Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This MIT Technology Review article notes that while Artificial Intelligence has experienced many sophisticated advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. In addition, humans, unlike machines, have the ability to learn very quickly from a relatively small amount of data and have a built-in ability to model the world in 3-D very efficiently. Programming machines to comprehend and generate language is a complex task, because the machines would need to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology. As MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum states, "Language builds on other abilities that are probably more basic, that are present in young infants before they have language: perceiving the world visually, acting on our motor systems, understanding the physics of the world or other agents' goals." ­ If he is right, then it will be difficult to re-create language understanding in machines and AI systems without trying to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology.

A Johns Hopkins study found that damage to a key structure in the brain may explain why some stroke patients can't perceive sarcasm. Researchers looked at 24 people who had experienced a stroke in the right hemispheres of their brains. Those with damage to the right sagittal stratum tended to have trouble recognizing sarcasm, the researchers found. This bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Sarcasm can be hard to interpret; it's a complex way to communicate. First, the person has to 1. understand the literal meaning of what someone says 2. detect the components of sarcasm: a wider range of pitch, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech "There're a number of cues people use, and it's both facial cues and tone of voice," noted Dr. Argye Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Tracing the linguistic path of mmhmm, and many other words commonly used today, from West Africa to the U.S. South is difficult, is riddled with controversy - and experts say it has lingering effects on how the speech of African-Americans is perceived. In a 2008 documentary, Robert Thompson, a Yale professor who studies the effect of Africa on the Americas, said the word spread from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans used to say "yay" and "yes." However, other historians and linguists disagree.

Lera Boroditsky, then an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University at the time of this article, looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. Boroditsky's research data, collected from around the world, suggeststhat people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Boroditsky argues that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think - that learning a new language isn't simply learning a new way of talking, but a new way of thinking. Languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of "catching" other people's emotions and moods. According to Elaine Hatfield, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, humans are hard-wired "to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally." Primitive emotional contagion is a basic building block of human interaction. It helps us coordinate and synchronize with others, empathize with them, and read their minds-all critical survival skills. When we mimic, the body gets feedback about the expressions we've taken on; we then feel what the other person is feeling. Gary Slutkin, a physician, epidemiologist, and founder and CEO of the nonprofit Cure Violence, says that emotional contagion, specifically anger and violence, springs from four mechanisms involving the brain: 1. Engagement of the cortical pathways for copying, a behavior related to mimicry. The most contagious behaviors are the most emotionally engaging, as well as the ones carried out by the people who are most relevant to you. 2. Activation of the brain's dopamine system, which works in anticipation of a reward. "Activation of that system puts you down a pathway toward what is important socially and for survival," he says. If you anticipate being rewarded for responding to someone with anger or violence, you are more likely to get on that behavioral track. 3. The brain's pain centers activate from veering off or being shut out from getting a reward. "A sense of I can't stand it lights up in the context of disapproval." 4. Serious injuries or abuse cause the limbic system and amygdala in the lower brain to become hyperreactive. "This causes you to be less in control, which accelerates violent behavior," Slutkin says. It also makes you more likely to get angry and be quick to react. "Then there's hostile attribution, another part of what happens with the limbic sy

Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext - for those, at least, who can read them. Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker's meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice. In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators. Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks. Put simply, they are written shorthand for the poster's intent and emotion. One might use "/srs," short for "serious," to express sincere affection for a pop culture crush.

In this NPR interview, Trinidadian-American Lyiscott reflects on a moment where she'd been termed "articulate," a loaded term that got Lysicott reflecting on the ways certain varieties of language are privileged over others, and also the way "articulate" also suggests a perceived mismatch between the appearance/race of the person and their use of langugage, also how people judge others' intellect and capacity, based on how they speak.

The immigration debate often centers on who should be welcomed into our country. Some even argue that multiculturalism dilutes our national character - that the very the essence of the country is somehow vanishing. But far from undermining the American experiment, immigrants enhance our culture by introducing new ideas, cuisines and art. They also enrich the English language. As newcomers master a new language, they lend words from their native lexicon to the rest of us. While American English can be perceived as a threat to the survival of other cultures around the world, within our country it is a force that helps to bind us together, even as ideological polarization pulls the other way. Immigrants help us reinvigorate our multitudinous language.

This article, published by BYU, talks about the effects that certain accents have on people's perceptions. Because everyone talks in a different way, some cultures may associate people with certain labels. Many studies are conducted within this article that displays statistical data on the perception of certain accents. Some people perceive certain accents positively while others see them negatively. This article reflects how different cultures act while being combined and the outcomes that come out of that action.

Abstract: Self-affirmation theory posits that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to perceived self-competence are met with resistance. When threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values. Many questions exist, however, about the underlying mechanisms associated with self-affirmation. We examined the neural mechanisms of self-affirmation with a task developed for use in a functional magnetic resonance imaging environment. Results of a region of interest analysis demonstrated that participants who were affirmed (compared with unaffirmed participants) showed increased activity in key regions of the brain's self-processing (medial prefrontal cortex + posterior cingulate cortex) and valuation (ventral striatum + ventral medial prefrontal cortex) systems when reflecting on future-oriented core values (compared with everyday activities). Furthermore, this neural activity went on to predict changes in sedentary behavior consistent with successful affirmation in response to a separate physical activity intervention. These results highlight neural processes associated with successful self-affirmation, and further suggest that key pathways may be amplified in conjunction with prospection.

This study, published in the acclaimed science journal _Nature_, examined how age and exposure to different types of COVID-19 (mis)information affect misinformation beliefs, perceived credibility of the message and intention-to-share it on WhatsApp.

This article explains Bill Nyeʻs perspective on how word use is extremely important when talking about climate change, as it can change how urgent people consider this issue. This shows the power of changing even just one word in a phrase or sentence, and how it can affect how language is perceived. One example they used was "phasing down coal" instead of "phasing out coal"; in reality, we want to eliminate the use of coal, but by using the word "down" instead of "out" it creates a different tone.

This article talks about how the new "Spanglish" invention provides an example of how language evolves. It gives examples of Spanglish phrases as well as explains how racism and language discrimination have caused people to perceive "Spanglish" as an incorrect use of language.

The following article explores language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon. Why is it that a seemingly harmful sentence can create stereotypes or biases? How does language change the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world? Can different language patterns indicate something about our behavior? These are some topics regarded in this text, as well as the overarching theme of how words shape us and our lives.

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.

It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.

This article talks about how German language can be perceived as aggressive. Which it explains why we only see it as how it's pronounce instead of what it really means, because the pronunciation doesn't reflect the emotions of the words.

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."

This study examines the effect of texting style/etiquette on the perceived relationships between two individuals. It takes into account text voice, message length, and frequency of communication.

This report touches on a bunch of different aspects on how language defines us. It shows us through short summaries and linked sources how language can tell us behavioral patterns, inform our knowledge about other languages, and predict perceived stereotypes.

This article talks about the impact language has on shaping people and culture. It dives into how language influences perception, behavior, and understanding, affecting everything from personal identity to social norms. It also discusses how language can be a tool for empowerment and change but can also perpetuate stereotypes and inequalities.