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14 children with autism spectrum disorder participated in the "Hunter Heartbeat Method" which is a drama-based social skills intervention. The children play games that work on skills like facial emotion recognition, personal space, social improvisation, and pragmatics of dialogue exchange. The games are based on the plot of The Tempest and are taught in a relaxed and playful environment. At the end of the ten week program, children showed better language skills and were able to better recognize facial expressions.

Over the past few months, the online word game Wordle has skyrocketed in popularity, with cryptic grids of gray, green and yellow squares appearing on social media.The game is challenging, but simple: Once a day, players have six guesses to identify a new five-letter word (all players receive the same word on a given day). Each guess provides color-coded hints: a letter turns green if it is in the correct spot, yellow if it is part of the word but in a different spot, and gray if it is not in the word at all. In Wordle, the process of intuiting a target word from color-coded clues provides a window into our subconscious understanding of how language works, according to UChicago linguist Jason Riggle. In effect, it turns everyone into a linguist, forcing us to wrestle with sound fragments and stitch them together according to probability distributions.

In many countries outside the US, athletes use calming words to ready themselves before a match or game. They tell themselves phrases like "let's go!" and remind themselves to be present. One of India's highest ranked tennis players silences his inner dialogue so that he is ready to go when the moment comes. Many American athletes, however, get 'pumped up' by calling each other 'sissy' and criticizing themselves so they have more drive to do better. Some sports teams put value in their lives outside the sport by encouraging their team mates that they should "do it for their family's sake." Overall, there is not one pep talk that works best for different sports, different positions, or different players.

Beginning with Gangnam Style, followed by the success of K-pop groups such as BTS, interest in Korean popular culture has skyrocketed in the past decade. One way this has manifested is through a steep rise in individuals learning the Korean language. According to a study conducted by the Modern Language Association, U.S. college student enrollment in Korean language classes has risen 78% from 2009 to 2016, reaching 15,000, while total enrollment in language classes has plateaued in recent years. The only other widely learned language with significant growth in the span was American Sign Language, which increased enrollments by 37%. Despite this trend, East Asian Studies departments have struggled to accommodate the increasing demand for Korean classes. This is because Korean language classes have been historically limited and under-resourced due to the fact that language programs in East Asian Studies have traditionally focused on Mandarin and Japanese. Experts say that K-pop is the main reason for this trend, coupled with the success of several Korean TV shows and films such as Parasite and Squid Game. The current growing trend of interest in the Korean language and culture has also been an opportunity for South Korea to engage Americans in a variety of other sectors relating to the country including business, politics, economics, and history.

Two graduate economics students from Washington State University used Twitter to analyze how sports pundits' reputation was affected by their confidence and accuracy at predicting the outcomes to sporting events. They analysed tweets in which professional pundits and fans made predictions about the winners of a series of high-profile baseball and American Football matches. Each tweet was given a "confidence" rating depending on its language, with words like "destroy" and "annihilate" scoring higher than "beat", for example. Both the pundits and fans' predictions were worse than chance, with the professional analysts only proving correct 47 per cent of the time and amateurs 45 per cent of the time. Yet pundits' confidence was measured as 50 per cent higher than amateurs, and they gained more followers on the networking website as a result, the researchers said. Presenting their findings at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance earlier this year, the researchers explained that being confident could increase a pundit's following by 17 per cent, while predicting every game correctly only raised it by 3.4 per cent.There was a similar pattern among amateurs, with brash people increasing their following by 20 per cent but correct guesses only raising it by 7.3 per cent. In general, pundits are better served by being brash and making people excited, they claimed.

The New York Times ran a sobering cover story today on the epidemic of gun violence in the nation titled "A Drumbeat of Multiple Shootings, but America Isn't Listening". In the piece, journalists analyzed 358 armed encounters across the country where four or more people were killed or wounded - and the results were staggering.

That's the conclusion of new research from the UK's Cambridge University Press, which has looked at the way we talk about men and women in sport. Analyzing over 160 million words from decades of newspapers, academic papers, tweets and blogs, the study finds men are three times more likely than women to be mentioned in a sporting context, while women are disproportionately described in relation to their marital status, age or appearance.

"At the highest levels [of playing Scrabble] it can also be an advantage not to speak English at all." Article mentioned in http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-24810762

Students at Stephen F. Austin State University ask questions that pertain to creating your own language. Big TV shows and movies such as Game of Thrones and Avatar are making creating your own language a popular idea. This article also describes how to create your own language, which includes picturing what your character looks like and how they would speak.

With texting, we tend to play this ridiculous game that revolves around who has the power in the conversation. The person who has yet to respond leaves the other person on tenterhooks, wondering if that was a dumb thing to say, if they were just scared off, if they're really on a date with someone much more interesting right now - any number of possibilities, really.

"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."

This NYT article reports findings of a recently released study, which concluded that computers are capable of scoring essays on standardized tests as well, or possibly better, than humans. However, Les Perelman, a director of writing at MIT and a tester of the Educational Testing Services E-Rater program disagrees, arguing that the system can be easily "gamed".

nbsp; Image by Getty Images via @daylife When he's on his game (as was the case last night), few leaders are better than President Obama at crafting and delivering a speech. His State of the Union address was beautifully written (of course, much credit goes to head speechwriter Jon Favreau) and expertly [...]

"[In] A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley ... Brain scans revealed that people with no symptoms of Alzheimer's who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease. ... While previous research has suggested that engaging in mentally stimulating activities - such as reading, writing and playing games - may help stave off Alzheimer's later in life, this new study identifies the biological target at play. ... Notably, the researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposition and levels of current cognitive activity alone. "What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said Landau. The researchers are careful to point out that the study does not negate the benefits of kicking up brain activity in later years."

Article discusses the Manti Te'o catfishing incident in historical context, examining the origin of the term "catfish", as well as other lexical terms that've been used to describe the duplicitous mind-games people play.