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There are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people. A 2014 study published in _Psychological Science_, co-written by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that taking longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions, in comparison to taking notes via laptop.

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

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.

Edge is a phenomenal science writing website with lots of fascinating 1-page essays that are good models of lively science writing.

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies. They measured parents' use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings. "What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The more parents exaggerated vowels -- for example "How are youuuuu?" -- and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the 1-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around. "The fact that the infant's babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Kuhl said.

Research by the University of Liverpool has found that the same brain activity is used for language production and making complex tools, supporting the theory that they evolved at the same time. Dr Georg Meyer, from the University Department of Experimental Psychology, said: "This is the first study of the brain to compare complex stone tool-making directly with language. "Our study found correlated blood-flow patterns in the first 10 seconds of undertaking both tasks. This suggests that both tasks depend on common brain areas and is consistent with theories that tool-use and language co-evolved and share common processing networks in the brain."

Lin, of National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan and Peper, of San Francisco State University, examined the psychophysiological effects of texting. Results indicated that all subjects showed significant increases in respiration rate, heart rate, SC, and shoulder and thumb SEMG as compared to baseline measures. Eighty-three percent of the participants reported hand and neck pain during texting, held their breath, and experienced arousal when receiving text messages. Subjectively, most subjects were unaware of their physiological changes. The study suggests that frequent triggering of these physiological patterns (freezing for stability and shallow breathing) may increase muscle discomfort symptoms. Thus, participants should be trained to inhibit these responses to prevent illness and discomfort.

For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. - See more at: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/03/burmangender.html#sthash.ni29a3Q7.dpuf

Terrific narrated slide show by a linguistics professor at Towson University

Review of "Through the Language Glass," by Guy Deutscher (who wrote that NYT article). One interesting part: "As he sums it up, "what Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal color blindness among the ancient Greeks." He goes on to discuss Lazarus Geiger, who "reconstructed a complete chronological sequence for the emergence of sensitivity to different prismatic colors" and asked the crucial question "Can the difference between [the ancient Greeks] and us be only in the naming, or in the perception itself?" Then there was Hugo Magnus, who decided sensitivity to colors had been evolving since ancient times..."

Check out the visualization: http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/21/speechome-interactive-visualization-language-acquisition.html "This interactive visualization provides a look into the most complete record of a single child's speech development ever created... But parentese is not universal. It varies between different parents and cultures, and in some cases has been reported to be absent altogether. What effect, then, does it have on child development? Answering this question could help guide better ways to help children that have difficulty learning language." With links to the actual studies at the bottom of the page.

"Computational Linguistics became an open access journal, freely available to all online readers. ... Computational Linguistics is the longest running publication devoted exclusively to the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. From this highly-regarded quarterly, university and industry linguists, speech specialists, and philosophers get information about computational aspects of research on language, linguistics, and the psychology of language processing and performance."

"With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a "backchannel" in their classes. The real-time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on-task, they are less likely to be texting about something else."

Google is working on a font, Noto, that aims to include "all the world's languages" - every written language on Earth. Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.

Like Facebook or Twitter, Yik Yak is a social media network, only without user profiles. It does not sort messages according to friends or followers but by geographic location or, in many cases, by university. Only posts within a 1.5-mile radius appear, making Yik Yak well suited to college campuses. Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board - or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union. It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school. Much of the chatter is harmless. Some of it is not. "Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland and the author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace." "It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way."

Wednesday, November 26, 2014 By Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 PITTSBURGH-Some people say that reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" taught them the importance of friends, or that easy decisions are seldom right. Carnegie Mellon University scientists used a chapter of that book to learn a different lesson: identifying what different regions of the brain are doing when people read.

New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."

The University of Southampton recently discovered that there is "no difference in the time it takes people from different countries to read and process different languages." If reading in their respective native languages, two people from different countries will take the same amount of time to read text. In other words, languages are all equally efficient in conveying meaning.

This research project looks into a certain sentence structure that appears in most Germanic languages, the Verb Second constraint. This kind of homologous structure may hold clues about whether universal grammar really exists.

They say a smile is the universal language of kindness, but it appears that's not the only facial expression understood across the world. Scientists have discovered the 'Not Face', which they say is a global expression of disagreement.