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Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext - for those, at least, who can read them. Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker's meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice. In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators. Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks. Put simply, they are written shorthand for the poster's intent and emotion. One might use "/srs," short for "serious," to express sincere affection for a pop culture crush.

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 the language of lying. It talks about liars' tendencies and patterns. Lying is very complex, but language itself is very good lie-detector.

This was a study looking at the use of elderspeak in a referential communication task. The study was used to determine if young adults paired with older adults, who stimulated dementia or acted normally, would change their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse.

When we reduce the Israel-Hamas war to simple labels like 'pro-' or 'anti-,' we overlook how complex the issue is and the wide spectrum of opinions. These terms pigeonhole people into one side versus another, preventing understanding and dialogue towards peace.

This article discusses the correlation between listening to music and cognition. They mainly used pop music and distinguished their test subjects between extraverts and introverts.

Some studies show that listening to music improves cognitive performance and focus. Certain rhythms and beats can cause shifts in emotion, which can ultimately affect the way that we comprehend things we read. In one of their studies, a controlled group of students studied with music that caused them to feel anxiety while another listened to music that evoked concentration. They also allowed a certain controlled group to listen to their favorite song and actually performed worse on their tests.

Listening to music for relaxation is common among students to counter the effects of stress or anxiety while completing difficult academic tasks. Some studies supporting this technique have shown that background music promotes cognitive performance while other studies have shown that listening to music while engaged in complex cognitive tasks can impair performance.

Nick Perham, a psychology researcher who conducted a major study on music and reading comprehension, gives a summary of music's effect on productivity. Whether it is beneficial or not is dependent on task and the timing of the music.While recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity, with other areas of performance, the impact of background music is more complicated. Performance is poorer when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet: this is known as the irrelevant sound effect. The irrelevant sound effect phenomenon arises from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time - one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability. A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words - from the task and the sound - are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of music with lyrics. It doesn't matter whether one likes the music or not--performance was equally poor. Whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation, then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information, then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music. One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that child

This article describes the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists in terms of language use and change. Prescriptivists believe in traditional grammar and vocabulary while descriptivists analyze how language evolves over time. The article goes on to talk about how language changes naturally but remains cohesive due to its systematic nature.

This article explored who has control over language. It touches upon how certain words eventually get used in contexts that it was not originally intended to be. It concludes that language is too complex for anyone to attempt to manage. Language is a genius self-regulating system.