Group items tagged

A Liverpool University study found reading poetry lights up both the left part of the brain concerned with language, as well as the right hemisphere, an area that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion. Reading triggers "reappraisal mechanisms" that cause people to reflect on their own experiences in light of what they read. The study might also suggest that word choice and sound are crucial elements in creating beneficial literary experiences: more "challenging" prose and poetry (striking wording/phrasing, complex syntax) sparks far more electrical activity in the brain than more pedestrian translations of those passages.

Why do you do what you do? What is the engine that keeps you up late at night or gets you going in the morning? Where is your happy place? What stands between you and your ultimate dream? Heavy questions. Reflecting on one's progress and goals in writing, an act termed self-authoring, can lead to productive results for at-risk students.

suggests that different languages have different rhythms, and that those rhythms are also reflected in the music of that culture

Perhaps this has to do with the babies crying study also? "...not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their foetal life."

Western literature exhibits a gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn't have to be. When people's choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one's own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters' inner experiences may sharpen readers' general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that's the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

The accents we take for granted in our fantasy stories are informed, like almost all of the genre, by J.R.R. Tolkien's influence. Tolkien, author of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy had his orcs speaking with a working-class Cockney accent, whereas dwarven language reflected Semetic language inspiration, and Elvish, Finnish and Welsh roots. When Tolkienʻs stories were adapted as radio plays and films, the dwarvesʻ accents took on a Celtic character, whereas the elvesʻ accent reflects the upper-crust accent associated with English royalty.

In this NPR interview, Trinidadian-American Lyiscott reflects on a moment where she'd been termed "articulate," a loaded term that got Lysicott reflecting on the ways certain varieties of language are privileged over others, and also the way "articulate" also suggests a perceived mismatch between the appearance/race of the person and their use of langugage, also how people judge others' intellect and capacity, based on how they speak.

Author Karel McIntosh, a "Trini Creole" (Trinidad Creole English, a.k.a. TCE) and standard English code-switcher, reflects on how TCE is stigmatized in her homeland, arguing that the language has a rightful and valuable place. Readers may find parallels between the linguistic situation in Hawaii and that in Trinidad.

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.

"'Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they'll be doing throughout infancy and childhood - learning about language,' said the lead author." This reminds me of the study that showed that babies' crying melodies reflect their native languages. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8346058.stm)

There are numerous positive effects of writing in a journal. The action of writing our thoughts, ideas and feelings benefits us in numerous aspects of our lives. One benefit of writing in a journal is that is boosts memory and comprehension. This is because there is a relationship between our hands and brains created by writing thoughts and ideas. Words are representation of ideas and the formation of letters causes the mind to compose or re-compose ideas while journaling. The second benefits is emotional, physical and psychological healing. This is because translating an experience into language makes the experience graspable and allows you to free yourself from emotional blockages and lowers anxiety, stress and induces better sleep. These are two out of ten benefits of writing in a journal that is proposed in this article.

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.

by George Grace--a commentary on the "social grooming" theory of language evolution

"A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech - talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation. ... Algorithms developed by Dr. Hirschberg and colleagues have been able to spot a liar 70 percent of the time in test situations, while people confronted with the same evidence had only 57 percent accuracy ... His lab has also found ways to use vocal cues to spot inebriation, though it hasn't yet had luck in making its computers detect humor - a hard task for the machines, he said."

Prior to the late 1880s, Chickasaw was the dominant language in Chickasaw Nation, in the southern part of central Oklahoma, yet today, only 65 fluent speakers, all bilingual in Chickasaw and English, remain. The death of Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual Chickasaw speaker, in December 2013 has spurred reflection on the erosion and future of this endangered language.

Anthony Shugaar reflects on the fine art of literary translation: how do you properly render details like dialect or culturally-understood details?

From drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans, the folk poetry called landay reflects Afghan life. Landay are two-line, 22-syllable poems in the oral tradition. The form is thousands of years old, thought to come from the caravan trains that arrived in the region in approximately 2,500 BC. Contemporary Afghan women are composing landay as a form of rebellion. Reporter Eliza Griswold studied these contemporary poems and discovered a complex world of rage, empowerment, sorrow and sex.

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, University of Washington researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas - the hippocampus and cerebellum - can predict children's language abilities at one year of age. Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1, as measured by babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and ability to produce different types of sounds. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor. "Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn't the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing," Kuhl said. "Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents." The findings could reflect infants' abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind. "The brain uses many general skills to learn language," Kuhl said. "Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path."

The more parents talk to their children, the faster those children's vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. The problem seems to be cumulative. By the time children are two, there is a six-month disparity in the language-processing skills and vocabulary of toddlers from low-income families. Toddlers learn new words from their context, so the faster a child understands the words he already knows, the easier it is for him to attend to those he does not. Dr Anne Fernald, of Stanford, found that words spoken directly to a child, rather than those simply heard in the home, are what builds vocabulary. Plonking children in front of the television does not have the same effect. Neither does letting them sit at the feet of academic parents while the grown-ups converse about Plato. The effects can be seen directly in the brain. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University studies how linguistic disparities are reflected in the structure of the parts of the brain involved in processing language. Although she cannot yet prove that hearing speech causes the brain to grow, it would fit with existing theories of how experience shapes the brain. Babies are born with about 100 billion neurons, and connections between these form at an exponentially rising rate in the first years of life. It is the pattern of these connections which determines how well the brain works, and what it learns. By the time a child is three, there will be about 1,000 trillion connections in his brain, and that child's experiences continuously determine which are strengthened and which pruned. This process, gradual and more-or-less irreversible, shapes the trajectory of the child's life.And it is this gap, more than a year's pre-schooling at the age of four, which seems to determine a child's chances for the rest of his life.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American's ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino's ability to speak English without an accent.This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour - microaggressions - used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.