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This article reminds me of the "Singing Neanderthals" reading that we did. Perhaps whales, like babies, hear tones instead of actual words and can also perceive emotions of other whales they communicate with. If this is so, would this 'tone communication' be considered a language in of itself?

Amusia is a deficit in musical memory, recognition, and in pitch processing that people can be born with or acquire through brain damage. Some people may think of themselves as being "tone-deaf", but most of these "bad" singers are just that. People with amusia are so unable to hear tones that they even struggle to differentiate between questions and statements when spoken. Language, like music, uses sound to convey meaning; be it a story, or simply an emotion. In fact, music and spoken language use many of the same structural elements: pitch, duration, intensity and melodic contour, to name a few. Melodic contour is the pattern in which pitch changes from high to low over time. This contouring of pitch is often used to express emotion in music. The emotional effect of contouring is appreciated across many cultures and across many age groups. In speech, melodic contour is created by intonation, which allows us to place emphasis upon certain words and distinguish the purpose of the sentence; e.g. whether it is a question, statement or command. These comparisons provide evidence for the overlap of brain areas and mechanisms that underlie speech and music processing. In addition, the storing of sound patterns in short-term memory is also overlapping for both language and music.

This is a powerpoint by a UCSD professor clearly comparing music and speech both in terms of syntax and tones. Most of it is pretty technical, but it's interesting.

Do genes cause a preferance for tonal or non tonal languages? Possibly. Researchers have discovered ASPM and microcephalin, two genes that are linked to brain growth, may cause a preference for tonal languages.

Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

"Humans may love music, biologically speaking, because it mimics the sounds of our own voices. Neuroscientists say the use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech and conveys emotion." The study: http://purveslab.net/publications/bowling_purves_2009.pdf

Some metaphors are common in spoken language but are inappropriate in sign, body-part metaphors are possible in sign metaphors but odd/uncommon in spoken metaphor. In spoken language, tone and body position determine when a metaphor is that and not literal. Sign metaphors also have similar markers such as change in facial expression but are more limited in expressing change in tone and body position (as the body is already the main mode of communication). There is a sign for "metaphor" or a way to slightly change the signs for common words in metaphor so that the "listener" knows that the "speaker" means something metaphorically as opposed to literally.

A Johns Hopkins study found that damage to a key structure in the brain may explain why some stroke patients can't perceive sarcasm. Researchers looked at 24 people who had experienced a stroke in the right hemispheres of their brains. Those with damage to the right sagittal stratum tended to have trouble recognizing sarcasm, the researchers found. This bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Sarcasm can be hard to interpret; it's a complex way to communicate. First, the person has to 1. understand the literal meaning of what someone says 2. detect the components of sarcasm: a wider range of pitch, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech "There're a number of cues people use, and it's both facial cues and tone of voice," noted Dr. Argye Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

While we may be punctuating less as a whole (a recent study found that only 39 percent of college students punctuate the end of texts and 45 percent the end of instant messages), the punctuation we do use is more likely to be scrutinized. "Digital punctuation can carry more weight than traditional writing because it ends up conveying tone, rhythm and attitude rather than grammatical structure," said Ben Zimmer, a linguist and the executive editor of Vocabulary.com. "It can make even a lowly period become freighted with special significance."

The correct use of punctuation can really improve someone's opinion of you. The author of this piece decided to go out with someone based on their use of punctuation in a text message. The author also discusses how we have been conditioned to read certain punctuation marks and how they correlate to tone of voice in the text message. Punctuation marks are an important aspect of language that can help convey a meaning in a text.

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

A new form of therapy makes use of virtual therapists, who have the capacity to read facial expressions, vocal patterns, body posture, and speech tones. Cleo Stiller, host of Asking For A Friend, said in a video, "[The virtual therapist]'s also interpreting my speech in real time. Am I using positive or negative language? [the therapist] adjusts her questions based off of my responses." The benefit of virtual therapy is that it removes some of the stigmas associated with "seeing a shrink," and allows people to feel more open with their feelings and problems... at least, that's the idea.

While watching the first presidential debate, take note of Lester Holt and each presidential candidate's body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, poise of presentation, grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure use. Additionally, performing a fact check on each candidate's remarks should also help you to distinguish a solid foundation of who to vote for: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

"Our main conclusion is that delays in word onset facilitate word recognition, and that such facilitation is independent of the type of delay. ... Our findings support the perhaps counterintuitive conclusion that fillers like um can sometimes help (rather than hinder) listeners to identify spoken words. But critically, the data show that the same is true for silent pauses and pauses filled with artificially generated tones. "

A few tips for writing a good college essay.

This is a really good tip sheet but how did they come up with these tips?

this article highlighted the fact that you don't need to write about accomplishments in your essay, there are other places in the application for that. It is more about how you write your essay and the tone it conveys.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American's ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino's ability to speak English without an accent.This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour - microaggressions - used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.

The human voice appears to trigger pleasure circuits in the brains of typical kids, but not children with autism, a Stanford University team reports. The finding could explain why many children with autism seem indifferent to spoken words. The Stanford team used functional MRI to compare the brains of 20 children who had autism spectrum disorders and 19 typical kids. In typical kids there was a strong connection between areas that respond to the human voice and areas that release the feel-good chemical dopamine, but that connection was reduced in autistic children. Connections between voice areas and areas involved in emotion-related learning also were weaker, creating greater communication difficulties. The new study's suggestion that motivation is the problem could explain why speech often comes late to children with autism even though the brain circuit involved in processing spoken words seems to function normally; the reward circuitry isn't working the way it does in typical children.

What our speech reveals about us

For both English and Mandarin speakers, the major formants in vowel sounds paralleled the intervals for the most commonly used intervals in music worldwide, namely the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the major third, and the major sixth. To Purves, the upshot is a simple truth: "There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," he says. "That's the reason that we like music." "Whenever we've heard happy speech, we've tended to hear major-scale tonal ratios," Purves says. "Whenever we've heard sad speech, minor tones tend to be involved."

Examines the languages of Mandarin and Vietnamese and how people who speak these languages are more likely to have perfect pitch. Includes various studies performed and poses an interesting question to think about.