This article talks about a study that was conducted by MIT linguistics professors and a group from Carleton University that explored the phenomenon of why children mix up the words "and" and "or." Linguists say that children use almost entirely the same approach as adults when it comes to evaluating potentially ambiguous sentences, by testing and "strengthening" them into sentences with more precise meanings, when disjunction and conjunction ("or" and "and") are involved. However, they found that children do not test how a sentence would change if "and" was directly substituted for "or." On the other hand, adults compute "scalar implicatures," which is a technical phrase for thinking about the implications of the logical relationship between a sentence and its alternative. The research team conducted the study's experiment by testing 59 English-speaking children and 26 adults. The children ranged in age from 4 months to 6 years. The linguists gave the subjects a series of statements along with pictures, and asked them to say whether the statements were true or false. The results suggest that children are computing scalar implicatures when they evaluate the statements, but they largely do not substitute disjunctions and conjunctions when testing out the possible meaning of sentences, as adults do. In general, the researchers observed, across languages, and for children and adults alike, when you take 'and' out of the space of alternatives, "or" becomes "and."

This article talks about how even though learning how to program a computer seems like learning a new language, computer language is actually processed through a different area of the brain than when language is processed. It says that it activates the multiple demand network, which is also activated by complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles. However, it appears to rely on different parts of the network than math or logic problems do, which suggests that coding does not precisely replicate the cognitive demands of mathematics either. The article says that researchers didn't find any regions that appear to be exclusively devoted to programming. They also suggest that understanding computer code cannot be categorized as a language-based or math-based skill. Instead, they think it might require a combination of both skills, even though the brain regions don't reflect it.

This article talks about the different arguments for the linguistic status of hashtags. One of the arguments is that they are like compound words. Compound words are words that are a combination of two existing words which were formed into one word (ex. notebook, living room or long-term). Another suggestion is that hashtagging is a less formal and completely new process of forming words. It suggests that there are no rules in hashtagging other than that there can be no spaces in between the parts. The authors argue that their research goes against both arguments by saying that they shouldn't be considered as words at all, but that they are still very interesting linguistically because they function in many different roles in language use on social media.

This article talks about the ASL-LEX database that four scientists created. The map of signs is meant to represent a mental lexicon and is allowing them to examine how signs are organized in the human mind. The article explains that signs may rhyme in a visual way even though the words do not, which causes the brain to relate groups of signs together. One pattern that was noticed is that the more commonly used signs tend to be simpler and shorter than the rare ones, which is comparable to spoken language. They also found that common signs are more likely to be in clusters of visually similar words, while rare signs are more isolated.