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This article by Candice Jalili on Time discusses the body language people tend to have when lying. Everyone can lie, in fact, the average American tells one to two lies each day. It explains how to detect honesty in a conversation, including where their eyes go and how their voice sounds. When someone is lying, they are likely uncomfortable, so they may fidget or have frequent voice cracks. Doctors from the healthcare community provide input on signs people display when lying. The main sections of this article are body cues, facial cues, tone of voice, and content of speech. Body cues include hand movement and itching/fidgeting. Facial cues are eye movement, mouth position, change in complexion, and sweating. The section on tone of voice consists of a high pitched voice and changes in volume while speaking. Lastly, content of speech includes phrases people use, filler words, and slip-ups.

In the last half century, much effort has been placed into teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. However, successes have been limited: animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life. Here are some things that differentiate humans from animals: 1. The fact that animals don't ask "why?" shows they don't aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification. 2. The inability of animals to use negation shows they lack basic logical abilities. 3. Another essential characteristic of human language is its normativity-namely, the fact that there are right and wrong uses of a word or phrase. Animals lack this capacity.

This is a CDC document with facts on ADHD, the signs of ADHD, types of ADHD, etc. Overall this site gives a basic run down of ADHD.

An interesting scholarly sociolinguistic paper! Jane H. Hill, a University of Arizona linguist, examines the use of mock Spanish phrases In the southwestern United States. Hill wondered why English speakers of ``Anglo" ethnic affiliation make considerable use of Spanish in casual speech, in spite of the fact that the great majority of them are utterly monolingual in English under most definitions. However, these monolinguals both produce Spanish and consume it, especially in the form of Mock Spanish humor, and that use of Mock Spanish intensified during precisely the same period when opposition to the use of Spanish native speakers has grown, reaching its peak in the passage of ``Official English'' statutes in several states during the last decade. Hill argues that the use of Mock Spanish is, in fact, racist discourse.

This article talks about the complexities of language in dementia patients, specifically the fact that they are most likely to revert to their primary language as their condition progresses. The study that was done for this article also expands on the possibility that speaking two or more languages can delay the onset of dementia for an average of five years.

This article considers sarcasm to be "the highest form of intelligence" because it symbolizes an individuals flexible and creative mind. Through research done by psychologist and neuroscientists, it has been found that the usage of sarcasm actually requires more brain power to interpret than a literary statement. This is supported by the fact that young children don't understand sarcasm while teenagers are able to fully utilize it.

This article posted by UCSB speaks to the fact that technology is harming our human interaction, and we are reliant on it for many aspects of our everyday lives. The author uses several examples such as texting a friend, emailing a professor (instead of going in for help,) or missing the opportunity to meet new people. It's important to be mindful of how often one is going on a device because there is more to the world than the internet, social media, etc.

Animals too rely on structured communication systems to help transmit information. In fact, the ability to communicate information is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom : all life on this planet is able to communicate, both with other individuals of the same species, and with individuals of different species.

While watching the first presidential debate, take note of Lester Holt and each presidential candidate's body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, poise of presentation, grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure use. Additionally, performing a fact check on each candidate's remarks should also help you to distinguish a solid foundation of who to vote for: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

Providing new details about how it's trying to counter the spread of fake news on its services, Facebook says it's working with fact-checking groups to identify bogus stories - and to warn users if a story they're trying to share has been reported as fake.

Students are unable to tell if a paid article was whether real or not. This caused students to accept what they read in front of them as fact without actual legitimate information.

"The pure traditionalist and pure revisionist positions are both oblivious to what is at stake in arguments over language. The traditionalists claim they are just asking us to play by the rules of the game; revisionists say they are just asking us to accept the fact that language is always changing. But both sides ignore the profound consequences of how we speak."

A new study finds that software designed to automatically read and grade essays can do as good a job as humans - maybe even better. The robo-readers are efficient, as well, and can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. The caveats, however: computers don't do as well on comprehension, ascertaining facts vs. fiction, and assessing certain genres, like poetry.

"But languages do differ significantly in what they force speakers to express, something Lera Boroditsky talks about often in support of the "linguistic relativity" hypothesis. ... What really can't be translated properly is "go" into Russian, or "loved" into Spanish, not because the English words are too specific but because they're too vague. Those languages force you to say much more ... The traditional idea of "can't be translated" has the facts exactly backwards."

"Researchers map thousands of letters exchanged in the 18th century's "Republic of Letters" ... According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others." ... "when you have a rich, dense and geographically expansive correspondence network," what exactly puts you at the hub? In other words, are you the leading light because you are a great thinker with provocative ideas? Or are you a good patron who can bring people together? Or is it that "you have goodies to give?""

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies. They measured parents' use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings. "What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The more parents exaggerated vowels -- for example "How are youuuuu?" -- and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the 1-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around. "The fact that the infant's babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Kuhl said.

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found. In their study, which appears in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers examined 117 infants, aged nine to 18 months, who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children in the treatment condition received a baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and flip books to be used daily over a seven-month period; children in the control condition did not receive these materials from the researchers. Over the course of seven months, the researchers conducted a home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development. To test children's emerging skills in the laboratory, the researchers examined the capacity to recognize letter names, letter sounds, vocabulary, words identified on sight, and comprehension. A combination of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each stage of development. Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases. No discernible differences were observed between the results of the experimental group vs. the control; yet parents of the infants in the experimental group perceived that their children were, in fact, acquiring words. :-)

Author Clive Thompson argues, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." Every day, we collectively produce millions of books' worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media - the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.) He notes the Internet has spawned a global culture of avid writers, one almost always writing for an audience, and suggests that writing for a real audience helps clarify one's thinking, enhances learning, and arguably, betters writers' organization, ideas, and attention to editing.

A new speed-reading app, Spritz, premiered in March 2014. Its makers claim that Spritz allows users to read at staggeringly high rates of speed: 600 or even 1,000 words per minute. (The average college graduate reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute.) Spritz can do this, they say, by circumventing the limitations imposed by our visual system. The author of this article argues that your brain has an even more superior "app": expertise, which creates a happy balance between speed and comprehension. In their forthcoming book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, researchers Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel (along with writer Peter Brown) liken expertise to a "brain app" that makes reading and other kinds of intellectual activity proceed more efficiently and effectively. In the minds of experts, the authors explain, "a complex set of interrelated ideas" has "fused into a meaningful whole." The mental "chunking" that an expert - someone deeply familiar with the subject she's reading about - can do gives her a decided speed and comprehension advantage over someone who is new to the material, for whom every fact and idea encountered in the text is a separate piece of information yet to be absorbed and connected. People reading within their domain of expertise have lots of related vocabulary and background knowledge, both of which allow them to steam along at full speed while novices stop, start, and re-read, struggling with unfamiliar words and concepts. Deep knowledge of what we're reading about propels the reading process in other ways as well. As we read, we're constantly building and updating a mental model of what's going on in the text, elaborating what we've read already and anticipating what will come next. A reader who is an expert in the subject he's reading about will make more detailed and accurate predictions of what upcoming sentences and paragraphs will contain, allowing him to read quickly while filling in his alrea

Memrise is a British technology start-up that makes vocabulary learning into a fast, effective, and fun game. A million people are already learning on the platform and, with monthly active users growing at 30 per cent month-on-month, it is one of the fastest growing learning tools in the world. Free online learning and teaching site, with an associated mobile app. The language learning modules combine neuroscience principles, fun online-gaming-style leveling-up and leaderboards, and a social community. You can learn a bunch of different languages--200, in fact--from Chinese to Finnish to Arabic to French (Macedonian or Xhosa, anyone?), as well as content in other subjects: math and science, arts and literature... I'll keep you posted on whether it works by trying to learn a new language or several. I did check out the Chinese language component, and it seems legitimate so far... There's also a unit on "Brain and Mind" that would be of use to WRU students.