Group items tagged

This article caught my attention because it's related to things we have discussed in class. The two main theories of where talking came from that are discussed in this article are exactly what we talked about in class. One thing I found interesting was that "researchers don't really think language was invented; instead [they] think it evolved during human beings' evolution from other apes."

This article talks about the benefits of meditation and how your body reacts. I find it interesting how much of an effect on the body meditation can do. Taking breaks throughout the day to reflect in peace allows the body (sympathetic nervous system) to calm down in order to achieve homeostasis. After trying some meditation techniques I find myself living a more relaxed life.

This article talks about how an Objiwe women built robots in order for the Native American children in her community (and others) to learn their indigenous culture and languages. It is so interesting to program a robot to speak a language to prevent indigenous languages from going endangered/extinct.

This article published from Yale briefly informs the reader about what dyslexia is, and how it can impact a person's everyday life. Something that is very interesting is even though dyslexia can create a setback when interpreting literature, many people who have dyslexia are some of the most creative thinkers. This just proves that the condition cannot define the intelligence of an individual. Even though it cannot be cured, it is very possible to have success and "overcome" this obstacle.

The article talks about the history drag and LGBTQ+ slang and the double-edged sword of the language becoming mainstream. It's interesting how many subcultures such as African American and Latinx cultures contributed to what drag is today.

This article reminded me of the Ted Talk we watched in class. It's interesting how a "language nest" works and how parents get paid to learn and speak Ojibwe with their children. I'm curious how language revitalization will evolve in the future.

Abstract: Self-affirmation theory posits that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to perceived self-competence are met with resistance. When threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values. Many questions exist, however, about the underlying mechanisms associated with self-affirmation. We examined the neural mechanisms of self-affirmation with a task developed for use in a functional magnetic resonance imaging environment. Results of a region of interest analysis demonstrated that participants who were affirmed (compared with unaffirmed participants) showed increased activity in key regions of the brain's self-processing (medial prefrontal cortex + posterior cingulate cortex) and valuation (ventral striatum + ventral medial prefrontal cortex) systems when reflecting on future-oriented core values (compared with everyday activities). Furthermore, this neural activity went on to predict changes in sedentary behavior consistent with successful affirmation in response to a separate physical activity intervention. These results highlight neural processes associated with successful self-affirmation, and further suggest that key pathways may be amplified in conjunction with prospection.

Sociolinguist Gavin Lamb examines how people use language to build social relationships with non-human beings, like dogs. He cites the research of Alexandra Horowitz, a dog-cognition scientist who studied verbal human-dog interaction. Some interesting findings: 1. Humans use dog-directed parentese for attention-getting, positive-affect, using a higher pitch, like we might for babies/toddlers. 2. Talking to dogs serves as a social lubricant for starting up conversations, or diffusing tense situations with other humans. 3. Asking rhetorical, unanswerable questions, e.g. "What's up, buddy?": an example of phatic communication, which is not information-driven, but which helps establish or maintain social relationships. The language serves a socio-pragmatic, rather than denotative function.

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.

SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT. There is no English translation that I know of for this article. Comprised of eleven interviews of fairly "high-class" individuals (including authors, journalists, doctors, lawyers, professors, religious officials, and more), the focus of this article is profanity, and whether or not said individuals use profanity while speaking. Interestingly enough, eight out of the eleven individuals used profanity fairly regularly. Most of those eight were fairly shameful about their use of profanity, or only used them in particular contexts-including, interestingly enough, during homilies/sermons. Only one person (Pilar de Río) declared that they used profanity freely and enthusiastically, while others, though admitting the merits of such language (particularly its expressive power), did not view them in such a positive light. Two additional members of the eleven interviewees primarily used "muletas" or "muletillas," or, as we know them in English, crutches or filler words. This article is quite interesting if examining profanity in different cultures and languages, as it is a Spanish-language article from El Ciervo, the longest-running magazine in Spain's history. Do note, again, that this source is a SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT, and that some proficiency in the language will be needed to interpret this text, even with the help of online dictionaries.

Emojis have now become the norm when it comes to online communication, however, it is now making its mark in health care. There is now interest in using emojis to help facilitate health literacy and engage patients with their own health data.

This is a super interesting article + podcast/interview about the last native speakers of Hawaiian. You learn about life and language on the Island of Niihau which is something we will never get to experience. It's 30 minutes and they discuss the tensions between second language speakers and native speakers of Hawaiian, evolution versus engineering of a language, the English influence over the Hawaiian accent, and more.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, the writer of this article from the Atlantic, examines the social media commentary surrounding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Milling," a sociological term, refers to the "agitated, aimless buzzing of the type of crowd that gathers in the aftermath of some bewildering catastrophe...We are all just chattering away in restless and confused excitement as we try to figure out how to think about what's happening. We want to understand which outcomes are most likely, and whether we might be obligated to help-by giving money or vowing not to share misinformation or learning the entire history of global conflict so as to avoid saying the wrong thing. We are milling." The word comes from the mid-20th-century American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who was interested in the process by which crowds converge, during moments of uncertainty and restlessness, on common attitudes and actions. As people mill about the public square, those nearby will be drawn into their behavior, Blumer wrote in 1939. "The primary effect of milling is to make the individuals more sensitive and responsive to one another, so that they become increasingly preoccupied with one another and decreasingly responsive to ordinary objects of stimulation." These days, we mill online. For a paper published in 2016, a team of researchers from the University of Washington looked at the spread of rumors and erratic chatter on Twitter about the Boston Marathon bombings in the hours after that event. They described this "milling" as "collective work to make sense of an uncertain space" by interpreting, speculating, theorizing, debating, or challenging presented information.

I thought was a really interesting and helpful website. The entries are short but you can request access to full articles as well. It has articles on LANGUAGE EFFECTS ON PERSONAL IDENTITY, PROFANITY AND MEDIA, PRAGMATISM OF CURSE WORDS, YOUTH SLANG EXPRESSION AROUND THE WORLD, IMPACTS OF "BAD" ENGLISH, UNCONVENTIONAL PHRASES AND AFRICAN RACE.

This article talks about how language is the most important part of culture. I thought this article was an interesting read because I believe it builds upon one of the small group discussions we've had in class earlier on in the semester. I am intrigued by the fact that many different countries have developed a language over time as a way to communicate, and has now become one of the things that define their culture.

Interesting article about AI's influence and potential influence in business practices.

This article talks about swearing and the hidden benefits that come with it. It also talks a little bit about swearing in different languages and how what words are considered swear words evolved. One thing I found particularly interesting in the article is that swearing has an observable, physical effect on a person. In the article, it said that "Students who repeated a curse word were able to keep their hand in a bucket of ice water longer than those who uttered a neutral word." I think that's both crazy and amazing that repeating a word that's considered taboo can have a physical impact on one's body.

This article was really interesting because it talked about how emojis are changing the way we communicate with each other. It talked about how emojis are replacing words in a simpler form, which can decrease the effectiveness of communicating with other people.

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

This site is very insightful as to the differences in language development in the brain between those that learn a second language in childhood and those that learn the language as adults. It explains briefly the idea of a critical period and discusses the interesting aspects that come along with learning a second language later in life. It mentions Broca's and Wernicke's area.