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Stephen Wilson, an associate professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, studied the upper and lower white-matter connecting pathways between Broca's region and Wernicke's region: the two areas of the brain that are hubs for language processing. Brain imaging and language tests were used to examine patients suffering from language impairments caused by neurodegeneration. Wilson discovered the pathways have distinct functions. Damage to the lower pathway affects lexicon and semantics: "You forget the name of things, you forget the meaning of words. But surprisingly, you're extremely good at constructing sentences." Conversely, damage to the upper pathway creates problems in syntactic processing and figuring out the relationship between words in a sentence.

Language isn't found in just one part of the brain but rather in separate individual parts that are responsible for different aspects of language. Neurodegentive diseases that target specific areas of the brain affecting language, only have a partial effect on the patients ability to understand and communicate.

""Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are," says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD ... In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power. "Height is often used as a metaphor for power," Duguid says ... "These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power," Duguid says." Full study (free PDF): http://j.mp/yxfnPV

In this essay, D.E. Whittkower, in the Dept. of Philosophy at Old Dominion University, attempts to establish that social media communications constitute a secondary literacy, which shares many of the features of spoken language ("orality"). Whittkower's discussion of Facebook, in particular, is thought-provoking; he suggests that the site is a "remarkably well-suited site for the activity of friendship," providing opportunities for relationships and interests to grow and intensify and for participants to engage in linguistic and post-linguistic social grooming.

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 researchers first looked at hot spots-locations with an exceptionally high number of unique species that also has a loss of habitat of 70 percent or more. ... In these 35 hotspots-spread throughout the world's continents with the exception of Antarctica-the researchers found 3,202 languages-nearly half of all languages spoken on Earth. ... It's unclear why areas of endangered species concentration and endangered languages coexist. ... The study is a starting point to explore the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity."

""When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds," says James Pennebaker. ... If the essay question was asked in a dry, confusing way, the students answered accordingly. If asked in a flighty, "Valley girl" way, the students punctuated their answers with "like," "sorta" and "kinda."... "Style words in the spouses' poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship's end," Ireland says." Unfortunately, the paper isn't online, but you can see the abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20804263

Thanks, Ryan. I think there will be a lot of interest in this research.

The amount of texting a teenager does can lead to school bullying, obesity and lack of sleep, according to a story in The Salt Lake Tribune. These factors can affect a teenager's relationships with both friends and family.

Emoticons - representations of facial expressions using colons, dashes, parentheses and other text symbols - originated in the days of the telegraph as a substitute for the facial expressions, hand gestures and vocal clues for different emotions that humans pick up during in-person meetings. Because printed words alone can't always convey the full emotional meaning of a conversation, emoticons have evolved into a separate language, especially with the world increasingly relying on texting, tweeting and e-mail. Called Stickers, Facebook's emoticons were born out of more than two years of research into the compassion of Facebook members, then fine-tuned by scientists specializing in human facial expressions. And while they were inspired by evolutionist Charles Darwin's studies in the mid-19th century, Facebook believes they could be a vital part of human-to-human relationships in the digital 21st century.

This is the URL for the detailed qualitative study: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332691.2013.836051

For example: "English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary." "Hawaiian is a cousin of Indonesian with a fear of consonants." "Spanish is essentially Italian spoken by Arabs."

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

Dwight tries to logically reason his relationship with Jim: Jim is Dwight's enemy, but Jim is also his own worst enemy. Therefore the enemy of Dwight's enemy is his friend. So Jim is actually Dwight's friend. But Jim is also his own worst enemy, and the enemy of a friend is an enemy. So Jim is...what? It is fallacy in humor because though the logic makes some sense, it goes in circles and puts Dwight in the same spot but more confused than helped.

Sounds like two possible fallacies: arguing from ignorance (if he's not my friend, he must be my enemy), and/or false choices.

a simple scheme for identifying the underlying issue in an argument

"the emoticon has rather suddenly migrated from the e-mails and texts of teenagers (and perhaps the more frothy adults) to the correspondence of business people who pride themselves on their gravitas. ... recent adoptees like Dr. Bates and Ms. Heller said that emoticons not only signal intention in a medium where it's notoriously hard to read tone, they also denote a special congenial relationship between sender and recipient. ... Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that writers and teachers of writing are among the last emoticon holdouts."

contains links to two scholarly essays, including how the tool was developed and used

"www.richslatcher.com/papers/SlatcherVazirePennebaker2008.pdf"

Discusses the benefit of lifelong bilingualism and it's relationship to the aging of the brain.

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.