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"Non-native accents make speech somewhat more difficult for native speakers to parse and thereby reduces "cognitive fluency" - i.e., the ease with which the brain processes stimuli. And this, they found, causes people to doubt the accuracy of what is said. "...[However,] several recent studies suggest that modest disruptions of cognitive fluency - cases of cognitive "disfluency," if you will - prompt people to think critically."

This article is about when a child needs to learn a language to be able to sound like a native. This article closely relates to what we have been learning in class and talks about the critical period. It talks about the critical period in a person's life for learning a new language and that is when a child should learn in order to sound like a native.

SNL faces criticism for appropriating AAVE in a sketch about "Gen Z slang". This becomes largely problematic as it comes to mind that most of the SNL cast is white. The creation and airing of this skit clearly shows a lack of education from the writers and performers on SNL in regards to AAVE.

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

If you're looking for the species that most closely matches our linguistic prowess, surprisingly, you won't find it in the apes, the primates, or even in the mammals. You have to travel to a far more distant relative, all the way to a family of birds known as the songbirds. The vocal life of a songbird is similar to ours in many ways. They learn songs by imitating their elders. Like human speech, these songs are passed down from one generation to the next. Songbirds are also best equipped to learn songs in their youth, and they have to practice to develop their ability. They can improvise and string together riffs into new songs, and over generations these modified songs can turn into new dialects. And like us, they come hard-wired with 'speech-centers' in their brain that are dedicated to language processing. An experiment from 2009 by Fehér and colleagues took newly hatched songbirds of the zebra finch species and raised them in sound proof chambers. They did this during their critical period of language development. Surprisingly, this culturally isolated generation of birds began to develop their own songs. These songs were less musical than your typical songbird song - they had irregular rhythms, they would stutter their notes, and the notes would sound more noisy. But the researchers were curious where this would lead. They listened to the songs of the next few generations of pupils, the offspring of these children of silence. What they found was quite amazing. In just two generations, the songs started to change in unexpected ways - they were becoming more musical. In fact, they started to converge upon the song of the wild songbirds, even though none of these birds had ever heard the wild songs. The Feher study suggests, but does not prove, that songbirds must have an innate understanding of the structures of their language. In other words, they seem to have a built-in intuition about grammar. Over time, they may be using these intuitions to develo

The critical period hypothesis is one of the reasons that some adults are hesitant to take on learning their heritage language. The theory essentially argues that there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic, somewhere between the age of 2 and puberty. This theory has entered our popular consciousness as a rule that you can't learn a second-language fluently when you're older. However, scientists disagree with this notion because although it will take more conscious effort, it is still possible to become fluent in another language past the "critical window." Specifically, second language acquisition becomes more difficult with age because it requires rewiring your brain to break certain habits that relate to language learning. For example, pronunciation and accent requires breaking habits related to the way you move your mouth to speak, making it more difficult to have native-level pronunciation as you grow older. Beyond neuroscience, though, research has shown that other factors, such as exposure and education influence language learning.

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

Columbia University linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter asserts that texting, rather than being a scourge, is a linguistic miracle. Texting is not so much written language, as it is speech. McWhorter argues that people benefit from texting, because fluency in spoken language, written language and writing-like-speaking language expands humans' linguistic repertoire.

Scientists say Koshik, an Asian elephant at a South Korean zoo, can imitate human speech, saying five Korean words readily understood by people who speak the language. The male elephant invented an unusual method of sound production that involves putting his trunk in his mouth and manipulating his vocal tract. Vocal mimicry is not a common behavior of mammals (unless you count humans). Researchers postulate Koshik was apparently so driven to imitate sounds that he invented the method of putting his trunk in his mouth and moving it around. They believe that he may have done this to bond with his trainers, as he was deprived of elephant companionship during a critical period of his childhood and spent years with humans as his only social contact. A video of Koshik with his trainer is embedded in the article.

Swearing, the critics say, may make us appear ill-educated, rude and untrustworthy, as our mothers might have tried to drill into us. But it could have some surprising benefits, from making us more persuasive to helping relieve pain.

"Our main conclusion is that delays in word onset facilitate word recognition, and that such facilitation is independent of the type of delay. ... Our findings support the perhaps counterintuitive conclusion that fillers like um can sometimes help (rather than hinder) listeners to identify spoken words. But critically, the data show that the same is true for silent pauses and pauses filled with artificially generated tones. "

An interesting (if crass read) about how Chinese Internet users have circumvented governmental censorship via homophonic, sometimes cross-lingual puns, often taking the form of Internet memes, in order to talk about forbidden topics, use taboo words, or criticize the government.

BEING bilingual has some obvious advantages. Learning more than one language enables new conversations and new experiences. But in recent years, psychology researchers have demonstrated some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function - which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities.

National Public Radio interviewed linguist John McWhorter on words and semantic change. The interview provides several contemporary examples showing how words and language are constantly changing. Mc Whorter asserts, "I think that we should learn not to listen to people using natural language as committing errors because there's no such thing as making a mistake in your language if a critical mass of other people speaking your language are doing the same thing."

"...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. ... Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country's National Encyclopedia. ... critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children ... toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do ... One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys 'gender-coded' them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys."

Translation is critical for addressing information inequalities in Africa. But could translation also improve economic development, health, human rights, and safety of the citizens of Africa? Findings from a new study reveal that the answer is "yes."

This article is about how a second language may help in your critical thinking process. Because of the unfamiliarity of the language, it may take away taboos or emotions associated with words that may influence our decision.

Members of Congress are often criticized for what they do - or rather, what they don't do. But what about what they say and, more specifically, how they say it? It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation.

Here's a follow-up on the same study, examining the speech of Hawaii's senators and representatives: http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/157017545.html?id=157017545. U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka speaks at a college sophomore level, according to an analysis of his speeches by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington group that pushes for government transparency. The analysis ranks Akaka in the top five among members of Congress for his use of longer sentences and more complex words. U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye isn't far behind. His speeches use words and sentences on the level of a college freshman. U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono speaks at the level of a high school senior, while U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa's speeches are at the high school freshman level, according to the study. Of course, longer sentences and more complex vocabulary use don't necessarily make for better communication, nor indicate effectiveness in re: serving one's constituents.

"Catholics throughout the English-speaking world on Sunday left behind words they have prayed for nearly four decades... The new translation, which alters some of the most familiar phrases of the Catholic liturgy, is praised by church officials as more authentic, more faithful, more accurate, and more reverential. ... [and] bemoaned by critics as being too slavish to the Latin, and in the process abandoning some of the ecumenical goals that influenced the last translation... And the Vatican rejected efforts to make the text more gender-neutral in places, sticking with the male pronouns used in Latin."

"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games ... The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional Stroop task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting Stroop task."

Actually, there are some studies just about emotional Stroop tests that sound similar to the one in the violent video games study. This looks like a good presentation about how emotional Stroop tests work: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/Emotion1.pdf This one talks about why those Stroop tests work: "In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology.The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition." - http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/papers/stickiness/WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf This is a meta-analysis of emotional Stroop test studies that describes (actually, it's critical of) how such studies are done: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/coglab/publications/LarsenMercerBalota2006.pdf

Thanks, Ryan! I will take a look at these.