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Many parents start to control their language when they have kids because they don't want their children to become "bad". Kids understand the degree of swearing and when to use it and when it is unnecessary. Children understand the context it is used in, as long as it is not to them, but it is fine around them.

Chess notation has an important role in the world of chess because it preserves the game's history. It allows people to record games for posterity and gives them the chance to review the history of the game's development to date. Notation also allows people to overcome language barriers and communicate with one another in a algebraic form, an interesting form of language indeed!

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in the United States. It touches the lives of millions of people. People with dyslexia don't naturally process the written word. They don't easily break it into smaller units that can be turned into sounds and stitched together. This makes reading a laborious - even exhausting - process. Writing, too.

Whether a child understands its mother or not, they can understand what their mother is saying based on her emotions. This is a study pursuing this phenomenon and deciphering what impacts anger has on the child's development.

Linguist John McWhorter links Donald Trump's use of casual speech as one of the reasons for his popular appeal. Even Trump's penchant for Twitter is understandable: the 140-character limit creates a way of writing that, like texting, diverges as little as possible from talking. America's relationship to language has become more informal by the decade since the 1960s, just as it has to dress, sexual matters, culinary habits, dance and much else. Given this historical context, we have to realize that Trump's talking style isn't as exotically barbaric as it looks on the page - the oddness is that it winds up on the page at all. And second, we have to understand that his fans' not minding how he talks is symptomatic of how all of us relate to formality nowadays. Language has just come along with it.

University of Washington students have created gloves called SignAloud. These gloves sense hand motions and translate the meanings, allowing more people to understand sign language.

Not long ago, I walked into a friend's kitchen and found her opening one of those evil, impossible-to-breach plastic blister packages with a can opener. This worked, and struck me as brilliant, but I mention it only to illustrate a characteristic that I admire in our species: given almost any entity, we will find a way to use it for something other than its intended purpose.

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

"A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors."

"You can help marine researchers understand what whales are saying. Listen to the large sound and find the small one that matches it best. "

Without understanding the 'referential function' of language (words as 'verbal labels', symbolizing other things) it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present early in infants? Marno, Nespor, and Mehler of the International School of Advanced Studies conducted experiments with infants (4 months old). Babies watched a series of videos where a person might (or might not) utter an (invented) name of an object, while directing (or not directing) their gaze towards the position on the screen where a picture of the object would appear. By monitoring the infants' gaze, Marno and colleagues observed that, in response to speech cues, the infant's gaze would look faster for the visual object, indicating that she is ready to find a potential referent of the speech. However, this effect did not occur if the person in the video remained silent or if the sound was a non-speech sound. "The mere fact of hearing verbal stimuli placed the infants in a condition to expect the appearance, somewhere, of an object to be associated with the word, whereas this didn't happen when there was no speech, even when the person in the video directed the infant's gaze to where the object would appear, concludes Marno. "This suggests that infants at this early age already have some knowledge that language implies a relation between words and the surrounding physical world. Moreover, they are also ready to find out these relations, even if they don't know anything about the meanings of the words yet. Thus, a good advice to mothers is to speak to their infants, because infants might understand much more than they would show, and in this way their attention can be efficiently guided by their caregivers."

"It turns out that very young children [4-6 yrs] can understand and even use ironic speech, even if they cannot describe what they have done to a researcher."

if you really want to understand it at the molecular level

"Susan Levine finds that simply repeating the numbers isn't as good as helping kids understand what they mean... "Counting objects and saying, 'Oh, you have four cars: one, two, three, four,' while you point at them - seems to be better," Levine says."

I love the way this guy writes about math. I really understand math as a language because of him. I wish I'd had him as a teacher.

"Your question is really asking, "What is a syllable?" For the most part, our original grammar school understanding that "A syllable is a part of a word with a single vowel sound" is essentially correct, but there's more to it than that. Let's look at a linguistic defintion of "syllable":..."

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

Including answers to questions such as: - Can you walk us through the logic Watson would go through to answer a question such as, "The antagonist of Stevenson's Treasure Island." (Who is Long John Silver?) - ...I found myself wondering whether what it does is really natural language processing, or something more akin to word association... does Watson really need to understand syntax and meaning to just search its database for words and phrases associated with the words and phrases in the clue?

"Children whose parents talked about sets of four to 10 objects that the child could see were more likely to understand the cardinal principle. Using smaller numbers in conversations and referring to objects the children couldn't see (such as "I'll be there in two minutes.") did not have the same results."