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"Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there's been a corresponding decline in "we" and "us" and the expression of positive emotions."

In a study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Michael Vitevitch, KU professor of psychology, found there are words, like main players in a social network, that hold key positions on the word network and that we process them more quickly and accurately than similar words that they hold together in our memory." The finding may help lead to new insights into developmental and acquired language disorders and treatments for those ailments.

The Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world's most irregularly spelled language. Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters. As there's no systematic way to learn to read or write modern English-people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed--English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. Moreover, English-speaking children then spend years progressing through different reading levels and mastering the spelling of more and more words. That means it typically takes English-speaking children at least 10 years to become moderately proficient spellers-memorizing about 400 new words per year-and because they forget and have to revise many of the spellings they've previously learned, "learning to spell is a never-ending chore."

A new study has found that a key part of the brain involved in forming speech is firing away in babies as they listen to voices around them. This may represent a sort of mental rehearsal leading up to the true milestone that occurs after only a year of life: baby's first words.

An analysis of 95,000 words Mr. Trump said in public in the past week reveals powerful patterns in his speech which, historians say, echo the appeals of demagogues of the past century.

The priming effect occurs when one is exposed to words or images that subconsciously influence decision-making. For example, seeing pictures of a shower would likely influence you to fill in so__p as "soap." But, seeing pictures of bread, you would probably say "soup." A somewhat controversial study has shown that subjects who were unknowingly exposed to elderly words (like bald, gray, and wrinkle) walked more slowly toward the next experiment than the control group. Another study asked participants to lie via email and another group of participants to lie via voicemail. Those who lied on the email were more likely to purchase soap, whereas the group who lied via voicemail were more likely to buy mouthwash. This wasn't included in the article, but I suspect the reason it's easy to come up with puns is because our brains are primed to think of words within a certain theme. The article mentioned that you can use priming to help you come up with new ideas around a central idea by writing related words in a list, until you think of something appropriate.

Jennifer Sclafani, an associate teaching professor in Georgetown University's Department of Linguistics, has been studying the way Trump speaks. She notes that the way Trump speaks, he speaks was a commoner rather than a president, who is usually someone that sounds more educated, and more refined than an average American. She has noticed that through hyperboles and directness from his words, he creates a feeling of strength and determination that he can get the job done. Trump also omits the word "well" which makes him come across as a straight talker and not someone that tries to escape a question.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

TechRadar spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK's University of Warwick, to find out the science behind the struggle to deduce Wordle Puzzle #256. "[In your live blog] you've already talked about _ATCH as a kind of trap. This is an example of an n-gram, i.e. a group of letters of a length (n) that commonly cluster together. So this is an n-gram with a length of four letters: a quadrigram," Professor Voice tells us. "Using [this] Project Gutenberg data, it's interesting to note that _ATCH isn't listed as one of the most common quadrigrams in English overall, but the [same] data considers words of all lengths, rather than just the five letters Wordle is limited to. I don't know of any corpus exclusively composed of common 5 letter words, but it might be the case that _ATCH happens to be particularly productive for that length." "The other thing to mention," Professor Voice adds, "would be that the quadrigram _ATCH is made up of smaller n-grams, like the bigram AT, which is extremely common in English. So we're seeing a lot of common building blocks in one word, which means that sorting individual letters might not be narrowing down people's guesses as much as it would with other words."

The following article explores language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon. Why is it that a seemingly harmful sentence can create stereotypes or biases? How does language change the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world? Can different language patterns indicate something about our behavior? These are some topics regarded in this text, as well as the overarching theme of how words shape us and our lives.

This article discusses flawed association of filler words with misogyny and credibility/confidence of women.

This campaign, a part of Speak to The Future, aims to urge people to learn at least 1,000 new foreign words because of a decrease in multilingualism throughout the UK. These 1,000 words would allow for simple conversations and are believed to help improve social diversity and increase economic opportunities.

Here's how to be more emotionally intelligent: 1. Emotions are concepts: They're not hardwired or universal. They're learned. 2. Emotional intelligence starts with emotional granularity: If your doctor came back with a diagnosis of "you're sick", you'd sue the quack for malpractice. Doctors need to be able to distinguish between "chancre" and "cancer." And you need to know the difference between "sad" and "lonely." 3. Emotional intelligence is in the dictionary: You can't feel Fremdschämen if you don't know what it is. So learn new emotion words so you can feel new emotions and increase your emotional granularity, that is, the ability to distinguish the emotions you feel and recognize them as distinct and different. 4. Create new emotions: We could all use a little more "passion-o-rama" in our lives. Name those unnamed feelings you have and share them with others to make them real. In sum, finding specific words to describe the particularities of what you're feeling can lead to greater mental health. The article also discusses the differences that cultures/languages have in re: feelings and emotions we might've previously assumed were universal.

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

In late January 2016, the British government revealed a plan to invest $28 million in English classes for immigrants. If unable to pass a language test after 36 months in Britain, immigrants will risk deportation. Britain's plan soon became a laughingstock after its Home Office announced a "New English langauge test for family route migrants." The Washington Post covers the criticism and the viewpoints of those who have seen the mistake - and those who have made it.

As language evolves and new terms enter the mainstream, teenagers are often blamed for debasing linguistic standards. In some cases, their preferred forms of communication-like text messaging-are attacked. But, teens don't actually influence language as much as is often claimed. That's one of the key findings in the latest linguistic research by Mary Kohn, an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. How much a person's vernacular changes over time may have as much to do with personality and social standing as it has to do with age. The extent to which teenagers are credited with (or blamed for) driving lasting change to language is, she says, "grossly overstated." The same factors that prompt teens to experiment with new language are applicable to people at many stages of life.

This article is essentially explaining that teens aren't the main cause for a dramatic change in our language but actually innovators bringing in new words into our daily vocabulary. It also says that everybody can change language, as some words become "dated" and others don't. Teens aren't the only ones to blame for modern lingo.

This article talks about how coronavirus is changing our language. In this article, new lingo appropriate to the coronavirus. However, the new lingo takes more of a humorous tone that explores the new words as novelties rather than everyday slang. One funny exam was the word "covidiot" referring to someone who doesn't comply to coronavirus restrictions.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, ALS patient, uses an Intel microprocessor which enables him to speak. Hawking irreversibly lost speech function in 1985 as a result of a tracheotomy. Since his hands are too weak to type, Hawking uses a single cheek muscle to control the device. The device uses an adaptive word predictor from London startup SwiftKey which allows Hawking to select a word after typing a letter. Intel worked with SwiftKey, incorporating many of Hawking's documents into the system, so that, in some cases, he no longer needs to type a character before the predictor guesses the word based on context. The new version of Hawking's user interface (now called ACAT, after Assistive Contextually Aware Toolkit) includes contextual menus that provide Hawking with various shortcuts to speak, search or email; and a new lecture manager, which gives him control over the timing of his delivery during talks. It also has a mute button, a curious feature that allows Hawking to turn off his speech synthesizer.

"The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded... Each language is a unique expression of human creativity... it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar...If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival."

"This past December, a new video debunking this claim made the rounds."