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in title, tags, annotations or urlLinguistics 201: Language and the Brain - 0 views
Many seem to associate our vocal tracts and mouths as the organs that produce language. However, how is it that the deaf can use sign language and the blind read braille? The primary organ responsi...
Language may be dominant social marker for young children | UChicago News - 2 views
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"Researchers showed children images and voices of a child and two adults, and asked, "Which adult will the child grow up to be?" Children were presented with a challenge: One adult matched the child's race, and one matched the child's language, but neither matched both. ... As would be expected, 9- and 10-year-old children chose the adult who matched the featured child's race. ... Five- and six-year-old English-speaking white children's responses were a bit more surprising: Most of those children chose the language match, even though this meant that the featured child would have needed to change race."
How the brain strings words into sentences - 3 views
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Stephen Wilson, an associate professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, studied the upper and lower white-matter connecting pathways between Broca's region and Wernicke's region: the two areas of the brain that are hubs for language processing. Brain imaging and language tests were used to examine patients suffering from language impairments caused by neurodegeneration. Wilson discovered the pathways have distinct functions. Damage to the lower pathway affects lexicon and semantics: "You forget the name of things, you forget the meaning of words. But surprisingly, you're extremely good at constructing sentences." Conversely, damage to the upper pathway creates problems in syntactic processing and figuring out the relationship between words in a sentence.
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Language isn't found in just one part of the brain but rather in separate individual parts that are responsible for different aspects of language. Neurodegentive diseases that target specific areas of the brain affecting language, only have a partial effect on the patients ability to understand and communicate.
Adolescents' Brains Respond Differently Than Adults' When Anticipating Rewards, Increasing Teens' Vulnerability to Addiction and Behavioral Disorders | University of Pittsburgh News - 6 views
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"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."
British and American English: Americanisation survey: the results | The Economist - 0 views
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"Our online survey asking Brits which Americanisms they use has had over 650 responses... It seems that "sidewalk" and "apartment" are the two commonest adoptions, while about half of you use "vacation" and "bug". There's a bit more resistance to "I'm good" over "I'm well", and to saying Z as "zee" instead of "zed". Around two-thirds stick with the British pronunciations of "process" and "progress", which seems to confirm my suspicion that those two are real assimilation watersheds."
How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect - 2 views
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Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species. Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. The researchers called "striking" the finding that the gestures of all three species were "predominantly communicative," Greenfield said. To be classified as communicative, a gesture had to include eye contact with the conversational partner, be accompanied by vocalization (non-speech sounds) or include a visible behavioral effort to elicit a response. The same standard was used for all three species. For all three, gestures were usually accompanied by one or more behavioral signs of an intention to communicate. At the beginning stage of communication development, gesture was the primary mode of communication for human infant, baby chimpanzee and baby bonobo. The child progressed much more rapidly in the development of symbols. Words began to dominate her communication in the second half of the study, while the two apes continued to rely predominantly on gesture. "This was the first indication of a distinctive human pathway to language," Greenfield said. All three species increased their use of symbols, as opposed to gestures, as they grew older, but this change was far more pronounced for the human child. The child's transition from gesture to symbol could be a developmental model of the evolutionary pathway to human language and thus evidence for the "gestural origins of human language," Greenfield said. While gesture may be the first step in language evolution, the psychologists also found evidence that the evolutionary pathway from gesture to human language included the "co-evolution of gestural and vocal communication." Most of the child's gestures were accompanied b
Chimpanzees: Alarm calls with intent? - 1 views
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Dr Katie Slocombe and Dr Anne Schel, of the Department of Psychology at York, examined the degree of intentionality wild chimpanzees have over their alarm calls. The study shows that chimpanzees appear to produce certain alarm calls intentionally in a tactical and goal directed way--they are not simply fear-based reactions. In Uganda, the researchers presented wild chimpanzees with a moving snake model and monitored their vocal and behavioural responses. They found that the chimpanzees were more likely to produce alarm calls when close friends arrived in the vicinity. They looked at and monitored group members both before and during the production of calls and critically, they continued to call until all group members were safe from the predator. Together these behaviours indicate the calls are produced intentionally to warn others of the danger. Dr Slocombe said: "These behaviours indicate that these alarm calls were produced intentionally to warn others of danger and thus the study shows a key similarity in the mechanisms involved in the production of chimpanzee vocalisations and human language. "Our results demonstrate that certain vocalisations of our closest living relatives qualify as intentional signals, in a directly comparable way to many great ape gestures, indicating that language may have originated from a multimodal vocal-gestural communication system."
Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language - 9 views
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the discipline of rhetoric was the primary repository of Western thinking about persuasion
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The principal purpose of this paper is to contribute a richer and more systematic conceptual understanding of rhetorical structure in advertising language
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Rhetoricians maintain that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways, and that in any given situation one of these ways will be the most effective in swaying an audience.
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Brain structure of infants predicts language skills at one year - 2 views
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Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, University of Washington researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas - the hippocampus and cerebellum - can predict children's language abilities at one year of age. Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1, as measured by babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and ability to produce different types of sounds. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor. "Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn't the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing," Kuhl said. "Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents." The findings could reflect infants' abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind. "The brain uses many general skills to learn language," Kuhl said. "Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path."
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/msscha/psych/psychophysiological_patterns_texting.pdf - 1 views
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Lin, of National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan and Peper, of San Francisco State University, examined the psychophysiological effects of texting. Results indicated that all subjects showed significant increases in respiration rate, heart rate, SC, and shoulder and thumb SEMG as compared to baseline measures. Eighty-three percent of the participants reported hand and neck pain during texting, held their breath, and experienced arousal when receiving text messages. Subjectively, most subjects were unaware of their physiological changes. The study suggests that frequent triggering of these physiological patterns (freezing for stability and shallow breathing) may increase muscle discomfort symptoms. Thus, participants should be trained to inhibit these responses to prevent illness and discomfort.
How To Write the Perfect College Essay-Grab Some Attention - 4 views
American English: Dialect Maps - 1 views
Do Deaf People Hear an Inner Voice? - 3 views
Language acquisition: From sounds to the meaning: Do young infants know that words in language 'stand for' something else? - 0 views
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Without understanding the 'referential function' of language (words as 'verbal labels', symbolizing other things) it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present early in infants? Marno, Nespor, and Mehler of the International School of Advanced Studies conducted experiments with infants (4 months old). Babies watched a series of videos where a person might (or might not) utter an (invented) name of an object, while directing (or not directing) their gaze towards the position on the screen where a picture of the object would appear. By monitoring the infants' gaze, Marno and colleagues observed that, in response to speech cues, the infant's gaze would look faster for the visual object, indicating that she is ready to find a potential referent of the speech. However, this effect did not occur if the person in the video remained silent or if the sound was a non-speech sound. "The mere fact of hearing verbal stimuli placed the infants in a condition to expect the appearance, somewhere, of an object to be associated with the word, whereas this didn't happen when there was no speech, even when the person in the video directed the infant's gaze to where the object would appear, concludes Marno. "This suggests that infants at this early age already have some knowledge that language implies a relation between words and the surrounding physical world. Moreover, they are also ready to find out these relations, even if they don't know anything about the meanings of the words yet. Thus, a good advice to mothers is to speak to their infants, because infants might understand much more than they would show, and in this way their attention can be efficiently guided by their caregivers."
Brain doesn't need vision at all in order to 'read' material | Machines Like Us - 3 views
How Much Are You Worth? - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review - 0 views
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Researchers have found that the highest rises in cortisol levels — the most extreme fight or flight response — are prompted by "threats to one's social self, or threat to one's social acceptance, esteem, and status." Just think about the difference between hearing a compliment and a criticism. Which are you more inclined to believe? What do you dwell on longer? The researcher John Gottman has found that among married couples, it takes at least five positive comments to offset one negative one.
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