As you can tell from the title, this article looks into why English people say sorry so often. Harvard researchers have found that perhaps the reason why English people say sorry so much is because by saying "sorry" to someone, it is the best way to get them onto your side and persuade them to do what you want. The article mentioned a study where they had an actor ask to borrow someones phone on a rainy day. When he asked the favor directly, he was only successful 9% of the time. However, when he said "Sorry about the rain" before asking the favor, he was successful 47% of the time.

This article is about the Icelandic language, which is seen as a source of identity and pride, is being damaged by the widespread use of English. Former president of Iceland, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, is worried that the Icelandic language will end up in the "Latin bin".

This article talks about an illusion our brain pulls on called the McGurk effect. This is when visual speech is mismatched with auditory speech and can result in the perception of an entirely different message. The example the article uses is if the visual "ga" were combined with the sound "ba", this results in the perception of "da." Vased on the principle of causal inference, researchers were able to create an algorithm model of multi-sensory speech perception. What this means is that when your brain is given a particular pair of auditory and visual syllables, it calculates the likelihood that they are from a single talker compared to multiple talkers and uses this likelihood to determine the final speech perception.

Researchers looked at international adoptees (babies that were adopted at a couple months old and grew up hearing a different language than they heard while in the womb) and were able to see what babies hear in the womb and soon after birth has an affect on how they perceive sounds. Newborn babies can actually recognize the voices they've been hearing for the last three months in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers. When born, babies prefer these familiar voices to strangers voices. Babies can also detect rhythm and prefer other languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with different rhythms.