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Emojis are emerging as a new form of communication online, mostly used by younger generations as a way to add emotional depth to online communications. A study conducted suggests that while older generations are less confident about using emojis, they are able to interpret them, and use them with minimal errors.

Imagine putting on a virtual reality headset and entering a world where you can explore communities, like Missoula, except your character, and everyone you interact with, speaks Salish, Cheyenne or Blackfoot. Imagine having a device like Amazon's Alexa that understands and speaks exclusively in Indigenous languages. Or imagine a digital language playground in Facebook's Metaverse, where programmers create interactive games to enhance Indigenous language learning. Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne man who is earning his Ph.D. in computer science, wants to make these dreams a reality. Running Wolf grew up in Birney, a town with a population of 150 just south of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He spent most of his childhood living without electricity. Running Wolf can speak some Cheyenne, but he wants Indigenous language learning to be more accessible, immersive and engaging. And he believes artificial intelligence is the solution. Running Wolf is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who are studying Indigenous languages and AI. He works with a small team of linguists and data scientists, and together, they analyze Indigenous languages and work to translate them into something a computer can interpret. If his team can accomplish this, Running Wolf reasons, then perhaps AI can be used to help revitalize Indigenous languages everywhere.

This article is about how scientists are discussing an A.I. that could translate thoughts into speech through MRI scans. A study was done on three people and analyzed their brain patterns as they listened to words and phrases in order to understand what part of the brain lights up when that word/phrase is said. They also used an A.I to translate MRI scans into words and phrases. However, the A.I.'s translation is doesn't make sense. While the result wasn't perfect, it discovered that the A.I can also decode meaning and imagination. While this is beginning of this kind of A.I. technology, it's possible that in the future, they will be able to decode our thoughts.

Ending your texts with a period is truly monstrous. We all know this. Grammar be darned, it just doesn't look friendly. Now a study has confirmed it. Researchers led by Binghamton University's Celia Klin report that text messages ending with a period are perceived as being less sincere, probably because the people sending them are heartless.

This article talked about how adults talk to babies and why we do it. When we talk to babies, we tend to raise our pitch a little and supposedly, it calms the baby down. They also talked about a research project where they recorded adults from different parts of the world, and noticed that those who come from western places raised their pitch the most, and in remote places didn't raise their pitch that much but everyone raised their pitch at least a little. The way we talk to babies is universal and we've evolved as humans to be able to communicate with infants.

The features of baby talk - softer tone, higher pitch, almost unintelligible vocabulary - are global. Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab documented over 1,500 recordings in 21 urban, rural and Indigenous communities - making their work possibly a first of its kind experiment. The article includes samples from different languages around the world. There are many reasons why baby talk might have evolved in humans and why it might serve beneficial purposes. Some theories suggest that the way we speak accentuates the vowels of the speech and helps babies learn speech. Other theories suggest that this kind of baby talk helps regulate the baby's emotions and helps structure the social interactions we have with babies, so it helps socialize them and control their behavior and mood. In prehistoric times, having ways to interact with babies and to care for them while still being able to keep your eyes up to look out for predators and use your voice to interact with babies, might have been an important reason why we may have evolved these kinds of behaviors.

This article explains the "foreign language effect". It says that speaking a second language improves rational decision making and open-mindedness. It also discusses impacts of speaking a second language on our memory and elements of our personality.

This article goes over how powerful swearing is due to the emotion behind it and how it stimulates our brains. Swearing not only generates a range of emotions, but acts as a release of energy/emotion. This is why curse words are often present in music and movies because they are able to better portray how one is feeling and the emotions they are experiencing.

Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it, we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona science Park, have studied these differences. By comparing people who are able to perceive a second language as if they were native speakers of that language with people who find it very difficult to do so, they have observed that the former group is also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language. The study results show that there is a positive correlation between specific speech discrimination abilities and the ability to learn a second language, which means that the individual ability to distinguish the specific phonemes of the language, both in the case of the mother tongue and in the case of other languages, is, without a doubt, a decisive factor in the learning process, and the ability to speak and master other languages."

The notion of a "gay lisp"-an offensive stereotype to many people-has been a confusing phenomenon for linguists. For decades, popular depictions of gay men have sometimes portrayed them pronouncing the letter "s" as more of a "th" sound-even though studies have failed to find "lispier" speech in gay men than in straight men. Now, however, preliminary data from a small study presented here last week at the biannual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) show that young boys who don't identify with their assigned gender use "th"-like pronunciation at slightly higher rates than their peers who do, although they seem to grow out of that tendency. The authors speculate that stereotypes of gay adults may be rooted in the speech of boys who go on to identify as gay.

This paper discusses how scientists attempted to teach children with autism to understand sarcasm. Sarcasm is a prominent force in everyday social interactions, and thus enabling kids with ASD to pink up on these subtleties benefits their relationships. The experiment, though it had a small sample size, was successful, using rules and other forms of training to give autistic children guidelines to follow.

This article discusses the dangers of disappearing languages that are native to small regions and minorities. There seems to be a label set on each language that determines its superiority or inferiority due to power, class and commonality.