Nick Perham, a psychology researcher who conducted a major study on music and reading comprehension, gives a summary of music's effect on productivity. Whether it is beneficial or not is dependent on task and the timing of the music.While recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity, with other areas of performance, the impact of background music is more complicated. Performance is poorer when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet: this is known as the irrelevant sound effect. The irrelevant sound effect phenomenon arises from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time - one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability. A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words - from the task and the sound - are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of music with lyrics. It doesn't matter whether one likes the music or not--performance was equally poor. Whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation, then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information, then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music. One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that child

Metaphors are extremely useful things. They provide a common language-an agreed-upon shorthand-for truths that can be difficult to discuss in terms that are simultaneously broad and precise. It doesn't take a Lakoff or a Luntz to appreciate the power of shared metonyms, particularly as the country grapples with the results of an election that was a political embodiment of that well-worn Fitzgerald line: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." This election, in particular, featured many more than two oppositional ideas. The 2018 midterms were about voter suppression, which is also to say about robbing swaths of Americans of their constitutional rights, which is also to say about structuralized inequality. They were about enfranchisement and its opposite. They were about progress. They were about backlash. They were about women winning. They were about women losing. They were about compassion empowered, and racism rewarded, and hard work realized, and cruelty weaponized, and corruption unpunished. They were about hatred. They were about love. They were about history made. They were about history ignored. They were about American exceptionalism in the best sense and-at the same time-in the worst. How do you sum that up in a headline or a news article? How do you talk about it in neatly cable-newsed sound bites? The true answer is that you can't, and the even truer answer is that this is why it is necessary to have a flourishing and extremely diverse media ecosystem, so that a broadly coherent picture might emerge from the individual efforts-but the more practical and immediate answer is that you can try to use metaphors to summarize the situation. You can talk about waves, with their familiarity and their liquidity and their visual power, and you can talk about the color of your notional water, and the size and shape of the swell, and you

Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

Language is common to all humans; we seem to be "hard-wired" for it. Many social scientists and philosophers say it's this ability to use language symbolically that makes us "human." Though it may be a universal human attribute, language is hardly simple. For decades, linguists' main task was to track and record languages. But, like so many areas of science, the field of linguistics has evolved dramatically over the past 50 years or so. Today's science of linguistics explores: -the sounds of speech and how different sounds function in a language -the psychological processes involved in the use of language -how children acquire language capabilities -social and cultural factors in language use, variation and change -the acoustics of speech and the physiological and psychological aspects involved in producing and understanding it -the biological basis of language in the brain This special report, compiled by the National Science Foundation, touches on nearly all of these areas by answering questions such as: How does language develop and change? Can the language apparatus be "seen" in the brain? Does it matter if a language disappears? What exactly is a dialect? How can sign language help us to understand languages in general? Answers to these and other questions have implications for neuroscience, psychology, sociology, biology and more.

Of the 7,105 languages spoken today, over half are considered in danger of extinction in this century. As languages vanish, communities lose a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment and the human mind. This will be a catastrophic erosion of the human knowledge base, affecting all fields of science, art, and human endeavor. It will also be an incalculable loss to indigenous peoples' sense of history, identity, belonging, and self. The story map embedded in this website will take you on a virtual tour of some endangered language communities around the world, to see and hear some of the last speakers, and understand their struggle to save their languages.

In this article addressed to teachers, author Julia Csillag cites research on the use of wordless texts to teach students with autism spectrum disorder. Wordless texts can be used to address a variety of skills that autistic students typically struggle with, including diverse literacy skills, cognitive flexibility, and nonverbal communication. Removing words and auditory information also supports autistic students since integrating information from multiple senses can take longer in autistic individuals, particularly if this information is linguistic. Removing words can therefore positively influence processing. Using wordless books or movies can build diverse literacy skills in terms of making inferences, understanding narrative structure, and using evidence to support a claim. All wordless "texts" support individuals' ability to make inferences, which is helpful since research shows that "students with Asperger syndrome…had challenges in making inferences from the text" (Knight & Sartrini, 2014). Moreover, researchers have found that "similar processes contribute to comprehension of narratives across different media" (Kendeou, P. et al, 2009), meaning that addressing visual inferences can transfer to inferences made during reading. Images and silent books or movies necessarily require students to infer what is happening, who the characters are, etc.

The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii's native speakers on Ni`ihau. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that Niihau speakers use different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement, a.k.a. "university Hawaiian"?

Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century. Wikitongues wants to save these endangered languages from extinction. Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. In 2014, they launched Wikitongues, an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. They've already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online, and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years. "When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions," says Bogre Udell.

Robert Bowers, the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue killer, had an online life like many thousands of anti-Semitic Americans. He had Twitter and Facebook accounts and was an active user of Gab, a right-wing Twitter knockoff with a hands-off approach to policing speech. The Times of Israel reported that among anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and slurs, Bowers had recently posted a picture of "a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps used to cremate Jews, writing the caption 'Make Ovens 1488F Again,'" a white-supremacist reference. Then he made one last post, saying, "I'm going in," and allegedly went to kill 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Only then did his accounts come down, just like Cesar Sayoc's, the mail-bomb suspect. This is how it goes now. Both of these guys made nasty, violent, prejudiced posts. Yet, as reporter after reporter has noted, their online lives were-to the human eye at least-indistinguishable from the legions of other trolls who say despicable things. There is just no telling who will stay in the comments section and who will try to kill people in the real world. It was not long ago that free-speech absolutism was the order of the day in Silicon Valley. But that was before anti-Semitic attacks spiked; before the Charlottesville, Virginia, killing; before the kind of open racism that had lost purchase in American culture made its ugly resurgence. Each new incident ratchets up the pressure on technology companies to rid themselves of their trolls. But the culture they've created will not prove easy to stamp out.

Other, non-human primates have Broca's and Wernicke's areas in their brains, as do humans. In both species, the Broca's region represents non-linguistic hand and mouth movements. Evidence also suggests that both species may have mirror neurons in this region that are involved in understanding the actions and intentions of others. In both macaques and humans, this region is likely involved in producing orofacial expressions and in understanding the intentions behind orofacial expressions of others. In humans, it has evolved an additional communicative function, namely speech production. Interestingly however, it does not appear to be involved in monkey vocalizations, which are instead mediated by limbic and brainstem areas. In both species, the region represents non-linguistic hand and mouth movements. Evidence also suggests that both species may have mirror neurons in this region that are involved in understanding the actions and intentions of others. In both macaques and humans, this region is likely involved in producing orofacial expressions and in understanding the intentions behind orofacial expressions of others. In humans, it has evolved an additional communicative function, namely speech production. However, unlike in humans, Broca's area does not appear to be involved in monkey vocalizations, which are instead mediated by limbic and brainstem areas. Regarding Wernicke's area, which is responsible for language comprehension in humans, evidence suggests that the left superior temporal gyrus is specialized for processing species-specific calls in macaques, just as it is specialized for speech comprehension in humans.

The extra information provided in music can facilitate language learning. The researchers of this study also suggest that other information, like gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language. In addition, there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Language and music are both associated with emotions. And of course, we know that children - especially small children - really like music. This study offers another bit of evidence that the link between language and music may be a fundamental one.

Voice-based interactions require sophisticated programming and AI to enable a machine to understand and talk to you. In other words, it's a really big deal to program a computer to have a conversation. Walter says the challenge now is to process massive amounts of dialogue-related data to facilitate human-like intellectual and speech functionality in machines. "We are developing the technology that will give machines the cognitive ability to understand the semantics and context of a conversation, respond to topic changes and, in essence, carry on everything from a complex conversation to small talk."

Regular speech is generated in the left hemisphere, in an area of the brain close to the surface. The cerebral cortex, or "gray matter," is often associated with higher thought processes such as thought and action. "It's sophisticated," says Bergen, "and comports with the idea of what it means to be human." Swearing, on the other hand, is generated much deeper in the brain, in regions that are older and more primitive in evolutionary terms, says Bergen. These regions are often found in the right hemisphere in the brain's emotional center, the limbic system."These are words that express intense emotions-surprise, frustration, anger, happiness, fear," says psychologist and linguist Timothy Jay, who began studying profanity more than 40 years ago."[Swearing] serves my need to vent, and it conveys my emotions to other people very effectively and symbolically," he says. "Where other animals like to bite and scratch each other, I can say 'f*ck you' and you get my contempt-I don't have to do it physically." Profanity serves other purposes, too. Lovers use it as part of enticing sex talk; athletes and soldiers use it to forge camaraderie; and people in positions of power use it to reaffirm their superiority. Profanity is even used as a celebratory expression, says Adams, citing "F*ck yeah!" as an example. The meaning of a profanity, like any other word, changes with time, culture and context. While swear words have been around since Greek and Roman times, and maybe even earlier, the types of things people consider offensive have changed. "People of the Middle Ages had no problems talking about sex or excrement, that was not their hang-up," Adams explains. "Their hang-up was talking about God disrespectfully...so that was what a profanity was."

This article documents the subculture of conlangers. Conlang", short for "constructed language," is a language that has been constructed. There are a lot of them, of various sorts. International auxiliary languages like Volapük, Esperanto, or Interlingua are one specific type of conlang. Invented to facilitate international communication during the great techno-utopian-modernist thought-boom of the last two centuries, they never got terribly popular. Conlangs do not necessarily have to be useful. As David Peterson explains in his new book _The Art of Language Invention_, conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for the entertainment of others.

Writer JRR Tolkien took bits of his favourite real-world languages and spliced them together. Listen carefully to the dialogue in the forthcoming movie of Return of the King and you might recognise some old English, a Welsh lilt here and there, and even some Finnish. "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," says Fred Hoyt, a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish.

Because text messaging is a conversation that involves a lot of back-and-forth, people add fillers as a way to mimic spoken language. We see this with the increased use of ellipses, which can invite the recipient to continue the conversation. The period is the opposite of that - a definitive stop that signals, as linguistics professor Mark Liberman has explained, "This is final, this is the end of the discussion." For some, this can appear angry or standoffish--but why? The use of the period is an example of what linguist John Gumperz termed situational code-switching: when we change how we talk depending on where we are, who we're talking to or how we're communicating. Using a period in a text message is perceived as overly formal, making the writer come across as insincere or awkward, just like using formal spoken language in a casual setting, like a bar.

While this article primarily addresses the phenomenon of dysmusia, difficulty in reading music, it also talks about the cognitive underpinnings of music reading. In the brain, reading music is a widespread, multi-modal activity, meaning that many different areas of the brain are involved at the same time. It includes motor, visual, auditory, audiovisual, somatosensory, parietal and frontal areas in both hemispheres and the cerebellum - making music reading truly a whole brain activity. With training, the neural network strengthens. Even reading a single pitch activates this widespread network in musicians. The article also reiterates a pattern that researchers are finding: while text and music reading share some networks, they are largely independent. The pattern of activation for reading musical symbols and letters is different across the brain. Scientists have determined this via studies of patients with limited brain damage, as brain injury impaired reading of one coding system but spared the other.

Teachers can use music to deepen the learning environment in a literacy classroom. Many commonalities exist between music and literacy, especially in the pre-K to second grade years, and therefore music education is a vital element in children's literary development. Here are some areas that reading and music both address: 1. Development of auditory processes 2. Visual decoding processes 3. Vocabulary growth occurs whenever students are exposed to new material, like a story or a song. Putting new information into a musical context can also help student memory. 4. Poetry: vocal music is essentially poetry set to a melody 5. Building confidence in performance, whether it's vocal or instrumental.

There are around 340 million L1 English speakers, and 600 million ESL speakers, making the language accessible to an estimated billion people, English is also the primary or official language in 101 countries. However, Vyvyan Evans, British linguist, notes emoji are an even more intuitively accessible global communication mode. 3.2 billion people have regular Internet access in the world, and 92 percent-plus of those 3.2 billion people regularly send emojis. So from that perspective, Emoji leaves English in the dust, in terms of use and uptake. Most people think that when we communicate in default face-to-face mode, language is what's driving effective communication, and in fact it's not. Communication requires different channels of information - language is just one. The two other important ones are paralanguage, and that's how you're delivering the words, so tone of voice, and the really big one is kinesics, and that has to do with action-based, nonverbal communication. Emoji functions analogously to tone of voice and to body language in text-speak, and without it, we're reduced communicators.

A collaboration between the Gottman Institute and the Huffington Post, Thrive Global offers sustainable, science-based solutions to enhance well-being, performance, and purpose, and create a healthier relationship with technology. Some useful communication articles!