"The results are bad news for universalists: "most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies," according to the authors. [...] If universal features can't account for what we observe, what can? Common descent. "Cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states." It's important to emphasize that this study looked at a specific language feature (word order)."

"EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries." Interesting data, especially about how different factors correlate with English ability. Direct link to report: http://www.ef.com/sitecore/__/~/media/efcom/epi/pdf/EF-EPI-2011.pdf

"The idea of "> Language > Place" is to create a collaborate virtual journey through different places, in different formats, and with different languages included - the main language is english, yet the idea is that every post also includes snippets or terms of other languages, and refers to a specific place, country, region or city. "

"According to Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the Web site the Name Inspector, "there's a land grab going on" in the information economy, as "companies are trying to snatch up pieces of our cultural commons." He lays much of the blame on the increasing scarcity of available names, whether for trademarks, domain names or Twitter handles." See also Language Log discussion: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3055

"Dr. Lera Boroditsky tells us about a language in Australia in which a pigeon-like ability to orient yourself is so crucial...you can't even say hello without knowing exactly which direction you're facing." Part of this podcast: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/

"A visual dictionary of words with abstract, complex, or underused meanings" - very nice illustrations.

"Positive evidence presented in a weak way can make listeners suspicious of a predicted outcome, a finding that can have serious implications for professional persuaders like marketers and politicians."

"Not every language suffers from this deficit of smell adjectives. The Kapsiki of Cameroon, for example, have 14 fundamental smell terms...  awesome words like dzafe and duf'duf are conspicuously absent from European languages."

"In one 40-second clip, you can hear how "gaga" turned into "water" over the course of six months. In a video clip, below, you can hear and watch the evolution of "ball." .... Unreal 3-D visualizations allowed his team to zoom through the house like a dollhouse and map the utterance of each word in its context. In a landscape-like image with peaks and valleys, you can see that the word "water" was uttered most often in the kitchen, while "bye" took place at the door."

"The researchers can't be sure, but they think the remission of the man's stammer is likely related to his cerebellum damage, which may have had the effect of inhibiting excessive neural activation in that structure."

"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs."

"The portion of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn't require vision at all, according to a new study... Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in precisely the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read."

"We can't talk about any complex situation-like crime-without using metaphors," says Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology.... In one study, 71 percent of the participants called for more enforcement when they read: "Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison." That number dropped to 54 percent among participants who read an alternative framing: "Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison."

"Neural processing that goes into deciphering simple two-word phrases is different from what happens when decoding complete sentences and other more complex linguistic expressions."

"Research suggests that bilingual people can hold Alzheimer's disease at bay for longer, and that bilingual children are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking." See also: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/100218-bilingual-brains-alzheimers-dementia-science-aging/

New study co-authored by Lera Boroditsky: "The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments...we find that metaphors can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve complex problems and how they gather more information to make "well-informed" decisions."

Including answers to questions such as: - Can you walk us through the logic Watson would go through to answer a question such as, "The antagonist of Stevenson's Treasure Island." (Who is Long John Silver?) - ...I found myself wondering whether what it does is really natural language processing, or something more akin to word association... does Watson really need to understand syntax and meaning to just search its database for words and phrases associated with the words and phrases in the clue?

"The field of natural language processing doesn't usually get showcased in a widely watched game show, but that's exactly what happened on Jeopardy! over the last three evenings, as IBM's Watson supercomputer squared off against the two best humans ever to play the game."

"Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists.... Piantadosi and colleagues suggest that the relationship of word length to information content might not only make it more efficient to convey information linguistically but also make language cognition a smoother ride for the reader or listener."

"Most people implicitly associate positive ideas with "right" and negative ideas with "left"....The meanings of words in English, Dutch, and Spanish are related to the way people type them on the QWERTY keyboard. Words with more right-hand letters are rated as more positive in emotional valence than words with more left-hand letters, consistent with right-handers' tendency to implicitly associate "good" with "right.""