Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

In this article, research shows that babies in the womb are affect by different languages that are spoken. In the last trimester of pregnancy, when the baby is able to recognize voices, they get used to the sound of their mother. Babies are more familiar and comfortable with the language that was spoken by their mother so when Korean born babies were adopted into Dutch speaking families, they were still able to make Korean sounds. Many people also believe that teaching an infant multiple languages can confuse them or make it more difficult for the child. However, this is not the case.

How are gendered languages holding up in society's current push for gender-neutral terms? This NPR podcast explores gender bias in the Spanish language, the role of the Real Academia Española, and efforts led by teenagers in Argentina to de-gender the Spanish language.

This blog post explains the relatively new history of 她, the female third-person, or "she." Originally, with standardized writings of Mandarin Chinese, the only third-person pronoun was 他. It was used regardless of the subject's gender. In 1917, linguist Liu Ban Nong proposed "她," but it wasn't until feminist movements and media coverage gained force that the Chinese Government claimed it. Its usage is still being debated today, with people questioning whether or not there needs to be a gendered "them" at all.

This post discusses whether or not Koko the gorilla could actually speak and utilize sign language, or if she was just trained to associate certain hand motions with a result without really understanding what it meant.

This post discusses the Chinese Room thought experiment, which examines whether or not computers are actually able to understand us and our words, or if they're just stringing together certain words by association.

This talks about how to effectively use self-affirmations and how they can help you.

Siblings are an important influence on the language acquisition/learning of other siblings, especially in multilingual households.

This short interactive quiz, meant for Gen Y and above readers, tests your ability to translate common slang used by Gen Z.

This goes into Chinese "chengyu" or four-character idioms used heavily in mandarin, much like our "two birds, one stone." Like English idioms, origins vary between chengyu, but often they're old stories and have been used for ages in colloquial language.

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.

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.

This article talked about how our language has changed recently because of the internet. The purpose of texting is to send short, efficient messages, so our language has reflected that. We now use more acronyms and speak informally when we are talking to people online. An example of how language has changed is our use of periods. Since we speak less formally, we don't use periods as often. So now, when we receive messages that come with periods we interpret them as passive-aggressive. This can be problematic because the age people joined the internet plays a big role in how we interpret messages online. So there is often lots of miscommunication between people of different ages because we interpret language differently.

This article is about a study suggests that bilingualism can possibly decrease chances of getting dementia and cognitive decline in older people. The study was published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging. It hypothesized that because bilingual people can switch between two languages seamlessly, it can be used in multitasking, self-control, emotion management, possibly delaying dementia. However, the study only focused on bilingual people who use two languages everyday for a long time. Because of the different degrees of bilingualism, it's difficult to know if it really can delay dementia.

This article discusses the language of lying. It talks about liars' tendencies and patterns. Lying is very complex, but language itself is very good lie-detector.

This article talks about emojis and how their meaning depends on the reader's interpretation. Researchers are building more understanding of the role emoji play in human communication, by studying the linguistic properties of emoji in comparison with languages like English.

Working on the metaphor poems lead me to wonder why metaphors are so important to communication and emotional connection. This article explains why metaphors have a different affect than other types of communication.

This article shows the potential influence that AI has on the economy. AI uses coding and programming through communication between computers in order to function

This study looks into how cultural learning can affect or improve second language acquisition, specifically looking into mandarin-speakers acquiring english.

This post (a 2021 update of a 2018 post) contains several useful infographics and charts, including a visualization of the top 23 most-spoken languages in the world, distribution of those languages by country, a family tree of Indo-European languages.

This journal is about how meaning in music can be communicated. Many people say that they express themselves through music, so this journal goes in-depth about how different people communicate their thoughts through music.