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Lukianoff, a First Amendment lawyer, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), and author of _The Coddling of the American Mind_, speaks about free speech controversies at American universities and the dangers of protecting students from ideas and words that they dislike. Such moves, although well-intentioned, arguably diminish tolerance for diversity and dialogue, and ironically, may exacerbate both depression and anxiety.

This article talks about: -Eminem -his rhyme schemes -how his rhyme schemes compare to historical rhyme schemes (ie. Shakespeare) -his rapping speed -his word puns and wordplay

"Psychology researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham wanted to know whether the voice that reads in our heads matches the voice that we read aloud in. In other words, does your internal monologue have an accent? ... you can't just ask people how they pronounce words in their heads. ... In order to get around that problem, the Nottingham researchers had subjects read limericks while carefully monitoring their eye movements. ... The subjects read the limericks silently to themselves. But when they got to rhymes that didn't make sense with their spoken accent, there was a distinct disruption in eye movement. ... what we know about he author of the piece can influence how we read it. ... 'For example, it has been demonstrated that knowledge of the presumed author's speaking speed can influence how quickly people read aloud a passage of text.'" Full study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0025782

Languages often adapt naturally to the world around them. Speakers create new words to communicate new concepts. But when a language isn't spoken widely enough to adapt on its own - as with Hawaiian - it may need help to move things along. The Hawaiian language has nearly 30,000 words. But up until the late 1980s, the language didn't have words for subjects like soccer, computer or recycling. So a group of linguists and language advocates formed a lexicon committee in 1987 to invent new words. The committee has created at least 7,500 new words since its inception. Many of the committee's entries have been published in a modern Hawaiian language dictionary called Māmāka Kaiao. Much of the group's work helped to make Hawaiian teachable in language immersion schools. But some are skeptical of the committee's work. One interviewee noted that there is a small group creating words that we "need" now, but it's unclear why that word was chosen or how. Even the pronunciation of new words can be confusing, she adds. Disagreements among Hawaiian speakers may seem like bad news for spreading the language. But Larry Kimura, UH-Hilo Hawaiian language professor, says it's a sign that the language is growing. He said the lexicon committee helps speed up what would have been an otherwise natural process of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi adapting to the world around it.

Eye contact plays a bigger role in communication than previously thought. Our pupils, which we cannot control, expands or contracts based on the attractiveness of what we're looking at. Blinking speed can also tell us something. You blink faster when talking to someone you find attractive. Too much constant eye contact can make people feel uncomfortable. A reason why children are often victims of pet attacks is that they stare too long at the animal and the animal feels threatened. The best use of eye contact is regular intervals rather than constant eye contact.

A linguist who began to train her border collie for sheepdog competitions using a dog whistle realized that the commands reminded her of language. The article goes on to detail communication between dogs and people, and how dog's cognition and understanding goes past following basic commands. For example, Chaser, the border collie, was able to fast map and learn things through reference cues - which goes much farther past simply understanding commands. It turns out, shepherds use only a few whistle commands with their sheepdogs, but the whistles change meaning based on situation, pitch, speed, etc, and provide information to the dog, similar to prosody, a key part of human language.

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.

This article talks about an interesting discovery that our speed to understand language may be able to change, as deaf people, who are more used to sign language, were also quicker to recognize human body language unrelated to sign language.

This is a study that looks at speed of speech, across many different languages, as people prepare to say nouns and verbs. They found that regardless of what language a person speaks, the majority of people slow down (in pauses and articulation) significantly more before a noun than they do before a verb. The study suggests that this is because nouns always contain new information and therefore require more planning than verbs, which don't always contain new and important information.

This article writes about the variation in speech rate. Some languages tend to have more syllables per a second. For example, French, Japanese, and Spanish speakers tend to have speak more syllables per a second (almost 8/s) than German, Vietnamese, or Mandarin speakers (roughly 5/s). Although stereotypes exist relating to speech rate, there is no connection between intelligence and speech rate. One significant and consistent variable in speech rate is age. Children speak slowly, then speed up until their 40s, then slow down again in their 50s and 60s.