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Interesting article that has facts about bilingualism, its benefits, and misconceptions

A new study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that children as young as two understand basic grammar rules when they first learn to speak and are not simply imitating adults. The study also applied the same statistical analysis on data from one of the most famous animal language-acquisition experiments -- Project Nim -- and showed that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language over the course of many years, never grasped rules like those in a two-year-old's grammar. "When you compare what children should say if they follow grammar against what children do say, you find it to almost indistinguishable," Professor of Linguistics Charles Yang said. "If you simulate the expected diversity when a child is only repeating what adults say, it produces a diversity much lower than what children actually say." As a comparison, Yang applied the same predictive models to the set of Nim Chimpsky's signed phrases, the only data set of spontaneous animal language usage publicly available. He found further evidence for what many scientists, including Nim's own trainers, have contended about Nim: that the sequences of signs Nim put together did not follow from rules like those in human language. Nim's signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization. This suggests that true language learning is -- so far -- a uniquely human trait, and that it is present very early in development.

As early as 1690, the terms "mademoiselle" and "demoiselle" were used to signify "unmarried female". In 2012, the French government struck the honorific from official forms and registries, as the result of pressure from two feminist organizations, who argued that no such sexist distinction exists for young males. "You've never wondered why we don't call a single man 'mondamoiseau,' or even 'young male virgin?' " the feminist groups ask on a joint Web site. "Not surprising: this sort of distinction is reserved for women."

Lori Schade, a marriage and family therapist at Brigham Young University, led a study that surveyed 276 Young adults from 2009 to 2011. All were in committed relationships; more than half were either engaged or married. Almost all texted their partner multiple times a day. Her findings: Texting terms of endearment seems to shore up relationships. Affectionate affirmations help mitigate hurts and frustrations. Women who texted their partner a lot considered the relationship more stable, yet men who received those texts or texted a lot themselves said they were less satisfied with the relationship. Working things out face-to-face, rather than texting, may be more beneficial when negotiating crucial conversations. With texting, people tend to keep responding, rather than slowing down to gain perspective on the situation. Also, unlike conversations, texts don't fade with time: the archive of messages allows people to review the exchanges and consequently, revive hurt feelings.

Article talks about teenage girls' linguistic innovation. While some people may decry "creaky voice"/vocal fry, uptalk, and the use of "like" as a discourse particle, the author argues that "Language is inherently unstable. It's in a constant state of flux, made and remade-stretched, altered, broken down and rearranged-by its speakers every day. Rather than a sign of corruption and disorder, this is language in its full vitality-a living, evolving organism... When it comes to language, the rules of natural selection apply: Evolve or perish."

After Great Britain left the European Union this year, its said that it would try to trade more with China. However, Mandarin Chinese education in Britain is not very extensive, and both the government private industries are taking a new approach - immersion and bilingual schools - to try to teach young children Mandarin. The UK hopes for 5000 fluent students by 2020.

This is a comprehensive review that talks about how television affects language learning and vocabulary building in young children. They cite lots of experiments and books related to this topic.

Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language. While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages. "Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i

This article considers sarcasm to be "the highest form of intelligence" because it symbolizes an individuals flexible and creative mind. Through research done by psychologist and neuroscientists, it has been found that the usage of sarcasm actually requires more brain power to interpret than a literary statement. This is supported by the fact that young children don't understand sarcasm while teenagers are able to fully utilize it.

This book chapter discusses two research projects that examine how teachers/instructors view slang terms and how those views affect young people. It explains how young people have their own vernacular and how older generations who don't understand it may see "youth speak" as a threat to "standard" English.

People are capable of learning more than one language at a young age. Bilingual people use a different part of their brain. Bilingual people are also better at various different test than people who speak just one language.

Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, suggests a new study that is the first in young babies to examine differences in brain regions involved in detecting sound patterns.

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.

The brains of adolescents are notoriously more receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval, which can lead to risky behavior. But researchers and educators are noticing that young people are also more sensitive to notions of social justice and autonomy. Teenage rebellion can be virtuous - even wholesome - depending on the situation. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that teenagers make wiser choices if they are encouraged to reimagine healthy behavior as an act of defiance.

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.

You know when you're searching for a word, or trying to say something more nicely than you actually mean it, or trying to make up your mind after you've already started speaking? Whether you reach for an "um" or an "uh" in those situations might depend on whether you're male or female. Our verbal pauses actually speak volumes: "Like," as eighth-grade English teachers will tell you, makes the speaker sound young or ditzy; "sort of" smacks of uncertainty. But according to the linguist Mark Liberman, who works at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs at Language Log, even a difference as subtle as the one between "um" and "uh" provides clues about the speaker's gender, language skills, and even life experience.

This article was about the language of love and took us, the reader, through the author's love history, given her very peculiar situation. The story began with Emily Robbins, moving to Syria as a young linguist trying to assimilate herself with the Arabic language. She met a Syrian doctor of similar age that she soon fell in love with. She was a beginner Arabic speaker and Arabic was his first language. There was an obvious language barrier between the two and it was often hard to convey messages to each other. The doctor was actually quite eloquent with his writing and speaking, but Robbins butchered his messages because of her blunt and broad knowledge of the language. They soon became distant because of their inability to understand each other. A few years have passed since Robbins has returned from Syria and she is definitely more adept to Arabic. She went through her old letters from the doctor and read them, with a better background of the Arabic language. From reading his letters she finally understood the full meaning behind his messages. The doctor's notes were beautiful and evidently showed his once devoted love to her. Robbins learned that being able to give and receive language is a huge base that ultimately holds love together. Had she understood the meanings of his messages before, there would be a possibility that they could still be passionately in love with each other today.