There are some cities you can identify with just an accent, including New York. But linguists say that those who speak in the classic New York tongue are part of a dying breed. To find them, filmmaker Heather Quinlan went accent hunting around the city, holding a sign that reads, "Do you have a New York accent?

The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a text. However, research suggests that people can deeply read using digital media: what's needed is self-monitoring, focus, and use of strategies such as annotation, either the old-fashioned way, or digitally. Digital devices in and of themselves may not disrupt the fuller synthesis of deep reading. What does: multitasking on the Internet and distractions caused by hyperlinks. Indeed, some data suggest that, in certain environments and on certain types of tasks, we can read equally well in any format.

Barack Obama says his address to Congress this year is all about 'finding areas where we agree, so we can deliver for the American people'. And if there's one thing we can all agree upon, it's emojis.

The film "Language Matters" asks what we lose when languages die and how we can save them. It was filmed around the world: on a remote island off the coast of Australia, where 400 Aboriginal people speak 10 different languages, all at risk; in Wales, where Welsh, once in danger, is today making a comeback; and in Hawaii, where a group of Hawaiian activists is fighting to save the native tongue.

Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists - or "natural language programmers," as they are known - to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. And they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the "fat finger" phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you've talked about. Apple's iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium - that is, "the casual style" you may use in texting versus "the more formal language" you are likely to use in email, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss. Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.

New research into how the bilingual brain processes two very different languages has revealed that bilinguals' native language directly influences their comprehension of their second language. The innovative study by researchers in The University of Nottingham's School of Psychology set out to explore whether Chinese-English bilinguals translate English words automatically into Chinese without being aware of this process. Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection -- but only if you know how they're written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be 'thing' which is written 东西 in Chinese, and the second might be 'west' which is written 西 in Chinese. The character for 'west' appears in the word 'thing' but these two words are totally unrelated in English. When two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster -- even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.

In a study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Michael Vitevitch, KU professor of psychology, found there are words, like main players in a social network, that hold key positions on the word network and that we process them more quickly and accurately than similar words that they hold together in our memory." The finding may help lead to new insights into developmental and acquired language disorders and treatments for those ailments.

Are the 10% of people who are left-handed and of those whose language is located in the brain's right hemisphere the same? Is the location of language areas in the brain correlated to handedness? Through an innovative approach using a large psychometric and brain imaging database, researchers demonstrated that the location of language areas in the brain is independent of left- or right-handedness, except for a very small proportion of left-handed individuals whose right hemisphere is dominant for both manual work and language.

Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report by Susan Goldin-Meadow, psychology professor at the University of Chicago. "Children who can hear use gesture along with speech to communicate as they acquire spoken language," a researcher said. "Those gesture-plus-word combinations precede and predict the acquisition of word combinations that convey the same notions. Gesture plays a role in learning for signers even though it is in the same modality as sign. As a result, gesture cannot aid learners simply by providing a second modality. Rather, gesture adds imagery to the categorical distinctions that form the core of both spoken and sign languages. Goldin-Meadow concludes that gesture can be the basis for a self-made language, assuming linguistic forms and functions when other vehicles are not available. But when a conventional spoken or sign language is present, gesture works along with language, helping to promote learning.

Translanguaging: the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or modes of languages to maximize communicative potential. Dr. Ofelia Garcia, a scholar of multilingualism, argues that past models of bilingual education are insufficient for highly linguistically-diverse populations. Multilingual education should not only enable the acquisition of multiple languages, but also recognize the actual linguistic practices and language blending employed by teachers and students.

Ronen and co-authors from MIT, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Aix-Marseille University created worldwide maps of how multilingual people transmit information and ideas. These maps depict three global language networks based on bilingual tweeters, book translations, and multilingual Wikipedia edits. The networks potentially offer guidance to governments and other language communities that want to change their international role. "If I want my national language to be more prominent, then I should invest in translating more documents, encouraging more people to tweet in their national language," Ronen says. "On the other side, if I want our ideas to spread, we should pick a second language that's very well connected."

(Posting for Ashley Ishimura) Article discusses why language is important and how important communication is.

(Posting for Ashley Ishimura) This is about how being able to be "fluent" in texting can actually help in life. Just as writing became a new way of expressing language all those thousands of years ago, texting is a new form of expression entirely representative of the way we communicate today-that is, quickly, economically, and on the go. Texting may also enhance social gregariousness and positively impact reading and language development.

"Mondegreen" means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect. Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That's a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn't interpret it the same way.

The U.S. Supreme Court is tackling a question of increasing importance in the age of social media and the Internet: What constitutes a threat on Facebook? Anthony Elonis was convicted of threatening both his estranged wife and an FBI agent. After his wife left him, taking the couple's two children with her, Elonis began posting about her on his Facebook page. Elonis was indicted on five counts of interstate communication of illegal threats. At his trial, he acknowledged the violence voiced in his posts, but argued he was exercising his First Amendment free speech rights. Longtime federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, however, notes that most of the posts occurred after Elonis' wife had gotten a protective court order, and that Elonis posted his messages on his Facebook page without restriction. Thus, Fitzgerald contends that the husband reasonably foresaw what the reaction would be. "The wife would read this and think, this is not an artistic statement, this is not a political statement about a larger cause," says Fitzgerald. "This is trying to get inside her head and make her think there could be someone doing violence to her."

Wednesday, November 26, 2014 By Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 PITTSBURGH-Some people say that reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" taught them the importance of friends, or that easy decisions are seldom right. Carnegie Mellon University scientists used a chapter of that book to learn a different lesson: identifying what different regions of the brain are doing when people read.

Condemned as a dead language, Manx - the native language of the Isle of Man - is staging an extraordinary renaissance. By the early 1960s there were perhaps as few as 200 who were conversant in the tongue. The last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974. The decline was so dramatic that Unesco pronounced the language extinct in the 1990s. But the grim prognosis coincided with a massive effort at revival. Spearheaded by activists and driven by lottery funding and a sizeable contribution (currently £100,000 a year) from the Manx government, the last 20 years have had a huge impact. Now there is even a Manx language primary school in which all subjects are taught in the language, with more than 60 bilingual pupils attending. Manx is taught in a less comprehensive way in other schools across the island.

An infant's mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later, even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the "lost" language remain in the brain and suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life -- potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. This could counter arguments not only within the field of language acquisition, but across domains, that neural representations are overwritten or lost from the brain over time.

Article shares 23 maps and charts that can hopefully illuminate small aspects of how we manage to communicate with one another. In the mix: linguistic diversity around the world, where the plurality of Wikipedia articles are authored, endangered languages, which countries boast the most languages...

New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."