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A Yale-led research team examined the brains of 38 couples engaged in discussion about controversial topics. For the study, the researchers from Yale and the University College of London recruited 38 adults who were asked to say whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements such as "same-sex marriage is a civil right" or "marijuana should be legalized." After matching up pairs based on their responses the researchers used an imaging technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy to record their brain activity while they engaged in face-to-face discussions. Their findings: When two people agree, their brains exhibit a calm synchronicity of activity focused on sensory areas of the brain, such as the visual system, presumably in response to social cues from their partner. When they disagree, however, many other regions of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions become mobilized as each individual combats the other's argument. Sensory areas of the brain were less active, while activity increased in the brain's frontal lobes, home of higher order executive functions. Joy Hirsch, Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, as well as senior author of the study, said that in discord, two brains engage many emotional and cognitive resources "like a symphony orchestra playing different music." In agreement, there "is less cognitive engagement and more social interaction between brains of the talkers, similar to a musical duet."

This article brings about the topic of how people end their emails differently. In the recent past, it has been deemed "cool" to have an email signature that read "Sent from my iPhone". Now, however, this is seen as generic. People are coming up with new ways to sign their emails that are original. They also aim to include personality and tone. This is proven to be challenging for many people because signatures are generally short. Email signatures can not only help indicate whether a person is professional or not, but also whether the person is irritated, silly, rushed, etc.

This article covers a few of the same things people covered from their recent projects. It is centered around the tone of emails and what makes that tone- words like "hi" vs. "hey", emoji use, punctuation, and response time. It also brings up an interesting point. "Research has found that when parties are getting along, they tend to mimic each other's subtle speech patterns".

Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain? "In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active." This article goes into depth on how social media like instagram is changing our brain. It shows us what parts of our brain are getting stimulated when we use social media! It also talks about peer influence, social learning, and reward circuitry.

This article explains a little bit about a study done testing how well people could learn Hungarian words in two different ways: listen to spoken words and repeat them back or listen to words said rhythmically or sung. The study found that those who listened to the rhythmically or sung words were better at remembering the vocabulary both short term and long term. This shows that perhaps music can help students trigger memory recall.

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.

This article talks about the difficulty of learning new languages at a certain age. It explains how there are different beliefs as to when it becomes difficult for us to become fluent in a second language. Some scientist say the age of 10 is when our ability to learn drops, others say 17-18. This is still an undiscovered mystery in the linguist world.

This article explains the difference of dyslexia in Chinese. Speakers of alphabetic languages have problems with converting letters to sound, while Chinese readers have difficulty translating symbol shapes to sound and meaning.

How environmental factors come to shape the emergence of linguistic This article describes how environmental motivations drive the emergence of different communicative conventions.

This website talks about the importance of emphasis in the English language and how changing the emphasis on different words can change the entire meaning of a sentence.

The publication provides insight into how people in Iceland are recording their language to help keep it alive. Icelandic is suffering from something known around the world as "digital minoritization", where the overwhelming amount of online language use is in a different language (ex. English worldwide, pushing out smaller minority languages). It stresses the importance of the language to the country's identity and how the recordings will help keep the history of the country alive today.

Some people seem to pick up a second language with relative ease, while others have a much more difficult time. Now, a new study suggests that learning to understand and read a second language may be driven, at least in part, by our ability to pick up on statistical regularities. Some research suggests that learning a second language draws on capacities that are language-specific, while other research suggests that it reflects a more general capacity for learning patterns. According to psychological scientist and lead researcher Ram Frost of Hebrew University, the data from the new study clearly point to the latter: "These new results suggest that learning a second language is determined to a large extent by an individual ability that is not at all linguistic," says Frost. In the study, Frost and colleagues used three different tasks to measure how well American students in an overseas program picked up on the structure of words and sounds in Hebrew. The students were tested once in the first semester and again in the second semester. The students also completed a task that measured their ability to pick up on statistical patterns in visual stimuli. The participants watched a stream of complex shapes that were presented one at a time. Unbeknownst to the participants, the 24 shapes were organized into 8 triplets -- the order of the triplets was randomized, though the shapes within each triplet always appeared in the same sequence. After viewing the stream of shapes, the students were tested to see whether they implicitly picked up the statistical regularities of the shape sequences.

This article discusses the history of acronyms and how they evolved from initialism. It also talks about the difference between the two, which is that initialism is an abbreviation pronounced as the actual letters (i.e. AFK and BRB), while acronyms are abbreviations pronounceable by its letters (i.e. SCUBA and NASA). Over time, the word "acronym" was used to describe all abbreviations formed by the initial letters of each word, leading to the extinction of initialism.

A common occurrence in text messages is the emoji. More people use emojis worldwide than the amount of people that are fluent in the world's most popular language, Mandarin. With the evolution from "keyboard emojis" [i.e. :) and >:( ] to what we currently know as emojis (the little pictures of faces and whatnot), we have developed these "unwritten definitions" for each distinct emoji, such as the different meanings behind each of the smiling emojis (

Chinese characters have been an obstacle preventing the development of Chinese proficiency for learners of Chinese whose native language does not have characters. A substantial literature review identified linguistic, pedagogical, and political factors as causes of those difficulties. Tone changes represent different meanings of a word. Compound characters include the phonetic component radicals that do not always sound the same as the phonetic radicals. These unique linguistic features of the Chinese language add even more challenges for learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).Technology integration has been found to facilitate the teaching and learning foreign languages in many efficient and effective ways.

This article talks about different dialects in America and how American dialects are continuing to diverge, primarily with their vowel sounds. In particular, cities in the Great Lakes have been observed as revolutionizing the sound of English. Linguists have observed what's called a "chain shift," where by changing one sound, such as the short "a" sound, would have an effect in changing multiple sounds and therefore altering the Northern Cities dialects. This article goes on to outline the history behind these changes, the unawareness factor people from these cities experience, the racial aspect of how this dialect is diverging, and other points.

Essayist Ligaya Mishan (one of my best friends from Punahou!) examines "cancel culture"--the practice of publicly ostracizing a person, whether it's professionally, personally, or in the digital/social media world--historically contextualizing the phenomenon, which is not recent, but something that has existed in many cultures, past and present, and examining the reasons behind it. This essay is also a Words R Us special in its use of etymology: examining the origins and evolution of different words related to cancel culture.

So basically you'll get into college if you write interesting stuff and you establish yourself as an individual. How hard can that be if we're all different people?

This article talked about how UC system used to not read the college essays. However, now that they do, it seems that a strong college essay could be the "edge" needed to make it into some of the more popular and more difficult to get accepted to UC schools. The main point that this article makes is, stand-out essays that represent the applicant's individuality can be much more beneficial than an essay that sounds like everyone else's.

This article promoted writing unique essays that establish you as an individual. This article talked about how they wanted to see more character within these essays rather than reading the same essays over again. I think that the point of this article was to stand out by being yourself and by adding some of your own personality to you essay.