Group items tagged

Provides audio of spoken Globish and side-by-side comparisons.

"The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment....A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory.... rich interactions with children-and patience-are more important than abstract picture books and drilling."

great side-by-side comparisons of old, middle, early modern prodigal son story, both text and audio

This article talks about the disadvantage low-income children face in regards to language acquisition. Studies show that children living in low-income areas in comparison to children from a higher-income area have an inferior knowledge of language and it sets them up for the same result when they're grown. This is because the level language they hear at home is subpar and when they go to school, the schools also lack the teaching for them to receive an adequate education. They're stuck in a paradox of growing up with insufficient schooling, then unable to advance to greater educational experiences because of it.

This journal talks about the history of linguistic comparison between Japanese and Korean as languages. I thought it was kind of interesting that the only viewpoint on the two languages was taken from a European standpoint. Even when discussing the Japanese and Korean findings of similarities between the languages, those realizations are told in a third person point of view instead of specifically to the people in Japan or Korea that figured these things out, as compared to the specific European linguists whose findings were accomplished. This was pretty cool as a Japanese-Korean person, though.

This essay compares the controversies surrounding actions taken by two school boards-one in Hawai'i and the other in Oakland-in their attempts to help students in their districts attain fluency in standard English. Public reactions expressed during each of these two incidents demonstrated a general lack of understanding about languages and nonstandard dialects. The myths and characterizations about Hawai'i Creole English and African American Vernacular English, and the issues these two stigmatized dialects have raised, point to educational policy implications concerning academic achievement and the politics of language.

This is a really useful essay in highlighting linguistic research re: how to effectively instruct speakers of non-standard varieties of English, e.g. AAVE and HCE. Nice find!

How do animals communicate with each other? A look at the Lana project, Washoe, a comparison with human communication and evaluation of research.

There are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people. A 2014 study published in _Psychological Science_, co-written by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that taking longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions, in comparison to taking notes via laptop.

Offering a written expression of condolence (from the Latin word condolere, to grieve or to suffer with someone) used to be a staple of polite society. "A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical - never mind," advised the 1960 edition of Emily Post. "Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value." But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. Just over two and a half million Americans die every year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and we buy 90 million sympathy cards annually, a spokeswoman for Hallmark said. But 90 percent of those cards are bought by people over 40. Take-away tips from the article: 1. BEING TONGUE-TIED IS O.K. 2. SHARE A POSITIVE MEMORY 3. NO COMPARISONS 4. DON'T DODGE THE 'D' WORDS 5. GET REAL. 6. FACEBOOK IS NOT ENOUGH

Author Clive Thompson argues, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." Every day, we collectively produce millions of books' worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media - the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.) He notes the Internet has spawned a global culture of avid writers, one almost always writing for an audience, and suggests that writing for a real audience helps clarify one's thinking, enhances learning, and arguably, betters writers' organization, ideas, and attention to editing.

this article from the Economist takes a cool look at what makes languages hard in comparison to english.

Some terms of endearment can be used in many languages - "baby", "angel" and "sweetheart" for example. But some don't travel as well as you might think. If you call a French person "honey" ("miel") he or she may take it as a unflattering comparison with a sticky mess. And how would you react if someone called you a cauliflower, a flea, or a baby elephant? Here is a quick guide to the language of love around the world - dominated by metaphors from cookery and the animal kingdom - with contributions by language coach Paul Noble.

Amusia is a deficit in musical memory, recognition, and in pitch processing that people can be born with or acquire through brain damage. Some people may think of themselves as being "tone-deaf", but most of these "bad" singers are just that. People with amusia are so unable to hear tones that they even struggle to differentiate between questions and statements when spoken. Language, like music, uses sound to convey meaning; be it a story, or simply an emotion. In fact, music and spoken language use many of the same structural elements: pitch, duration, intensity and melodic contour, to name a few. Melodic contour is the pattern in which pitch changes from high to low over time. This contouring of pitch is often used to express emotion in music. The emotional effect of contouring is appreciated across many cultures and across many age groups. In speech, melodic contour is created by intonation, which allows us to place emphasis upon certain words and distinguish the purpose of the sentence; e.g. whether it is a question, statement or command. These comparisons provide evidence for the overlap of brain areas and mechanisms that underlie speech and music processing. In addition, the storing of sound patterns in short-term memory is also overlapping for both language and music.

New research shows that bilingualists can view the world in different ways depending on the language they are operating in.

Modern German language sounds very disparate in comparison to modern English. New research finds that your language determines your literal perspective of the world due to its grammar.

Schizophrenia is a very disabling psychiatric illness affecting about 2 to 3 million Americans. Contrary to popular perception, it has nothing to do with a "split personality." Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder involving "positive" and "negative" symptoms. Positive symptoms include hallucinations (hearing voices or seeing visions that aren't real), delusions (fixed false beliefs), and disorganized thinking or speech. A recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry by Paul Grant, Aaron Beck, and their colleagues found that a modified version of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a specific type of talk therapy, can produce clinically significant improvement in patients with schizophrenia. Importantly, significant improvement was seen in certain negative symptoms-apathy/avolition (lack of drive)-as well as in positive symptoms. These results are impressive, especially considering that the participants had been ill for an average of 18 years and suffered from severe symptoms. In this study, study participants were divided into two groups. One group received CBT in addition to "standard treatment," which included treatment with antipsychotic medications. The other group received standard treatment alone. CBT has been shown to be effective in a variety of psychiatric illnesses. It uses pragmatic techniques to help a person correct inaccurate or dysfunctional thoughts and emotions by promoting critical comparison of those thoughts with observable facts. For example, if a person believes that he/she is "doing absolutely nothing," one CBT technique would be to encourage the person to keep a detailed diary of daily activities. The therapist would later review this diary with the patient and facts would be compared to perceptions. Homework assignments would include strategies to increase productive activities. In the study mentioned above, the researchers focused CBT "on identifying and promoting concrete goals for improving quality of life and

A new study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that children as young as two understand basic grammar rules when they first learn to speak and are not simply imitating adults. The study also applied the same statistical analysis on data from one of the most famous animal language-acquisition experiments -- Project Nim -- and showed that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language over the course of many years, never grasped rules like those in a two-year-old's grammar. "When you compare what children should say if they follow grammar against what children do say, you find it to almost indistinguishable," Professor of Linguistics Charles Yang said. "If you simulate the expected diversity when a child is only repeating what adults say, it produces a diversity much lower than what children actually say." As a comparison, Yang applied the same predictive models to the set of Nim Chimpsky's signed phrases, the only data set of spontaneous animal language usage publicly available. He found further evidence for what many scientists, including Nim's own trainers, have contended about Nim: that the sequences of signs Nim put together did not follow from rules like those in human language. Nim's signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization. This suggests that true language learning is -- so far -- a uniquely human trait, and that it is present very early in development.

This article explains why and when we say things such as "please" and "thank you" to others. A recent study has shown that people in informal settings, received expressions of gratitude only a small amount of times in comparison to the amount of requests they complied with or number of times they offered their service or help. Although this may seem like a bad thing, researchers believe this is good news. This article further explains the researchers reasoning.

Quick comparison of the differences between child and adult second language learning: suggests that children will be able to attain greater fluency in L2, whereas adults will learn the L2 imperfectly.

This article discusses the use and comparison of the two words "women" and "female." It takes a political, social, and economical aspect to show very interesting examples of how the two words differ. "Both words can function as nouns, but female, unlike woman, can also be an adjective. In an Oscar Hammerstein II lyric from "Flower Drum Song," written 50 years ago, a young woman glad to be a girl sings, "I'm strictly a female female" - the first use an adjective; the second, a noun. Adjectives are by their nature stretchable, happily taking "more" or "less": you can say "more female," but you cannot say "more woman"; you would have to say "more womanly." In modifying another noun, woman is what the O.E.D. labels an apposite noun - explaining, even identifying, the noun it "stands next to" - but syntactically stronger than an adjective. Both words can be used as modifiers of nouns, but the noun woman has more weight."