Group items tagged

"Researchers identified subtle variations caused by differences in the shape of individual whales' heads. It's the first time that sperm whale vocalizations have been linked to specific individuals. ... While the whales tended to possess the same basic repertoire of "codas" - the technical name for each distinctive series of clicks - one female had a completely different set. ... The question of whether it's appropriate to think of sperm whales as having names is a controversial one. Some scientists think that many cetaceans should be considered persons ..." See also "Sperm Whales Really Do Learn From Each Other" (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/sperm-whales/) - "Yes, sperm whale culture really is culture."

If any of you like History Channel, this would be an interesting video to watch. This film explains why American citizens have different accents and how their take on the American language has affected the shapes of our states. Note: This video does not contain great quality in terms of sound or picture but is still a cool video to watch if you have time :)

"Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. ... people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs. ... Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words."

Great article that explains different learning styles

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

We start building our sense of people's personalities from the first words they utter. Phil McAleer, of the University of Glasgow, ran an experiment where he recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth. Interestingly, participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices. What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. "Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted." (Perhaps a reason to avoid uptalk, if you're female?)

This study shows the science behind first impressions, and how certain voices can affect first impressions.

John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. - See more at: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/03/burmangender.html#sthash.ni29a3Q7.dpuf

Dyslexia stems from physiological differences in the brain circuitry. Those differences can make it harder, and less efficient, for children to process the tiny components of language, called phonemes. Using cutting-edge MRI technology, the researchers are able to pinpoint a specific neural pathway, a white matter tract in the brain's left hemisphere that appears to be related to dyslexia: It's called the arcuate fasciculus. "It's an arch-shaped bundle of fibers that connects the frontal language areas of the brain to the areas in the temporal lobe that are important for language," Elizabeth Norton, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute of Brain Research, explains.

Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, summarizes a decade's worth of research in this article. He concludes that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak. It is not a learned group reaction but an instinctive behavior programmed by our genes. Laughter bonds us through humor and play. He also explores gender differences in regard to the role of laughter in communication, also laughter as a tool in romance/pair-bonding.

Author Sheila Heen, along with Douglas Stone, recently wrote a book called Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. One of their chapters focuses on a phenomenon called "switchtracking": when "someone gives you feedback, and your reaction to that feedback changes the subject." Heen notes switchtracking is a pattern in feedback conversations "so common that it's instantly recognizable." "The first person stays on their own track. The second person actually smoothly switches to a different topic, which is their own reaction to the feedback, and often the feedback that they have themselves for the first person," Heen says. "They just get further and further apart ... And they don't even realize that they're going in different directions." Four pieces of take-away advice for effective feedback: 1. Try A Post-it We're always trying to get people to pay attention, but there's some research showing that we have a powerful (and affordable) weapon at our disposal: the Post-it note. 2. Assume Positive Intent Assume positive intent when receiving feedback: concentrate on the substance of the feedback, rather than questioning the giver's intentions! 3. To Get Someone's Attention ... Try Whispering In Their Right Ear. People are more likely to comply with a request when it was whispered in their right ear. 4. When Giving Feedback, Flatter First If you can boost a person's self-esteem before giving them constructive criticism, they might be more receptive to it.

Examining the results and methodology of a large Whorfian study (17 languages), which tested differences if there are differences in cognition between speakers of verb-frame languages (like Spanish, if the "Path is characteristically represented in the main verb or verb root of a sentence") and satellite-frame languages (like English, if the path is "characteristically represented in the satellite and/or preposition"). Important conclusion regarding study methodology: "Strong claims regarding the (in)validity of the Whorfian hypothesis in the encoding of motion events cannot be made on the basis of a limited number of languages or a restricted range of manner and path contrasts." They could have reached opposite conclusions if they only compared certain language pairs.  This is made in contrast with studies by, e.g., Boroditsky, which had relatively small sample sizes.

Interactive timeline of the history of English (spread across 10 different "acts") - includes sound clips (including Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales prologue), English language history, etc.

Adding on to Ryan's commentary: For each era, you can click on the different icons and do the following: 1. Read and hear a famous document 2. Get a brief historical overview 3. Linguistic developments 4. New words entering the language 5. A fast fact 6. A pun or riddle

"In different languages what do we say to mimic animal sounds?" 17 languages, from Danish to Urdu, with lots of animals.

Check out the visualization: http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/21/speechome-interactive-visualization-language-acquisition.html "This interactive visualization provides a look into the most complete record of a single child's speech development ever created... But parentese is not universal. It varies between different parents and cultures, and in some cases has been reported to be absent altogether. What effect, then, does it have on child development? Answering this question could help guide better ways to help children that have difficulty learning language." With links to the actual studies at the bottom of the page.

allows for a mashup of different approaches, using something called a recipe

"Neural processing that goes into deciphering simple two-word phrases is different from what happens when decoding complete sentences and other more complex linguistic expressions."

By Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky "In five experiments, we have explored how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that metaphors can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve complex problems and how they gather more information to make "well-informed" decisions.... [D]ifferent metaphorical frames created differences in opinion as big or bigger than those between Democrats and Republicans."

"What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). "