Words R Us

This year, the 2024 Merrie Monarch Hula Festival is paying tribute to the 40th anniversary of the Hawaiian language revitalization movement. All the hula [dances] and songs [mele] selected for Wednesday's Hōʻike Night performances were either choreographed or composed for the Hawaiian language revitalization movement over its 40-year history. Mele provides a conduit for language proliferation and perpetuation.

This article talked about how adults talk to babies and why we do it. When we talk to babies, we tend to raise our pitch a little and supposedly, it calms the baby down. They also talked about a research project where they recorded adults from different parts of the world, and noticed that those who come from western places raised their pitch the most, and in remote places didn't raise their pitch that much but everyone raised their pitch at least a little. The way we talk to babies is universal and we've evolved as humans to be able to communicate with infants.

The features of baby talk - softer tone, higher pitch, almost unintelligible vocabulary - are global. Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab documented over 1,500 recordings in 21 urban, rural and Indigenous communities - making their work possibly a first of its kind experiment. The article includes samples from different languages around the world. There are many reasons why baby talk might have evolved in humans and why it might serve beneficial purposes. Some theories suggest that the way we speak accentuates the vowels of the speech and helps babies learn speech. Other theories suggest that this kind of baby talk helps regulate the baby's emotions and helps structure the social interactions we have with babies, so it helps socialize them and control their behavior and mood. In prehistoric times, having ways to interact with babies and to care for them while still being able to keep your eyes up to look out for predators and use your voice to interact with babies, might have been an important reason why we may have evolved these kinds of behaviors.

Japanese onomatopoeia is one of the language's most intriguing features. This article categorizes onomatopoetic words by sounds and states, animal noises, bewildering flexibility (e.g., "goro goro" can refer to the sound of thunder or a couch potato lazing around the house), and pain.

It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.

Thanks to Gabby Gonzales '24 for this site! Programmer Thomas Dimson, author of Instagram's original content-ranking algorithms, created this website which uses GPT-2 algorithm to generate words that sound like they should exist, but don't, along with definitions and examples. Example: downage (verb) dow·nage obtain or retain (something) at a reduced price "the team had to downage contracts after a series of sellout losses"

This article talks about how AI-generated texts can be distinguished from human writing. It explains why it is essential for us to tell them apart and why it is still not able to perfectly mimic humans.

This article discusses some of the ways AI-generated text can differ from sentences written by humans.

This paper discusses a brief history of Hokkien (Fujian) migrants into the Philippines and how their culture, language, and food has survived in a new, syncretized form in the Philippines. The article gives a few examples that can be seen in Binondo, a Chinese district in Manila, Philippines.

This paper talks about Chinese loanwords in selected Southeast Asian languages (Khmer, Thai, Hmong, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Indonesian) and compares how different Chinese words got into different SEA languages depending on how the Chinese integrated with the local population.

This article details the impact of effective technology and the accessibility that comes with communication methods. The article also describes the way that iPads and tablets have become a part of the way that special education teachers communicate with their students and the newfound independence of non-verbal students.

This article discusses the impact of special communication apps for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and how they help non-verbal students communicate with the teachers and classmates.

This paper discusses how the gene FOXP2 is related to certain speech and language disorders, such as apraxia, or difficulty coordinating parts of the mouth to form speech. This research is important when placed into the wider debate of Nature Vs. Nurture, as it demonstrates that genetics may have the capacity to influence language acquisition.

This seminal paper by Dr. Jean Berko Gleason introduces the Wug Test, a unique way to study childhood language acquisition by asking young children to pluralize nonsense words, put them past tense, and more.

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

This article details a study that analyzed the parts of the brain involved in producing and understanding sign language. A main conclusion of this study was that both spoken and sign languages utilize the same areas of the brain.

This article delves into the grammatical structure of sign languages and highlights the differences between spoken and signed languages. It places an emphasis on the primary differences between them, which is the fact that signed symbols can be delivered simultaneously instead of in a linear fashion.

The article explores how abbreviations, particularly in scientific communication, can be alienating to unfamiliar audiences and are often unnecessary. It argues that many scientific abbreviations are mentally taxing.