Maltz and Borker argue that "American men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a conversation, so that when they attempt to carry on conversations with one another, even if both parties are attempting to treat one another as equals, cultural miscommunication results." Their article also provides a literature review of various studies examining male-female miscommunication. Here's the synopsis of the differences discovered in female vs. male conversation. Women generally 1. Display a greater tendency to ask questions. 2. Tend to facilitate and elicit interaction more. 3. Make greater use of positive minimal responses, e.g. "mm...I see", and insert them mid-conversation. 4. More likely to adopt a "silent protest" response to interruption 5. Greater tendency to use the pronouns "you" and "we", explicitly acknowledging the presence of the other. In contrast, men are 1. More likely to interrupt 2. More likely to challenge or dispute their partners' utterances 3. more likely to ignore the comments of the other speaker, that is, to offer no response or acknowledgment at all, or respond reluctantly 4. Utilize more mechanisms for controlling the topic of conversation 5. more likely to make direct declarations.

Comedian George Carlin once said, "Language is a tool for concealing the truth." In his short essay, "Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies," Carlin humorously employs pleonasms - instances where the user employs more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g., see with one's eyes), either as a fault of style or for emphasis.

Author Sheila Heen, along with Douglas Stone, recently wrote a book called Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. One of their chapters focuses on a phenomenon called "switchtracking": when "someone gives you feedback, and your reaction to that feedback changes the subject." Heen notes switchtracking is a pattern in feedback conversations "so common that it's instantly recognizable." "The first person stays on their own track. The second person actually smoothly switches to a different topic, which is their own reaction to the feedback, and often the feedback that they have themselves for the first person," Heen says. "They just get further and further apart ... And they don't even realize that they're going in different directions." Four pieces of take-away advice for effective feedback: 1. Try A Post-it We're always trying to get people to pay attention, but there's some research showing that we have a powerful (and affordable) weapon at our disposal: the Post-it note. 2. Assume Positive Intent Assume positive intent when receiving feedback: concentrate on the substance of the feedback, rather than questioning the giver's intentions! 3. To Get Someone's Attention ... Try Whispering In Their Right Ear. People are more likely to comply with a request when it was whispered in their right ear. 4. When Giving Feedback, Flatter First If you can boost a person's self-esteem before giving them constructive criticism, they might be more receptive to it.

Dana Suskind, a University of Chicago pediatric otolaryngologist, states our exposure to rich language in the first three years of our lives is critical not just for our ability to pronounce long words but for our overall development and success. The 4 Ts are key points for parents and caretakers of small children: 1. Tune in: be interested in what your child is interested in 2. Talk more: talking more, using richer language, narrating your child's day. 3. Take turns: viewing your child as a conversational partner from day one. Babies are born to learn. 4. Turn off the technology: there is no substitute for real live human interaction.

This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

McDonald's swears up and down that the little yellow "Minions" Happy Meal toy is speaking only nonsense words and not something a little more adult. Experts say the company may be right, and the curse words many hear may be tied to how our brains are primed to find words even when they're not really there. "The brain tries to find a pattern match, even when just receiving noise, and it is good at pattern recognition," says Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at the Yale School of Medicine. "Once the brain feels it has found a best match, then that is what you hear. The clarity of the speech actually increases with multiple exposures, or if you are primed by being told what to listen for" - as most people who heard the toy online already had been. The technical name for the phenomenon is "pareidolia," hearing sounds or seeing images that seem meaningful but are actually random. It leads people to see shapes in clouds, a man in the moon or the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich.

Why do you do what you do? What is the engine that keeps you up late at night or gets you going in the morning? Where is your happy place? What stands between you and your ultimate dream? Heavy questions. Reflecting on one's progress and goals in writing, an act termed self-authoring, can lead to productive results for at-risk students.

The University of Hawaii plays a lead role in a major statewide initiative called the Hawaii Language Roadmap, which aims to create a robust, multilingual workforce in Hawaii. This video gives an overview of the project. On June 16, 2015, thanks to the efforts of several stakeholders, including the Hawaii Language Roadmap, Hawaii's Board of Education unanimously voted to approve a Seal of Biliteracy for Hawaii's public school students. The policy adopted by the BOE reads as follows: The Board of Education hereby establishes a Seal of Biliteracy to be awarded upon graduation to students who demonstrate high proficiency in either of the State's two official languages and at least one additional language, including American Sign Language; provided that a student who demonstrates a high proficiency in both of the State's two official languages shall be awarded a Seal of Biliteracy. The purposes of the Seal of Biliteracy are to recognize the importance of: (1) enabling students to be college, career, and community ready in today's global society; (2) establishing an educational culture that recognizes and values the wealth of linguistic and cultural diversity students bring to the classroom; (3) supporting opportunities for study of and increasing proficiency in 'Ōlelo Hawai'i, an official language of the State of Hawai'i; and (4) encouraging partnerships with institutions of higher education and community organizations to increase access to language instruction in a variety of languages. The Department of Education shall implement the Seal of Biliteracy, including developments of criteria that students must satisfy to receive the Seal. Rationale: The Board of Education recognizes that there is personal, cultural, social, academic, and vocational/occupational value in encouraging students to maintain, or develop, proficiency in more than one language.

It's not just what you say, it's the way that you say it. The sound of our voices, including its pitch, accent and inflection, has all sorts of subtle effects on how we are perceived by other people. This article lists 10 ways that our voices influence others' conception of us and provides links to the relevant studies.

UCLA researchers Oppenheimer and Mueller wondered if there was something about paper and the act of writing that explained this phenomenon, so they conducted an experiment. They asked about 50 students to attend a lecture. Half took notes on laptops and half with pen and paper. Both groups were then given a comprehension test. It wasn't even close. The students who used paper scored significantly higher than those who used laptops. Mueller attributes this unexpected finding - published in the journal, Psychological Science - to the fact that the "analog" note takers were forced to synthesize rather than merely transcribe. It's a phenomenon known as "desirable difficulty." "Desirable difficulty is some small roadblock that is in your path that actually improves your understanding of a topic," she explains.

English is now the language we all use to communicate science. But while it may feel inevitable, the domination of English is very recent and may be down to geopolitics and other accidents, argues Michael Gordin's book, _Scientific Babel_.

Has American English become homogenized? Have our regional ways of saying particular things - sometimes in very particular ways - receded into the past? Or do we talk as funny as ever?

Much of our recent reporting, especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school, nor working. There are an estimated five and a half million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States. But what do we call them? The nomenclature has fluctuated widely over the decades. And each generation's preferred term is packed with assumptions- economic, social, cultural, and educational - about the best way to frame the issue. Essentially, each name contains an argument about who's at fault, and where to find solutions.

What emoji do people use the most? That's the central question in a new study that looks at emoji use around the world. The company SwiftKey analyzed more than a billion pieces of emoji data, organized by language and country. According to SwiftKey's chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood, the results were fascinating. Here's a sample of what researchers found: 1. 70 percent of all emojis sent are positive. 2. Canadians lead the charge in their use of money, violence, sports-related, raunchy, and even the poop emoji. 3. Americans are second behind Canada in their love of violent emojis, such as guns. But they also enjoy food emoji: pizza and the chicken drumstick are high-frequency. 4. Australians referenced drugs, alcohol, junk food and holidays much more than any other nation. 5. French really are hopeless romantics and use heart emojis four times more than anyone else. 6. Arabic speakers are big fans of the rose emoji, using it 10 times more than other language speakers. 7. Spanish-speaking Americans used sad faces more than any other language. "The most popular emoji that they used out of the sad faces was the crying emoji."

The father of modern American poetry, Walt Whitman, celebrates the importance of slang: "...perhaps Language is more like some vast living body, or perennial body of bodies. And slang...is afterward the start of fancy, imagination and humor, breathing into its nostrils the breath of life.

Sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of I,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance.

Some possible signs, according to various researchers cited in the article:
1. amount of bragging
2. efforts to elevate themselves by comparing down to others
3. efforts to draw attention to oneself and maintain superiority over others
4. prefer to make authoritative statements about the way things are rather than how they feel
5. arrogant and argumentative: more likely to interrupt, glaze over when you speak, swear, post provocative pictures, and tag themselves in social media than ever use the word 'I',"

Being passive-aggressive doesn't mean you're a bad person. Often it's "a strategy we use when we think we don't deserve to speak our minds or we're afraid to be honest and open." The article reviews 7 tell-tale signs: 1. Making wistful statements 2. Doling out backhanded compliments 3. Ignoring or saying nothing 4. Procrastinating 5. Leaving someone out 6. Sabotaging 7. Keeping score

According to standard grammar, "they" and its related forms can only agree with plural antecedents. But English sorely lacks a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, and "they" has for centuries been pressed into service for that purpose, much to the grammarians' chagrin. Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular "they" may be easing their stance.

While we may be punctuating less as a whole (a recent study found that only 39 percent of college students punctuate the end of texts and 45 percent the end of instant messages), the punctuation we do use is more likely to be scrutinized. "Digital punctuation can carry more weight than traditional writing because it ends up conveying tone, rhythm and attitude rather than grammatical structure," said Ben Zimmer, a linguist and the executive editor of Vocabulary.com. "It can make even a lowly period become freighted with special significance."