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"Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. ... people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs. ... Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words."

It appears the queen's English ain't wot it used to be. A scientific study of Queen Elizabeth II's accent has found her vowels moving steadily downmarket. The study published in Nature magazine found there was a drift in the queen's accent toward one "characteristic of speakers who are...

Information set to music, suggests research, is better retained, as it taps into time- honored strategies that help information stick. Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. A study by Rubin showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics-memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it. Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang it.

A few of the words recently added to Dictionary.com Deep web: the portion of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines, as by encryption; the aggregate of unindexed websites: Dox: Slang. to publish the private personal information of (another person) without the consent of that individual Haptics: the branch of psychology that investigates sensory data and sensation derived from the sense of touch and localized on the skin. Glanceable: noting or relating to information on an electronic screen that can be understood quickly or at a glance:

UCLA researchers Oppenheimer and Mueller wondered if there was something about paper and the act of writing that explained this phenomenon, so they conducted an experiment. They asked about 50 students to attend a lecture. Half took notes on laptops and half with pen and paper. Both groups were then given a comprehension test. It wasn't even close. The students who used paper scored significantly higher than those who used laptops. Mueller attributes this unexpected finding - published in the journal, Psychological Science - to the fact that the "analog" note takers were forced to synthesize rather than merely transcribe. It's a phenomenon known as "desirable difficulty." "Desirable difficulty is some small roadblock that is in your path that actually improves your understanding of a topic," she explains.

Singing along to our favorite songs may actually be a skill we acquire even before we're born. According to a recent study published in the journal Ultrasound, unborn babies can "sing and dance" in the womb as early as 16 weeks.

more detail from Harvard about how to use N-gram

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.

Infants can make sense of complex social situations, taking into account who knows what about whom, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our findings show that 13-month-olds can make sense of social situations using their understanding about others' minds and social evaluation skills," says psychological scientists and study authors You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri.

In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

Dogs mull over human speech much the way we do, and they try hard to decipher what we're saying to them, a new study suggests. The research, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that our dogs are riveted to our words.

North Korea has published 310 new slogans to encourage patriotism - so what do they say, what do they mean and what do they tell us about the leadership in Pyongyang? Propaganda in the form of slogans, posters, stamps and books has played an important role in the country since the state was founded in 1948, so the appearance of a new batch of exhortations is not surprising. My personal favorite: "Play sports games in an offensive way!" See http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-31446387 for a full list of the slogans.

GENIE An Abused Child's Flight From Silence. By Russ Rymer. 221 pp. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. THE story of the girl known by the pseudonym Genie, who spent the first 13 years of her life locked in a bedroom alone, alternately strapped down to a child's potty chair or straitjacketed into a sleeping bag, fed on baby food and beaten with a wooden paddle when she so much as whimpered, is really three stories woven together.

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, "Science and Linguistics," nor the magazine, M.I.T.'s Technology Review, was most people's idea of glamour.

@kbendernyc *originally published 09/08/2014 AT 04:45 PM EDT Ben McMahon of Melbourne, Australia, can't remember the serious car accident that left him in a coma for over a week, but what he recalled upon waking up is truly astounding. McMahon awoke from his coma with the ability to speak near-perfect Mandarin, reports .

JRR Tolkien's classic, _The Hobbit_, is about to be issued in `ōlelo Hawai`i, thanks to the work of translator, Keao NeSmith. Hawaiian is one of the most endangered of the Polynesian languages. It's hoped that "Ka Hopita" will legitimize Hawaiian as an everyday language and boost the efforts of a new generation of Hawaiian speakers. "Ka Hopita," which is set to be published on March 25 (a date important to Tolkien fans because it's the day that Bilbo Baggins came home from his adventures), is the first Tolkien novel to appear in an indigenous language of the United States.

Does the Turkish word küçük (pronounced coo-chook) mean "big" or "small"? If you guessed the latter without knowing the language, you're right-and there may be a cognitive explanation for your instinct. In a study published in Cognition earlier this year, researchers tested people's ability to guess at the meanings of words based on their sounds. The lead researcher of the study, Kaitlyn Bankieris, a cognitive scientist from the University of Rochester, noted, "Our study provides a potential neural grounding for sound symbolism." In linguistics, the idea of "sound symbolism" is that there's an underlying relationship between how words sound and what they mean-and it is sometimes used to support the theory that there's some underlying cross-language meaning that humans are hardwired to attach to certain sounds.

When driving, don't talk to your car - or your phone. That's the underlying message of new neuroscience published Thursday that raises new questions about the safety of voice-activated technology in many new cars. The technology, heralded by many automakers, allows consumers to interact with their phones and their cars by issuing voice commands, rather than pushing buttons on the dashboard or phone. However, research found that the most complicated voice-activated systems, and the vocal and auditory tasks associated with them, can take a motorist's mind off the road for as long as 27 seconds after he or she stops interacting with the system. Even less complex systems can leave the driver distracted for 15 seconds after a motorist disengages. See the article for an embedded .pdf of the full study. But good news: apparently listening to the radio or audiobooks don't pose much distraction.

"Even if we cannot consciously see a person's face, our brain is able to make a snap decision about how trustworthy they are. According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain immediately determines how trustworthy a face is before it's fully perceived, which supports the fact that we make very fast judgments about people."