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Ryan Catalani

The Bilingual Advantage - NYTimes.com - 6 views

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    "We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: "Apples grow on noses." The monolingual children couldn't answer. They'd say, "That's silly" and they'd stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, "It's silly, but it's grammatically correct." The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important."
jessicawilson18

Why English is Such a Great Language for Puns - The Economist - 1 views

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    We've all laughed at some horrible puns and made them as well! This article explores why English enables us to create word play and the extreme level to which people have taken it! For example, the pun masters of this world dubbed Gandhi as "a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis" for his barefoot and food fasting lifestyle. There are even competitions to show off your skill.
Lara Cowell

Is Language Unique to Humans? - 1 views

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    Primates, birds, cetaceans, dogs and other species have proven able, through extensive training, to understand human words and simple sentences. And as Ed Yong explained, in some exceptional cases, such as Kanzi and Alex, they've even been able to engage in two-way communication with humans. However, language is more than a process through which meaning is attached to words or short sentences. Language might be described as the ability to take a finite set of elements (such as words), and using a set of rules (grammar and syntax) to create infinite combinations, each of which is comprehensible. In addition, as far as we can tell, humans are the only species who can create and comprehend understandable silliness, like "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously".
dylanpunahou2016

Judging Others by Their Email Tics - 1 views

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    This article brings about the topic of how people end their emails differently. In the recent past, it has been deemed "cool" to have an email signature that read "Sent from my iPhone". Now, however, this is seen as generic. People are coming up with new ways to sign their emails that are original. They also aim to include personality and tone. This is proven to be challenging for many people because signatures are generally short. Email signatures can not only help indicate whether a person is professional or not, but also whether the person is irritated, silly, rushed, etc.
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    This article covers a few of the same things people covered from their recent projects. It is centered around the tone of emails and what makes that tone- words like "hi" vs. "hey", emoji use, punctuation, and response time. It also brings up an interesting point. "Research has found that when parties are getting along, they tend to mimic each other's subtle speech patterns".
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