Group items tagged

Wanda Wallace, in a study reported in the November 1994 _Journal of Experimental Psychology_, noted that the melody of a song, in some situations, can facilitate learning and recall. The experiments in this article demonstrate that text is better recalled when it is heard as a song rather than as speech, provided the music repeats so that it is easily learned. Furthermore, the experiments indicate that the melody contributes more than just rhythmic information. Music is a rich structure that chunks words and phrases, identifies line lengths, identifies stress patterns, and adds emphasis as well as focuses listeners on surface characteristics. The musical structure can assist in learning, in retrieving, and if necessary, in reconstructing a text.

Based on past experiments and research of music affecting one's reading comprehension, it shows that students listening to lyrical music during an exam scored lower than students listening to instrumental songs. (Which proves my hypothesis of this experiment that I will be performing myself.)

Bilingual TV shows and networks have just begun popping up in the past few years. For some, it's important to serve the bilingual audience. For others, it seems unnecessary because bilingual people can already enjoy both Spanish and English-language shows.

"The verb tweet is gradually developing its own syntax according to what it means and what its users regard as its combinatory possibilities. That is a really interesting, though unintended, large-scale natural experiment in how syntactic change works."

Including information on the Forbidden Experiment, Critical Period hypothesis, Victor of Aveyron, Genie, and others.

lively analysis of the role of pronouns in English--this writer gives you a glimpse of what it's like to be setting up experiments in psycholinguistics

New study co-authored by Lera Boroditsky: "The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments...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."

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."

Essays should be more about how an experience affected a writer, and should give insight about the writer than just telling a story. Doing so will personalize the essay more and let the reader set the writer apart from the other thousands of applicants.

The writer can make their essay sound more personal by focusing on specific events or qualities within a larger event.

The writer needs to be able to convey how they changed or show specific qualities that they gained from events that impacted their lives. rather then just explaining a story in their lives because the admissions officer wont be able to know the real you.

These writing experiments seem like ways to burrow through the language environment that is our niche...

This video is an experiment of gratitude. It experimented the effects expressing gratitude with words, has on happiness.

I can relate and I completely agree.

New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."

Nice resource of sound recordings/experiments done with children, babies and language

Many people experience moments of which certain words are "On the tip of their tongue." This is actually quite common and caused by the meaning of words, and the words themselves being stored in different areas of the brain. Bilingual people are found to experience this twice as much, especially with the less dominant language.

This article talks about how metaphors are everywhere and are always present in our lives. It talks about how using metaphors can help to improve the user friendliness of online websites.

There are two neural mechanisms that scientists believe enable us to communicate. One is that sound waves made by the speaker affects how the listener's brain responds, which is basically the same way the speaker's brain is responding. The other is that human brains have formed a common neural behavior which makes our brains respond in the same type of pattern, allowing us to share information through this neural behavior. One of the experiments discussed in this article explains that people were brought in and scanned by fMRI machines, monitoring the part of the brain that processes sound waves coming from the ear. These subjects were monitored while they were at rest, telling a story, and/or listening to a story. It then discusses the results and results of similar experiments.

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. A 2017 study conducted by Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and felllow linguist Emanuel Bylund, shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. Learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. It seems that by learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren't aware of before. The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception and now it turns out, our sense of time. But it also shows that bilinguals are more flexible thinkers and there is evidence to suggest that mentally going back and forth between different languages on a daily basis confers advantages on the ability to learn and multi-task, and even long term benefits for mental well-being.

What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them? Part of the problem is that there is more involved than just language and thought; there is also culture. Your culture-the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that you pick up from the people you live and interact with-shapes the way you think, and also shapes the way you talk.

Have you ever had trouble describing one of your experiences? This article explores how language can restrict us. For example, color is fluid, but language isn't; at one point the color is going to change from red to orange when yellow is slowly added to it. Moreover, the environment in which we live has an influence on the words we use and the ones even in our language. Guugu Yimithirr doesn't have words for the English equivalent of "left", "right", "up", or "down". Instead, directional words (North, South, East, and West) are used. Languages have a great way of affecting how we think and offering new insights.