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Has a list of entries on the word "like"

'By studying language in people with aphasia, we can try to accomplish two goals at once: we can improve our clinical understanding of aphasia and get new insights into how language is organized in the mind and brain,' said Daniel Mirman, Professor of Psychology at Drexel University. Mirman is lead author of a new study which examined data from 99 people who had persistent language impairments after a left-hemisphere stroke. In the first part of the study, the researchers collected 17 measures of cognitive and language performance and used a statistical technique to find the common elements that underlie performance on multiple measures. Researchers found that spoken language impairments vary along four dimensions or factors: 1. Semantic Recognition: difficulty recognizing the meaning or relationship of concepts, such as matching related pictures or matching words to associated pictures. 2. Speech Recognition: difficulty with fine-grained speech perception, such as telling "ba" and "da" apart or determining whether two words rhyme. 3. Speech Production: difficulty planning and executing speech actions, such as repeating real and made-up words or the tendency to make speech errors like saying "girappe" for "giraffe." 4. Semantic Errors: making semantic speech errors, such as saying "zebra" instead of "giraffe," regardless of performance on other tasks that involved processing meaning. In the second part of the study, researchers mapped the areas of the brain associated with each of the four dimensions identified above.

Comparing two types of brain damage, researchers believe "the semantic system of the brain is comprised of at least two components - a core representation of knowledge, and an overall control system that navigates through the corridors of the mind finding and comparing meanings." Actual study at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19506072

Semantic Sustainability

Here's a followup on the Economist's language blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/change . The comments are pretty interesting, too.

"It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away. ... They found that after saying a word aloud 2-3 times per second for 15 seconds, subjects' estimates of its position in this semantic space moved to a point nearer the origin [it became more meaningless to the speaker]."

This research article was published to the Journal of Experimental Psychology, but this experiment did include linguistics. The experiments purpose was to see if more engaged working memory could quickly determine whether a word was really a word, thus the effect of the working memory on semantic meaning. They found that a high working memory load impaired the prime and task efficiency.

Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child." People use an array of strategies to make sense of confusing statements. This article reveals the different strategies brains use to create a correct sentence based on semantic expectations.

Siri uses a variety of advanced machine learning technologies to be able to understand your command and return a response - primarily natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition. NLP primarily focuses on allowing computers to understand and communicate in human language. In terms of programming, languages are split up into three categories - syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Whereas syntax describes the structure and composition of the phrases, semantics provide meaning for the syntactic elements. Pragmatics, on the other hand, refers to the composition and context in which the phrase is used.

The meaning of words, and the way we used them, change all the time - and that's OK with linguist John McWhorter of Columbia University. He writes about how the English language has evolved in his new book, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like Literally). This is a terrific book, by the way, with lots of entertaining examples of language shift, semantic drift, linguistic blending and contracting: perfect read for Words R Us. Highly recommended!

In spoken language, especially in conversations, people are prone to using filler words or - as linguists call them - discourse particles. By inserting these semantically and syntactically neutral words in an utterance, they allow for a speaker to pause while collecting their thoughts while preserving the position of speaker, a coveted social role.

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

National Public Radio interviewed linguist John McWhorter on words and semantic change. The interview provides several contemporary examples showing how words and language are constantly changing. Mc Whorter asserts, "I think that we should learn not to listen to people using natural language as committing errors because there's no such thing as making a mistake in your language if a critical mass of other people speaking your language are doing the same thing."

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.

Much of our recent reporting, especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school, nor working. There are an estimated five and a half million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States. But what do we call them? The nomenclature has fluctuated widely over the decades. And each generation's preferred term is packed with assumptions- economic, social, cultural, and educational - about the best way to frame the issue. Essentially, each name contains an argument about who's at fault, and where to find solutions.

Speech must be decoded by systems for semantic memory and syntax. Speech is open, inventive, improvised; it is rich in ambiguity and meaning. There is a huge freedom in this, making spoken language almost infinitely flexible and adaptable - but also vulnerable to mishearing.

nice overview of several linguistic topics (skip lingua franca links)

"Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female. ... The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. ... Some colleges, too, are starting to adopt nongender language."