abacus or palindrome. 2. There are also categories of words that lead to tip-of-the-tongue states more often. Proper names are one of those categories. There's no definitive theory, but one reason might be that proper names are arbitrary links to the people they represent, so people with the same name don't possess the same semantic information the way that common nouns do, Abrams said.

super interesting! read, read, read !

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech. The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate students. This year, UW sophomores Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor - who are studying business administration and aeronautics and astronautics engineering, respectively - won the "Use It" undergraduate category that recognizes technology-based inventions to improve consumer devices. Their invention, "SignAloud," is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

Could understanding other cultures' concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own? The Positive Lexicography Project aims to catalogue foreign terms for happiness that have no direct English translation. The brainchild of Tim Lomas, a lecturer in applied positive psychology at the University of East London, the first edition included two hundred and sixteen expressions from forty-nine languages, published in January. Lomas used online dictionaries and academic papers to define each word and place it into one of three overarching categories, doing his best to capture its cultural nuances. The glossary can be found here: http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!alphabetical-lexicography/b5ojm

Our social media activity can give extraordinary - and often unintentional - insights into our mental wellbeing. Little wonder that professionals whose job it is to look after our emotional health are now exploring how they can use these signals to take the 'emotional pulse' of individuals, communities, nations and even the entire species. Apparently, the words that're said are less important than the category or the frequency of posts in re: painting user profiles.

Just in time to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, a comprehensive listing of lucky foods to eat for Chinese New Year. Generally, these foods fall into two categories: they either physically resemble lucky objects (e.g. dumplings look like gold ingots, carrot rounds look like coins) or are homophonic with auspicious phrases (e.g. "ye zi"= coconut, sounds like the words for "father/son", conveying the idea of harmonious parent-child relations). Food for thought.

People familiar with more than one language showed a later onset of dementia, according to a new study from Indian researchers. Multilingualism appeared to stave off dementia onset in several diagnostic categories, including front temporal and vascular dementia as well as Alzheimer's, according to the researchers' report in the online version of Neurology.

I love the way this guy writes about math. I really understand math as a language because of him. I wish I'd had him as a teacher.

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Psychology professor Rachel Albert studies babbling, which until recently was considered to be mere motor practice, something babies did to exercise their mouths. Few people thought of it as a vocabulary all its own. But parents, take note: All those repetitive syllables are an important signal. Albert says they tell us that babies are "putting themselves in this optimal state of being ready to learn." Babbles create an opportunity for a social feedback loop - also known as a conversation. And if you listen closely, you can even decipher a babble's four distinctive categories, from the whiny "nasal creaking" of newborns to the more mature bah-bahs and dah-dahs of older babies. But Albert says if you can't tell your "quasi-resonant vocalizations" from your "canonical syllables," don't worry too much. All you really need to know is this: babbling equals learning.

This article discusses human communication with other animals. It states that animals won't be able to remember words like "bacteria" or "economy" because they don't have the brain capacity to understand those words. However, if you tell a dog to "sit", the dog is able to differentiate the sound of that particular word from other verbal signals, and can carry out the action. This is how learning words works. The article also discusses IQ and explains that human brains have been genetically modified for communication, and the size of our brains is also much bigger than expected in animals of the same size.

The article also underscores a quality that differentiates human language from other animal communication: grammatical orderliness. Human languages have word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. We can modify word order and word endings to create different tenses so that we can describe events from the past or imaginary ones from the future. This grammatical complexity emerges quite early in child development, beginning in the second year of life and exploding with full force in the third year of life. No nonhuman animal to date has demonstrated the ability to construct sentences with the level of grammatical complexity typical of a three-year-old human child.

Linguists' analysis of Trump's Inaugural Address as the POTUS confirms that he actually did the writing! The speech matches his usual style of debates, interviews, etc. His style, as described by Kayla N Jordan, is intuitive, rather than analytical. Trump goes with his heart rather than his head. His Address also shows he is authentic (which doesn't necessarily mean he is true), because he uses personal words like I and me. This article includes graphs comparing Trump to all(?) past presidents in different categories.

A recent Times article asked readers to name everyday words that repelled them. There was a wide variety of answers from simple words like moist to complicated words like pulchritude. There were also some random words that inspired word aversion for no apparent reason. This New York Times article explains why some people have word aversion to certain categories of words.

Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking. But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. A whopping 70 percent of Trump's statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed "crooked," Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.) For decades, researchers have been wrestling with the nature of falsehood: How does it arise? How does it affect our brains? Can we choose to combat it? The answers aren't encouraging for those who worry about the national impact of a reign of untruth over the next four, or eight, years. Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people's sense of themselves, which Trump's clearly do.

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.