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In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

One could argue that Niʻihau Hawaiian is the closest we've got to early forms of the language spoken in the islands. However, the language may be dying out. One interviewee noted the more frequent use of English amongst younger Ni`hau residents and expressed worry that when young speakers use English, they'll start to think in English, possibly leading them to abandon the Hawaiian way of thinking, and perhaps the language. Niʻihau speakers don't use diacritical marks like ʻokina (glottal stop) and kahakō (macron), which have become invaluable aids for language learners. They do, however, use "t"s and "r"s in place of "k"s and "l"s (e.g. ke aloha= te aroha, Ni`ihau style) - something that isn't taught in universities and immersion schools. Hawaiian language scholar Keao NeSmith says there's a history there. He says missionaries were confused by the Hawaiian language when they arrived. They were determined to translate the Bible into Hawaiian, but they couldn't figure out when to swap the "t" for the "k" and the "l" for the "r". So they created a standardized alphabet that dropped the use of "t'"s and "r"s. NeSmith says Niʻihau speakers chose not to alter their spoken language. But the missionary system gained a stronghold in the rest of the islands through the 1800s. Many of the Hawaiian language documents developed during this period, including newspapers, would become a go-to repository for the revitalization of the ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi a century later as the number of native speakers began to decline.

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

270 Catholic bishops from around the globe, representing 13 different language groups, will be convening for a week-long meeting this month. Their goal: to come up with a single document of their findings to present to Pope Francis. The final version of that document will be written in the lingua franca of the Catholic Church, which is Italian. Italian has not been the official language for all synod business for very long. Pope Francis changed the official language of synod business from Latin to Italian a couple of years ago. In the past, when the bishops gathered for a synod, they produced documents in Latin. Unlike Latin, Italian is a living language of the real world, and arguably a more neutral linguistic choice than English. However, much controversy has arisen over both translation and ideological issues, and what true meaning and intent is being conveyed by document language and wording. Massimo Faggioli, a theology scholar, noted that under previous popes, the synods worked very differently. Bishops used to gather for the purpose of rubber-stamping Vatican policy. There was no real debate over the true meaning of the official text. "But now, these texts matter," Faggioli says. "[The bishops] know that if they vote on one text or another, that might change the direction of the Catholic church on some teachings, which was not something anybody was thinking about under Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict." Pope Francis has said he wants a more decentralized Catholic Church. And he has encouraged the bishops at the synod to speak boldly, even about subjects on which they disagree. Some of the most contentious issues at this synod are about whether or not to allow Communion to people who've been divorced and remarried, premarital cohabitation, and how the Church should talk about gays and lesbians.

Jez Burrows is the author of Dictionary Stories: more than 150 short fiction pieces, composed entirely from example sentences taken from 12 different dictionaries. Describing his writing process, Burrows comments: "It was only a few weeks into writing Dictionary Stories that I realized the dictionary is something of a Trojan horse. Trundling up to the perimeter of your bookshelves, it presents itself as a harmless book of reference-but look inside and you'll find it crawling with thousands upon thousands of microscopic pieces of fiction, all in the form of example sentences. Fiction is perhaps a slightly misleading word to use in this context. Lexicographers do not write these examples from scratch in the service of whimsical narrative; they query huge corpora of texts that could include novels, news broadcasts, articles and essays, and select an example that demonstrates the most probable usage of a word. But surrounded by the neutral, instructive language of dictionary definitions, example sentences feel vital and full of personality. The New Oxford American Dictionary contains over 80,000 examples, but it was just one ("He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery," an example of the word "study") that set me on the journey of collaging these sentences together to create very short stories. Should you wish to try writing stories of your own in this vein, I give you this list of some of the most versatile words the New Oxford American has to offer-or at least, words with the highest number of example sentences, any of which would make a fine start to a story." So, if you want to try emulating Burrows' style, here're the 6 words: 1. go, 2. run, 3. take, 4. set, 5. cut, and 6. stand. These words illustrate the linguistic concept of polysemy: words that possess many meanings. Try creating a story using one--or collaging several example sentences. Have fun!

Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

Research from Concordia University in Montreal reveals a new perk visible in the problem-solving skills of bilingual toddlers. The study assessed the vocabularies of 39 bilingual children and 43 monolinguals when they were aged 24 months, and then again at 31 months. During the second assessment, the researchers also had the young participants perform a battery of tasks to test their cognitive flexibility and memory skills. While overall, there was little difference between the bilingual and monolingual toddlers, bilingual children performed significantly better on the conflict inhibition tasks than did their monolingual counterparts. Conflict inhibition refers to the mental process of overriding a well-learned rule that you would normally pay attention to. These were the two tasks: 1. Reverse categorization -- participants were told to put a set of little blocks into a little bucket and big blocks into a big bucket. Then the instructions were switched -- big blocks in the little bucket and little blocks in the big bucket. 2. Shape conflict -- participants were shown pictures of different sized fruit and asked to name them. Then a new series of images was shown, with a small fruit embedded inside a large one. Toddlers were asked to point to the little fruit. Crivello, one of the lead researchers, commented that "Language switching underlies the bilingual advantage on conflict tasks. In conflict inhibition, the child has to ignore certain information -- the size of a block relative to a bucket, or the fact that one fruit is inside another. That mirrors the experience of having to switch between languages, using a second language, even though the word from a first language might be more easily accessible."

English originated in England and is the dominant language in many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. It is also the official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, island nations in the Carribean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and many countries in Africa, including South Africa. About a third of the world's population uses English and it is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries in the world. The parent language of English Proto-Indo-European was used about 5,000 years ago by nomads. The closest language to modern English is Frisian, used by the Dutch province of Friesland. During the course of many millennia, modern English has slowly gotten simpler and less inflected. In English, only nouns, pronouns (he, him, his), adjectives (big, bigger, biggest) and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to use uninflected adjectives (tall man & tall woman versus Spanish el hombre alto & la mujer alta. For the verb "ride", English has 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden) versus German reiten that has 16 forms. The simplification and loss of inflection has made English more flexible functionally and more open in vocabulary. English has "borrowed" words from other languages (e.g. cannibal, cigar, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, tornado, vanilla, etc. From Greek, English "borrowed": alchemy, alcohol, algebra, arsenal, assassin, elixir, mosque, sugar, syrup, zero, cipher etc. From Hebrew is: amen, hallelujah, manna, messiah, seraph, leviathan, shibboleth, etc. There are many other words in the English dictionary that are taken from other languages. Many countries speak or use English, but not in the same way we use it. The article is very long and goes through phonology (sounds), morphology inflection (grammar forms of tense, case, voice, person, gender, etc), composition, syntax (sentence forms), vocabulary, orthography (spelling systems) of English. It also gives

Maori is having a revival across New Zealand. Indigenous people are increasingly embracing their language, rejecting generations of stigma and shame associated with its use. And white New Zealanders are looking to Maori language and culture to help them make sense of their own cultural identity. As of 2013, just 3.7 percent of New Zealanders spoke the language fluently, and many predicted that it would soon die out. But analysts say Maori's status is shifting, and a basic knowledge of the language has come to signify cultural cool in a country that continues to wrestle with its colonial and indigenous roots. Now New Zealand's government, which says it wants more than 20 percent of the country's population to speak basic Maori by 2040, has pledged to provide Maori lessons in all New Zealand schools by 2025, despite a dearth of teachers who can speak the language.

This article talks about how the native Maori language is being revived in New Zealand. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the 19th century. Since that time, Maori language was looked down upon making it the minority language, but now with the recent rise of Maori speakers, it has started to become a common language used. This article talks about how every school is teaching Maori in their classes, and how they want Maori to be one of the dominantly spoken languages in New Zealand by 2040.

This article discusses the history of the Maori language and its progression throughout recent history. The Maori language was threatened like many other native languages in the world due to the aggression from the British. In the article shows how the people of the country are coming to terms with the past in order to build a brighter future for the native Maori culture and language.

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. Moreover, the brains of different people map language in the same way: words with related meanings lit up similar parts of the brain. Words meanings could pop up in different places simultaneously. Hearing the word "top" caused regions associated with clothing and appearances to light up. But "top" could also stimulate a region associated with words related to numbers and measurements. UC Berkeley neuroscientist, Jack Gallant, who authored the study, says the findings contradict two beliefs nonscientists commonly have about the brain. First, that only the left hemisphere handles language. Second, that the brain has localized regions which handle specific tasks. Contrary to those ideas, he says, language and meaning are distributed. "It's not that there's one brain area and one function," he says. But for Gallant, the real surprise is that the meanings of words triggered the same brain regions across multiple people in his study.

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. Moreover, the brains of different people map language in the same way.

Abstract: The speech community of the Hawaiian Islands is of theoretical interest to both the sociologist and the linguist. The reasons for this are clear. In the first place, it has a linguistic repertoire which is characteristic of multilingual societies. This is a direct consequence of the influx of immigrant labor from China, Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, Japan, and Portugal and their social and linguistic contacts with the native Hawaiians and the English-speaking colonialists. Hence, Hawaii is a veritable laboratory for sociolinguistic research. Secondly the varieties of speech range extensively and in accordance with the social demands of solidarity and status. This is particularly evident in the phenomenon of code-switching where a native speaker of Hawaiian Creole can either shift towards a dialect of English or towards a variety of immigrant speech when the social context of the situation demands it. Finally, the study of Creole languages such as the one to which this paper is directed has some very interesting implications for the "sociology of knowledge" because a Creole speaker attributes a different cognitive saliency to the lexical relations "push/pull," "bring/take," and "come/go" when he speaks Hawaiian Creole, then when he switches to standard English. These sundry concepts and their relevance to the field of sociolinguistics are the central topics of this paper.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, the writer of this article from the Atlantic, examines the social media commentary surrounding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Milling," a sociological term, refers to the "agitated, aimless buzzing of the type of crowd that gathers in the aftermath of some bewildering catastrophe...We are all just chattering away in restless and confused excitement as we try to figure out how to think about what's happening. We want to understand which outcomes are most likely, and whether we might be obligated to help-by giving money or vowing not to share misinformation or learning the entire history of global conflict so as to avoid saying the wrong thing. We are milling." The word comes from the mid-20th-century American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who was interested in the process by which crowds converge, during moments of uncertainty and restlessness, on common attitudes and actions. As people mill about the public square, those nearby will be drawn into their behavior, Blumer wrote in 1939. "The primary effect of milling is to make the individuals more sensitive and responsive to one another, so that they become increasingly preoccupied with one another and decreasingly responsive to ordinary objects of stimulation." These days, we mill online. For a paper published in 2016, a team of researchers from the University of Washington looked at the spread of rumors and erratic chatter on Twitter about the Boston Marathon bombings in the hours after that event. They described this "milling" as "collective work to make sense of an uncertain space" by interpreting, speculating, theorizing, debating, or challenging presented information.

"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games ... The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional Stroop task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting Stroop task."

Actually, there are some studies just about emotional Stroop tests that sound similar to the one in the violent video games study. This looks like a good presentation about how emotional Stroop tests work: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/Emotion1.pdf This one talks about why those Stroop tests work: "In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology.The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition." - http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/papers/stickiness/WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf This is a meta-analysis of emotional Stroop test studies that describes (actually, it's critical of) how such studies are done: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/coglab/publications/LarsenMercerBalota2006.pdf

Thanks, Ryan! I will take a look at these.

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, University of Washington researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas - the hippocampus and cerebellum - can predict children's language abilities at one year of age. Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1, as measured by babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and ability to produce different types of sounds. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor. "Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn't the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing," Kuhl said. "Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents." The findings could reflect infants' abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind. "The brain uses many general skills to learn language," Kuhl said. "Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path."

Article explores the philosophical battle between those who believe in leveled reading--adjusting the difficulty of text to suit the ability of the reader--and those who emphasize the importance of "challenge" by having all students grapple with the same "complex texts." Leveled reading has become increasingly easier with the advent of technology. New-generation leveling tools like Newsela allow every student to read the same story, albeit at varying levels of complexity. "This facilitates the social learning that happens when students engage in a shared discussion of the text," Cogan-Drew notes. Second, digital reading programs can make leveling more discreet, preventing students from being teased or stigmatized for reading at a lower level. Compared to the large numbers emblazoned on the covers of many leveled-reader print books, the computerized versions call far less attention to the degree of competency of their users. At the same time, students using these programs are often given the option of dialing up or down their reading level themselves, supporting the development of their "metacognition," or awareness of their own cognitive abilities. Defenders of leveled reading and the champions of complex texts may share more common ground than they realize, however. Both agree that to become fluent readers, students must read a lot on their own-and such independent reading calls for not-too-easy, not-too-hard selections that look a lot like leveled reading. Meanwhile, both sides also concur that students should be asked to wrestle at times with more challenging texts-but in the classroom, where teachers are available to offer help and head off discouragement.

The University of Hawaii plays a lead role in a major statewide initiative called the Hawaii Language Roadmap, which aims to create a robust, multilingual workforce in Hawaii. This video gives an overview of the project. On June 16, 2015, thanks to the efforts of several stakeholders, including the Hawaii Language Roadmap, Hawaii's Board of Education unanimously voted to approve a Seal of Biliteracy for Hawaii's public school students. The policy adopted by the BOE reads as follows: The Board of Education hereby establishes a Seal of Biliteracy to be awarded upon graduation to students who demonstrate high proficiency in either of the State's two official languages and at least one additional language, including American Sign Language; provided that a student who demonstrates a high proficiency in both of the State's two official languages shall be awarded a Seal of Biliteracy. The purposes of the Seal of Biliteracy are to recognize the importance of: (1) enabling students to be college, career, and community ready in today's global society; (2) establishing an educational culture that recognizes and values the wealth of linguistic and cultural diversity students bring to the classroom; (3) supporting opportunities for study of and increasing proficiency in 'Ōlelo Hawai'i, an official language of the State of Hawai'i; and (4) encouraging partnerships with institutions of higher education and community organizations to increase access to language instruction in a variety of languages. The Department of Education shall implement the Seal of Biliteracy, including developments of criteria that students must satisfy to receive the Seal. Rationale: The Board of Education recognizes that there is personal, cultural, social, academic, and vocational/occupational value in encouraging students to maintain, or develop, proficiency in more than one language.

For decades, scientists thought perhaps smell was a diminished human sense and less valuable than other senses - like our glorious eyesight. "In the West, people came to this conclusion [through] the fact that we don't seem to have a good ability to talk about smells," says Asifa Majid, a professor of language and cultural cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. But Majid found that isn't universally true. Certain language speakers can name odors as easily as English speakers name colors, and the key difference may be how they live. Majid worked with speakers of four different languages: English and three from the Malay Peninsula. Two of these languages, Semaq Beri and Jahai, are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups. The other one, Semelai, is spoken by farmers. In order to test the ability of these language speakers to classify odors, Majid and her colleagues gave asked them to smell pen-shaped contraptions each filled with a different scent like leather, orange, garlic or fish - and then asked them to identify the smell. She also asked the participants to identify colors using different color chips. The farmer Semelai, like English speakers, found colors relatively easy to name and agreed with one another that the red chips were, indeed, red. When it came to identifying odors, the Semelai failed as miserably as the English speakers on the same tests. But both hunter-gatherer groups were much better at naming smells than the Semelai. In fact, they were just as good at identifying smells as colors. "That says something about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle," Majid says. There's a scarcity of English words that objectively describe odors, Majid says. Given that, readers of this article - written in English - may wonder how it's possible to describe a smell without leaning on other senses like taste (words like "sweet" or "sour") or emotional words like "gross." In English, most of our attempts to describe smells come from individual sources. You

Even in America, there are different ways people speak English from different parts of the US. This article talks about some of the linguistic differences of people speaking in the US. There was a survey conducted by Harvard linguist Bert Vaux in 2003 to understand some of the differences in the way people talk. Generally, people in Atlanta call a sweetened carbonated beverage "coke" whereas in the Midwest, it's called pop, and it's called soda everywhere else. In New York, people say waiting "on line" rather than saying "in line." And the term "anymore" means different things in different parts of the country. Some people use it to mean "nowadays" and some use it to mean "already." In some parts of the country, there is a term for when it rains while still being sunny. People in the Northeast call it a "sunshower," but Southerners call it "the devil is beating his wife" and most of the rest of the country has no name for this at all. Finally, the northern half of the country is more likely to pronounce the second "a" in pajamas like "jam" whereas the southern half of the country is more likely to pronounce the second "a" in pajamas as "jam." This information is supposed to be useful in helping to figure out where the lines are between different American dialects and can also help to predict where someone is from.

Scientists are reporting in the journal Science that they have identified specialized brain cells that help us understand what a speaker really means. These cells do this by keeping track of changes in the pitch of the voice. "We found that there were groups of neurons that were specialized and dedicated just for the processing of pitch," says Dr. Eddie Chang, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. Chang says these neurons allow the brain to detect "the melody of speech," or intonation, while other specialized brain cells identify vowels and consonants. "Intonation is about how we say things," Chang says. "It's important because we can change the meaning, even - without actually changing the words themselves." The identification of specialized cells that track intonation shows just how much importance the human brain assigns to hearing, says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist who runs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Processing sound is one of the most complex jobs that we ask our brain to do," Kraus says. And it's a skill that some brains learn better than others, she says. Apparently, musicians, according to a study conducted by Kraus, are better than non-musicians at recognizing the subtle tonal changes found in Mandarin Chinese. On the other hand, recognizing intonation is a skill that's often impaired in people with autism, Kraus says. "A typically developing child will process those pitch contours very precisely," Kraus says. "But some kids on the autism spectrum don't. They understand the words you are saying, but they are not understanding how you mean it." The new study suggests that may be because the brain cells that usually keep track of pitch aren't working the way they should.

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