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Schizophrenia is a disorder that affects thought, and language, and communication, among many other things. Thought disorder often appears as disorganized language use and problems with semantic processing ability.

Voice-based interactions require sophisticated programming and AI to enable a machine to understand and talk to you. In other words, it's a really big deal to program a computer to have a conversation. Walter says the challenge now is to process massive amounts of dialogue-related data to facilitate human-like intellectual and speech functionality in machines. "We are developing the technology that will give machines the cognitive ability to understand the semantics and context of a conversation, respond to topic changes and, in essence, carry on everything from a complex conversation to small talk."

That agonizing moment when you know precisely what you want to say but you fail to produce the word or phrase is known as a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment. Lise Abrams, a psychology professor at the University of Florida has studied the phenomenon for 20 years. Researchers have even found occurrences among sign language users--termed "tip-of-the-finger" states. Key findings: 1. Low-frequency use: We're more likely to draw blanks on words we use less frequently - like abacus or palindrome. 2. There are also categories of words that lead to tip-of-the-tongue states more often. Proper names are one of those categories. There's no definitive theory, but one reason might be that proper names are arbitrary links to the people they represent, so people with the same name don't possess the same semantic information the way that common nouns do, Abrams said.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

This study examining the online identity and language use of teens who maintain personal blogs. Expression of gender, identity, and use of language were examined in terms of disclosed personal information (sexual identity, emotive features, and semantic themes).

Similarities: Both are used to communicate, both form language families, both have semantics and syntax Differences: Human language used to communicate between humans, programming languages used to communicate between human and computer, no morphology in programming languages, No synonyms, cultural significance, metaphors, analogies, in programming languages, no room for interpretation in programming languages

Summary: A new AI-based system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity -- while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story -- into a continuous stream of text. Unlike other thought decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive.

Outlines the importance of early children's language development. It highlights the importance of the four main components to early language development: Phonology, Semantics, Grammar and Pragmatics. This article shows the critical period of first 5 years in development as this is the time that baby's nerve connections are being made and those for speech/communication need to be built early on so that they're inherent to learning.

This was a study looking at the use of elderspeak in a referential communication task. The study was used to determine if young adults paired with older adults, who stimulated dementia or acted normally, would change their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse.

An important area of the field of second/foreign language teaching and learning is pragmatics -- the appropriate use of language in conducting speech acts such as apologizing, requesting, complimenting, refusing, thanking. Meaning is not just encoded in word semantics alone, but is affected by the situation, the speaker and the listener.A speech act is, according to linguist Kent Bach, "the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". Speech acts can be broken down into 3 levels: 1. locutionary: saying something 2. illocutionary: the speaker's intent in performing the act. For example, if the locutionary act in an interaction is the question "Is there any salt?" the implied illocutionary request is "Can someone pass the salt to me?"; 3. In some instances, there's a third perlocutionary level: the act's effect on the feelings, thoughts or actions of either the speaker or the listener, e.g., inspiring, persuading or deterring. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at University of Minnesota provides a collection of descriptions of speech acts, as revealed through empirical research. The material is designed to help language teachers and advanced learners to be more aware of the sociocultural use of the language they are teaching or learning. These speech acts include: Apologies Complaints Compliments/Responses Greetings Invitations Refusals Requests Thanks

This article describes a study conducted by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence which evaluated AI's capability to actually understand the language it produces. This comes after recent advancements in natural-language processing (NLP) have allowed AI to generate convincing literary works. In the study, researchers posed over 44,000 questions, built off the Winograd Schema Challenge, to an AI system. Essentially, the questions used pairs of sentences with slight differences that flipped the meaning of a pronoun, thus requiring a comprehensive understanding of semantics in order to correctly assign the pronoun. The study found that the AI only had a 60-80% success rate, compared to the human success rate of roughly 94%.