A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.
""Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki... variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard. ... "People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent.""
Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance.
Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much.
Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks."
The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages.
"Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.
This article describes the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world's languages. It considers model population size and the proportion of second language speakers in the speech community as sociolinguistic predictors, and other factors that have recently been suggested to influence typological and sociolinguistic language variations.
"Researchers identified subtle variations caused by differences in the shape of individual whales' heads. It's the first time that sperm whale vocalizations have been linked to specific individuals. ... While the whales tended to possess the same basic repertoire of "codas" - the technical name for each distinctive series of clicks - one female had a completely different set. ... The question of whether it's appropriate to think of sperm whales as having names is a controversial one. Some scientists think that many cetaceans should be considered persons ..."
See also "Sperm Whales Really Do Learn From Each Other" (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/sperm-whales/) - "Yes, sperm whale culture really is culture."
"Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female. ... The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. ... Some colleges, too, are starting to adopt nongender language."
The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii's native speakers on Ni`ihau. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that Niihau speakers use different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement, a.k.a. "university Hawaiian"?
Code-switching involves moving freely between two different languages or dialects of a single language. Many people of color, especially mixed-race and multi-cultural people naturally code-switch. This article shows us Sheena Cobb as an example because she uses both the American Sign Language (ASL) and Black ASL depending on who she is with. Elements of black culture appear in Black ASL such as religious practice, cooking, humor, music, hairstyles, words and phrases typically used in the black communities. People who use Black ASL tend to sign with two hands, in different positions, in a larger signing space and with more repetition than with regular ASL signs.
The alveolar trill (rolled R) is a very difficult sound to produce and is often one of the last sounds that Spanish speaking children learn. The sound is also extremely prevalent in most romance languages and as a result special focus is applied to it in the classroom. The range-mapping technique is a very effective way to learn the rolling R. It is based off of cognitive research that suggests that having variation within the full range of a motor skill allows for better learning. The steps are as follow: develop tongue and mouth awareness, learn to create vibrations, and use the trill in words.
Language is common to all humans; we seem to be "hard-wired" for it. Many social scientists and philosophers say it's this ability to use language symbolically that makes us "human."
Though it may be a universal human attribute, language is hardly simple. For decades, linguists' main task was to track and record languages. But, like so many areas of science, the field of linguistics has evolved dramatically over the past 50 years or so.
Today's science of linguistics explores:
-the sounds of speech and how different sounds function in a language
-the psychological processes involved in the use of language
-how children acquire language capabilities
-social and cultural factors in language use, variation and change
-the acoustics of speech and the physiological and psychological aspects involved in producing and understanding it
-the biological basis of language in the brain
This special report, compiled by the National Science Foundation, touches on nearly all of these areas by answering questions such as: How does language develop and change? Can the language apparatus be "seen" in the brain? Does it matter if a language disappears? What exactly is a dialect? How can sign language help us to understand languages in general?
Answers to these and other questions have implications for neuroscience, psychology, sociology, biology and more.
Ironically, native L1= English speakers are worse at delivering their message than people who speak English as a second or third language. Non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. L2=English speakers generally use more limited vocabulary and simpler expressions, without flowery language or slang. Consequently, their language tends to be shorter, clearer, and more direct. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang, references, and baffling abbreviations specific to their own culture. "The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others." When trying to communicate in English with a group of people with varying levels of fluency, it's important to be receptive and adaptable, tuning your ears into a whole range of different ways of using English, Jenkins says. "People who've learned other languages are good at doing that, but native speakers of English generally are monolingual and not very good at tuning in to language variation."
"Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase "yeah, right" was used, it was uttered sarcastically. ... The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a "theory of mind" to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different ... Kids pick up the ability to detect sarcasm at a young age. ... There appear to be regional variations in sarcasm. ... Many parts of the brain are involved in processing sarcasm, according to recent brain imaging studies."
Sarcasm is an important aspect of society that seems to develop a person's brain as well. "Exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving" and it "exercises the brain more than sincere statements do." So the extra work it takes to understand sarcasm actually does work out our brains. Apparently sarcasm has been a way to show you belong and almost have a superior quality to those around you. Very interesting!
How environmental factors come to shape the emergence of linguistic This article describes how environmental motivations drive the emergence of different communicative conventions.
In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.
Interesting article. There may be, however, counter-explanations for this combined phrase. Hip was cited by Samuel Johnson in the mid-1700s as a variant of the Latin phrase "eho, heus": an exclamation calling for attention (_The Nature of Roman Comedy_, Duckworth 1994). And hooray, according to the OED, is a variation of hurrah (int. and n.), a word used as early as 1716, a century before the anti-Semitic forces took it up as a rallying cry. Have snipped the following definitions from the OED:
Word #1. Hip (int.):
hip, int. (and n.4)
1. 'An exclamation or calling to one; the same as the Latin eho, heus!' (Johnson).
1752 in Ainsworth's Thes. Linguæ Latinæ (ed. 4)
1768-74 A. Tucker Light of Nature (1852) I. 34 Perhaps Dr. Hartley‥may give me a hip, and call out, 'Prithee, friend, do not think to slip so easily by me'.
2. An exclamation used (usually repeated thrice) to introduce a united cheer: hence as n.
1827 W. Hone Every-day Bk. 12 To toss off the glass, and huzza after the 'hip! hip! hip!' of the toast giver.
a1845 T. Hood Sniffing a Birthday xiv, No flummery then from flowery lips, No three times three and hip-hip-hips!
1849 Thackeray Pendennis (1850) I. xvii. 154 'Here's Mrs. Smirke's good health: Hip, hip, hurray!'
hip-hurrah v. (also hip-hip-hurrah)
1832 Examiner 609/2 One set of men 'hip hurrah' and rattle decanter stoppers.
1871 T. Carlyle in Lett. & Memorials J. W. Carlyle (1883) I. 116 In the course of the installation dinner, at some high point of the hep-hep hurrahing.
Word #2: Hurrah:
Pronunciation: /hʊˈrɑː/ /həˈrɑː/ /hʊˈreɪ/ /həˈreɪ/
Forms: Also 16- hurra, 17 hurrea, whurra, 18 hooray, ( hooroar), hourra.
Etymology: A later substitute for huzza v. (not in Johnson, Ash, Walker; in Todd 1818), perhaps merely due to onomatopoeic modification, but possibly influenced by some foreign shouts: compare Swedish, Danish, Low German
I thought this was an intersting article that builds upon the topic we've learned in class. With the evolution of language overtime, there is a trend that it get simpler and simpler. It's fascinating to see as we look back on past variations of English to see how complicated it is for us to understand but 200 years from now, people will be looking back at our time and wondering why we spoke the way we do now.
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