Group items tagged

This article is about the positive and negative effects of technology on children, this talks specifically about statistics and how they can benefit and not benefit from technology use.

This article contains several data tables that show the different modes of communication and how often we use each one. Certain graphs organize data by gender, age, impact on school, and much more. Something that interested me was that our time spent on text-based technology has negatively impacted our ability to write. This article analyzes each set of data points and puts our usage of electronics into perspective, as technology has dominated the way we converse.

This article serves as an update in the new year of 2024 on which states require their public schools to teach kids how to read and write in cursive. New to the 27 state list are California and New Hampshire, as they now all require some form of cursive education for the youth in school.

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.

This article discusses the impact of special communication apps for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and how they help non-verbal students communicate with the teachers and classmates.

This article details the impact of effective technology and the accessibility that comes with communication methods. The article also describes the way that iPads and tablets have become a part of the way that special education teachers communicate with their students and the newfound independence of non-verbal students.

A mom to a child with autism wrote a children's book to demonstrate how her non-verbal son is able to communicate despite being unable to speak. Although many people with severe autism aren't able to verbally communicate, they are still able to communicate their thoughts through gestures, body language, and tablets. Tablets have become a voice for people with autism and allows them to show others that they are able to comprehend more than people realize. People with autism, especially children, face constant judgment and bullying. The hope is that this book will normalize and expose children to other children with autism.

This language talks about the use of filler words in sentences and speech. Used limitedly, there are nothing wrong with filler words, but they may take away from how confident and put together you appear. It also covers hedge words, and how they make your sentences less impactful.

This article took another take on filler words and expanded on how filler words can actually be useful if used in an intentional way.

This article goes through the 6 distinct ways of using "like" and how society changes their views on filler words based on gender.

This is an excerpt of an article that details the evolution of the earliest writing systems. The most traceable writing system to date is the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which follows a trackable evolutionary pattern through history. The script evolved from tokens to 2D impressions, to logographs, and then finally into something similar in concept to the modern alphabet. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script would later become the foundation of many other written languages, including the current English alphabet.

Filler words ("um", "uh", "like", etc) play an important linguistic role in communication. This article explores explains the different types of filler words that exist, as well as the function that they serve in conversation. It also briefly touches on the use of filler words in different demographics.

Swearing is used in many parts of everyday speech, but still has some great mysteries. What are the grammatical categories of different swear words? Why do we swear? Why is society so affected by swear words? Why are swear words bleeped out on television?

Psycholinguist Steven Pinker examines the emotional impact of swearing and the evolution of words considered taboo, also reflects on several issues surrounding the issue of what language is offensive and about guidelines that might inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity?

By activating internalized values and norms, accents play a role in the formation and categorization of one's cultural identity, resulting in culturally specific patterned cognition. This article looks at the way accents give rise to cultural shifts in perspective and decision-making within bicultural individuals who have accented English, suggesting that bilinguals adopt cultural values and attitudes associated with their target language and demonstrating that accent alone can affect people's cognition. It highlights the idea of cultural frame-switching in which a person's interpretive frames shift because of the situational cues linked with their bicultural identity.

This article discusses the AI company Sanas' invention of technology that can mask "non-preferred" accents, intended for use in call centers. Controversy has erupted over the consequences of this technology, namely white-washing and the erasure of the culture and identity that is tied to accents.

This article describes a linguistic experiment that took place in Antarctica in 2017-2018. Scientists going to Antarctica were surveyed on their pronunciation of specific words, and by the end of the four month trip, the team pronounced one of the words in a different way to their individual original pronunciation. This illustrates that accents form through prolonged social and geographical isolation.

The author delves into the nuanced role of swear words, exploring how they can forge social bonds and emphasize points in conversations. However, how acceptable these words are varies based on how they are used, as there are a number of reasons one may swear.

This article discusses the psychology behind how each individual's linguistic style might influence those whom we build friendships with. Specifically, this article focuses in on how relational "echo chambers" are common in both online and in person conversations. From a study done to determine more about how linguistics relate to relationships, it was found that "In addition to linguistic similarity driving tie formation, friendship ties will also induce increases in linguistic similarity."

This article writes about address terms like "guys," "y'all," "bro," "dude," etc. They wrote about how masculine terms evolve tend to lose their gender over-time. This is the case because they are seen as more powerful and therefore more acceptable to be used for non-male addressees. People may take offense to being addressed as "ladies" because "ladies" puts attention towards their femininity when gender is usually irrelevant to the situation.