Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This article looks at Finnish language and talks about how verbal repetition of new words helps with vocabulary development, and can cause the brain to have neural response enhancements. This response also indicated how well they were able to retain the vocabulary. The language background of this study's participants was observed, and they found that those who had learned more languages earlier had greater brain flexibility to acquire new phonology.

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.

Over the years, we have found that our words come from different parts of the brain. In addition the part of the brain which we use to formulate thoughts into sentences, we also use the part of the brain that deals with emotion when we swear. Researchers discovered that patients with neurodegenerative diseases like a stroke, were still able to swear. Studying patients with Tourette syndrome have also proved that swearing uses many areas of the brain. Since swearing involves the emotional part of the brain, we know that profanity is used to express intense emotions.

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."

The left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger. The part of the brain that we use to formulate thoughts into sentences is that part that we also use to deal with emotion when we swear. Different studies done on people found with brain issues/diseases allowed researchers to understand that profanity is used to express the extreme emotions.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, the writer of this article from the Atlantic, examines the social media commentary surrounding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Milling," a sociological term, refers to the "agitated, aimless buzzing of the type of crowd that gathers in the aftermath of some bewildering catastrophe...We are all just chattering away in restless and confused excitement as we try to figure out how to think about what's happening. We want to understand which outcomes are most likely, and whether we might be obligated to help-by giving money or vowing not to share misinformation or learning the entire history of global conflict so as to avoid saying the wrong thing. We are milling." The word comes from the mid-20th-century American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who was interested in the process by which crowds converge, during moments of uncertainty and restlessness, on common attitudes and actions. As people mill about the public square, those nearby will be drawn into their behavior, Blumer wrote in 1939. "The primary effect of milling is to make the individuals more sensitive and responsive to one another, so that they become increasingly preoccupied with one another and decreasingly responsive to ordinary objects of stimulation." These days, we mill online. For a paper published in 2016, a team of researchers from the University of Washington looked at the spread of rumors and erratic chatter on Twitter about the Boston Marathon bombings in the hours after that event. They described this "milling" as "collective work to make sense of an uncertain space" by interpreting, speculating, theorizing, debating, or challenging presented information.

The takeaway: one K is bad, two Ks are good and above all else, never, ever use three Ks. 1. "Okay" is obviously the most professional way to type the word, and I will vouch that it is also safe to casually use in text messages. Some disagree that "okay" can sound sarcastic or stern, especially when paired with a period. Which isn't wrong - sentences do invoke a more serious tone when there are periods involved. But the reason why okay is, well, okay, is because it's the longest form of the word. You took the time to type out those additional two letters, and that counts for something. 2. "Kk" is the closest to gotcha. It means message received, roger that. 3. The origins of the dreadful "k" can't exactly be pinpointed, though it's been a thing since iMessage looked like this, so basically the Stone Age. People voiced their disdain for short responses - "k, ok, lol" - on Facebook pages and through memes years ago. And everyone pretty much agreed that yeah, when you type out an extremely long, emotionally charged paragraph to someone and they respond with one letter, it's pretty infuriating. From then on we've been conditioned (or traumatized) to react in a similar manner to the single k. Even when it's just in response to a simple, harmless sentence, it can still feel like a dig.

This article describes the result of an experiment which examined babies' neural responses to social interactions with their parents. They found the amount of brain activity had a positive correlation with their future language development and acquisition at three years old.

A new form of therapy makes use of virtual therapists, who have the capacity to read facial expressions, vocal patterns, body posture, and speech tones. Cleo Stiller, host of Asking For A Friend, said in a video, "[The virtual therapist]'s also interpreting my speech in real time. Am I using positive or negative language? [the therapist] adjusts her questions based off of my responses." The benefit of virtual therapy is that it removes some of the stigmas associated with "seeing a shrink," and allows people to feel more open with their feelings and problems... at least, that's the idea.

Marketers and brand managers responsible for naming new products should be interested to learn that people associate certain sounds with nearness and others with distance, say researchers from the University of Toronto, whose new study adds to the body of knowledge about symbolic sound.

Ben Yehuda is one of the main people responsible for the founding of Jewish nation state called Israel. Along with the immergance of a state, he also jumpstarted the revival of Hebrew from a liturgical language to one spoken by as a native language.

There's new reason to believe so-called "digital natives" really do think differently in response to technology: It may be "priming" them to think more concretely and remember details-rather than the big picture-when they work on a screen. Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem, found a series of experiments detailed in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information," wrote researchers Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth College and Geoff Kaufman of Carnegie Mellon University.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

Recent advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of human cognition (thinking) have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics, Evolutionary Anthropology, and Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. to better understand 3 areas of language: 1. Language processing: The human genome directs the organization of the human brain and some peripheral organs that are prerequisites for the language system, and is probably responsible for the significant differences in language skills between individuals. At the extremes are people with extraordinary gifts for learning many languages and undertaking simultaneous interpretation, and people with severe congenital speech disorders. 2. Language and populations: Genetic methods have revolutionized research into many aspects of languages, including the tracing of their origins. 3. Structural differences: While languages are not inborn, certain genetic predispositions in a genetically similar population may favour the emergence of languages with particular structural characteristics - an example thereof is the distinction between languages that are tonal (such as Chinese) and non-tonal (such as German).

There are two versions of the writer Lauren Collins. There is the English-speaking Lauren, who, presumably, is the Lauren primarily responsible for writing her (wonderful) new memoir, When in French. And then there is the French-speaking Lauren, the one tasked with navigating a marriage and a life in a second language.

It's cool to think that speaking a language can change your perception of the world. I never thought about it before, but from studying Chinese, I feel like I have two sides to myself: an american point of view and an asian point of view. Language shapes who you are.

A CEO of a company that runs about 32 charter schools around New York is cutting foreign language from the curriculum because "Americans don't learn foreign languages well".

Eva Moskowitz is the CEO and founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, responsible for about 9,000 students in 32 charter schools around New York City. Moskowitz sat down for an interview with the American Enterprise Institute this week, and talked about how to fit everything she deems important for students-coding, recess, science five days a week-into...

It takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions conveyed by vocalizations; apparently human brains pay more attention when emotions are embedded in vocalizations rather than in speech. Participants were able to detect vocalizations of happiness (i.e., laughter) more quickly than vocal sounds conveying either anger or sadness. Vocalizations displaying anger, however, are more resonant than those displaying other emotions: both produced ongoing brain activity that lasted longer than either of the other emotions: "listeners engage in sustained monitoring of angry voices, irrespective of the form they take, to grasp the significance of potentially threatening events." More anxious individuals also have a faster and more heightened response to emotional voices in general than people who are less anxious.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

When my relationship unraveled nearly two years ago, I decided to suspend my career as an actuary in Boston and take a long vacation in Costa Rica, where I planned to learn how to surf and do yoga. Yes, it was the most clichéd response possible for a heartbroken 32-year-old Westerner like me.

In this study, we continuously monitored Egyptian fruit bats for months, recording audio and video around-the-clock. We analyzed almost 15,000 vocalizations, which accompanied the everyday interactions of the bats, and were all directed toward specific individuals, rather than broadcast. We found that bat vocalizations carry ample information about the identity of the emitter, the context of the call, the behavioral response to the call, and even the call's addressee.

Our brains are set up to do two things at once, but not three, a French team reports in the journal Science. Their experiment examined an area of the brain involved in goals and rewards and tested people's abilities to accomplish up to three mental tasks at the same time. When volunteers were doing just one task, there was activity in goal-oriented areas of both frontal lobes, suggesting that the two sides of the brain were working together to get the job done. But when people took on a second task, the lobes divided their responsibilities. Since the brain has only two frontal lobes, researchers surmised there might be a limit to the number of goals and rewards it can handle. Indeed, when people started a third task, one of the original goals disappeared from their brains. Also people slowed down and made many more mistakes.