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'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.

This article explains key principles and strategies for how to learn languages. It talks about the important elements: comprehensible input (understanding), comprehensible output (producing), and review/feedback (identifying and correcting errors). It mentions the need for balance and avoiding putting too much effort on one skill. It also talks about the importance of embracing mistakes, being comfortable with not knowing certain things, and creating low-stakes practices to become more comfortable with errors. It talks about motivation in learning and the drive for people's desire to learn the language. It includes a lot of psychology in it too.

Neuroimaging studies suggest that sign languages are complex linguistic systems processed much like spoken languages, even though they're gestural/visual, not oral. Wernicke's area activates when perceiving sign language; Broca's when producing sign language. In deaf people, lesions in left hemisphere "speech centres" like Broca's and Wernicke's areas produced significantly more sign errors on naming, repetition and sentence-comprehension tasks than signers with damaged right hemispheres.

President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci mispronounced the new COVID variant at a recent White House speech, calling the variant "omnicron" instead of the Greek letter "omicron." However, linguists explain that this is an expected error, as it is common for humans to take words from other languages and 'nativize' foreign sounds to make it more natural-sounding in their mother tongue. The abundance of English words with the prefix omni- seems to serve like a magnet, drawing in speakers to the similar set of letters and tempting speakers to mispronounce the omi- prefix as "omnicron."