Group items tagged

This article discusses the origin of the Austronesian people, who rapidly spread across the Pacific and as far as Madagascar. Many Austronesian words and cultural practices are shared in the modern day. Austronesian people include the indigenous people of Taiwan, Oceania (Polynesians, Micronesians, and some Melanesian groups), the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Madagascar. There are also Austronesian groups in mainland Southeast Asia.

Immigrant groups from every part of the world have routinely brought their languages to the United States, save one: African Americans. John Baugh explains how the African slave trade impacted this unique variety of American, and how the term "Ebonics" came into being.

A group of anthropologists from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century - close to a billion words in millions of books. Researchers found that the Twenties marked the apex of joy-related words; the overall usage of commonly known emotion words, however, has been in decline over the 20th century. The one exception: "fear", which started to increase just before the 1980s.

This article highlights the phrases that Clinton used during the presidential debate to attract black voters. Phrases like "systematic racism", "implicit bias", "black bias", and "racist" were used to identify with the black voters. Many viewers were excited that she was facing such issues and was tackling them head on because according to this article, "A big chunk of Americans - not just people of color - want our leadership to talk about race, and to talk about policing the criminal justice system and the role that race plays in those institutions." As a presidential candidate, Clinton has been forced to become more skilled with the word choice. Here, she attempts to appeal herself to different groups of people to attract votes.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

The Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese is a victim of language standardization in schools and offices, urban redevelopment and migration. To the untutored ear, the Beijing dialect can sound like someone talking with a mouthful of marbles, inspiring numerous parodies and viral videos. The dialect is a testament to the city's tumultuous history of invasion and foreign rule. The Mongol Empire ruled China in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Manchus, an ethnic group from northeast Asia, ruled from the mid-17th century into the 20th. As a result, the Beijing dialect contains words derived from both Mongolian and Manchurian. The intervening Ming dynasty, which maintained its first capital in Nanjing for several decades before moving to Beijing, introduced southern speech elements.

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.

"No matter whether you're a new hire or a veteran professional, at some point you're going to have to initiate a 'difficult conversation' with a boss, co-worker or colleague. This conversation could be between you and one person, or it could be between you and an entire group of people."

"Learning a foreign language is never easy, but contrary to common wisdom, it is possible for adults to process a language the same way a native speaker does. And over time, the processing improves even when the skill goes unused, researchers are reporting. ... the immersion group displayed the full brain patterns of a native speaker." Full study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032974

Linguists can generally be divided into two groups: prescriptivists, or those who hold that language is governed by fixed rules of grammar, and descriptivists, or those who believe that patterns of actual usage reflect the way the language is used. In extremely broad strokes, if prescriptivists are anal retentive, then descriptivists are free-to-be-you-and-me.

ABSTRACT: The present investigation examined the impact of bicultural identity, bilingualism, and social context on the psychological adjustment of multicultural individuals.......We concluded that, in the process of managing multiple cultural environments and group loyalties, bilingual competence, and perceiving one's two cultural identities as integrated are important antecedents of beneficial psychological outcomes.

"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games ... The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional Stroop task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting Stroop task."

Actually, there are some studies just about emotional Stroop tests that sound similar to the one in the violent video games study. This looks like a good presentation about how emotional Stroop tests work: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/Emotion1.pdf This one talks about why those Stroop tests work: "In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology.The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition." - http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/papers/stickiness/WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf This is a meta-analysis of emotional Stroop test studies that describes (actually, it's critical of) how such studies are done: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/coglab/publications/LarsenMercerBalota2006.pdf

Thanks, Ryan! I will take a look at these.

"...a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. ... "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer ... who created Na'vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." ... fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. ... There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto ... The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. "Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It's about belonging to a group," she said. ... The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language ... But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na'vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology." Reaction on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3628 - "there's an attitude among some linguists - and also plenty of non-linguists, as is evident from many of the comments on the NYT piece - that engaging in conlang activity is a waste of time, perhaps even detrimental to the real subject matter of linguistics."

"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."

"...a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress. ... Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said. ... The study focused on "prosocial" gossip that "has the function of warning others about untrustworthy or dishonest people," said Willer, as opposed to the voyeuristic rumor-mongering about the ups and downs of such tabloid celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen."

Dr. Geary explains how metaphors are used to veil the true meaning of what one is trying to say in hopes to either deceive a group or to promote good feelings among a population. Consider his examples of Bush's "Axis of Evil" and Obama's desire to extend a warm hand to countries across the globe. This book sounds much like Steven Pinker's lecture for the RSA Animate video, "Language as a Window into Human Nature", and both the video and book aren't too different; both simply look at the same topic in different ways (innuendo vs. metaphor - though these hardly seem different if one were to really think about it). Link to Pinker's RSA Animate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

"A council in France has abolished the word 'Mademoiselle' from all official documents because it is 'condescending and sexist'. The Paris suburb of Fontenay-sous-Bois said the term - the French equivalent of 'miss' - discriminates against women by asking them to reveal if they are married. ... Julie Muret of campaign group Osez Le Feminisme, meaning Dare Feminism, said in September that the equivalent word for men of 'Damoiseau' - meaning squire - was abolished decades ago."

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.

Research by professor Ilija Casule of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia shows that Burushaski, a language spoken by about 90,000 people in a remote area of Pakistan is Indo-European in origin, and not a linguistic isolate, as previously thought. He explains how 20 years of research has tied this isolated group of people to a migration that started in the Balkans and moved East 3,000 years ago.