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"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

I think the starting off small (like the questions and fill in the blanks during class) is the best way to find a deep and meaningful topic because it opens your mind to think freely and as you narrow your topic, you'll find a topic that really means something to you. Also, the "Going Beyond Cliché", I think that's going to be hard for me because I'm so used to trying to write the typical 5 paragraph papers that are set up as guidelines during school with topic sentence and 3 supporting details. So, trying to find my own outline might make things a little more difficult for me.

While reading this article, I realized i had already looked past one of the most important factors while choosing my own topic to write about. Before reading the article, I was simply searching for a memory of a time that shaped me into the person I am today, or an instance that would impress a college admissions officer, showing them im the type of student that would fit in perfectly at their school. Then in reading the article, i came across: "What do you think college admissions officers are looking for when they read student essays." Even though this may seem like an obvious task, sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in making yourself look good, and completely forget that you're writing must be interesting enough to stand out to an admissions officer more than others. I don't know if my thought process is easy to understand from an outsider's point of view, but this article showed me that it is important to remember that you're writing to not just impress an audience, but also to show them the real 'you'!

This article is especially helpful because it gives easy to read bullet points to make sure people don't fall into the cliché trap. It's easy to write about something that would be commonly seen in college essays, such as a time someone volunteered at some homeless shelter and they say they're grateful for not being homeless. This article says you should go into more depth other than concluding with a cliché concept.

"Be concise, Be honest, Be an individual, Be coherent, Be accurate, Be vivid, Be likable, Be cautious in your use of humor, Be controversial, and Be smart" HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!? Quite a bit to take in and remember while working away on a concise paper which may or may not decide our future. Just a few small nuggets of gold (interpret as you please): "If you go over 700 words, you are straining their patience, which no one should want to do." "Not everyone has to be the star at everything." "The whole application is a series of snapshots of what you do. It is inevitably incomplete. The colleges expect this. Go along with them." "If you write about Nietzsche, spell his name right." "Subtlety is good." "Be funny only if you think you have to. Then think again." "It is fine to write about politics, religion, something serious, as long as you are balanced and thoughtful. Don't pretend you have the final truth." "Colleges are intellectual places, a fact they almost always keep a secret..." From this, I take: Be human. But be an awesome human.

4. Be coherent.  I thought that this website was really helpful because I am known to like to write a lot and sometimes want to write so much that I ramble a lot.  I don't want to sound busy but not scattered or superficial either.

I feel like by setting up some of these guidelines, it is kind of changing our experiences or ideas we want to write. We have to find something coherent to the question and on top of that be likeable. what if what you think is likeable isn't the same as what the college people want?

A very interesting and amusing presentation. From the abstract (http://nwav40.georgetown.edu/262.docx.pdf): "I use co-occurrences of words and emoticons to (i) develop a taxonomy of the affective stances Twitter users take, and (ii) characterize the meanings and usage of their emoticons. ... It's reasonable to ask what emoticons themselves mean and reversing the direction of analysis shows how emoticons pattern across words. ... Emoticons with noses are historically older. ... this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary ... affect and word choice both create and reflect social characteristics like age and gender."

Amusia is a deficit in musical memory, recognition, and in pitch processing that people can be born with or acquire through brain damage. Some people may think of themselves as being "tone-deaf", but most of these "bad" singers are just that. People with amusia are so unable to hear tones that they even struggle to differentiate between questions and statements when spoken. Language, like music, uses sound to convey meaning; be it a story, or simply an emotion. In fact, music and spoken language use many of the same structural elements: pitch, duration, intensity and melodic contour, to name a few. Melodic contour is the pattern in which pitch changes from high to low over time. This contouring of pitch is often used to express emotion in music. The emotional effect of contouring is appreciated across many cultures and across many age groups. In speech, melodic contour is created by intonation, which allows us to place emphasis upon certain words and distinguish the purpose of the sentence; e.g. whether it is a question, statement or command. These comparisons provide evidence for the overlap of brain areas and mechanisms that underlie speech and music processing. In addition, the storing of sound patterns in short-term memory is also overlapping for both language and music.

270 Catholic bishops from around the globe, representing 13 different language groups, will be convening for a week-long meeting this month. Their goal: to come up with a single document of their findings to present to Pope Francis. The final version of that document will be written in the lingua franca of the Catholic Church, which is Italian. Italian has not been the official language for all synod business for very long. Pope Francis changed the official language of synod business from Latin to Italian a couple of years ago. In the past, when the bishops gathered for a synod, they produced documents in Latin. Unlike Latin, Italian is a living language of the real world, and arguably a more neutral linguistic choice than English. However, much controversy has arisen over both translation and ideological issues, and what true meaning and intent is being conveyed by document language and wording. Massimo Faggioli, a theology scholar, noted that under previous popes, the synods worked very differently. Bishops used to gather for the purpose of rubber-stamping Vatican policy. There was no real debate over the true meaning of the official text. "But now, these texts matter," Faggioli says. "[The bishops] know that if they vote on one text or another, that might change the direction of the Catholic church on some teachings, which was not something anybody was thinking about under Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict." Pope Francis has said he wants a more decentralized Catholic Church. and he has encouraged the bishops at the synod to speak boldly, even about subjects on which they disagree. Some of the most contentious issues at this synod are about whether or not to allow Communion to people who've been divorced and remarried, premarital cohabitation, and how the Church should talk about gays and lesbians.

There are around 340 million L1 English speakers, and 600 million ESL speakers, making the language accessible to an estimated billion people, English is also the primary or official language in 101 countries. However, Vyvyan Evans, British linguist, notes emoji are an even more intuitively accessible global communication mode. 3.2 billion people have regular Internet access in the world, and 92 percent-plus of those 3.2 billion people regularly send emojis. So from that perspective, Emoji leaves English in the dust, in terms of use and uptake. Most people think that when we communicate in default face-to-face mode, language is what's driving effective communication, and in fact it's not. Communication requires different channels of information - language is just one. The two other important ones are paralanguage, and that's how you're delivering the words, so tone of voice, and the really big one is kinesics, and that has to do with action-based, nonverbal communication. Emoji functions analogously to tone of voice and to body language in text-speak, and without it, we're reduced communicators.

It's an ethos so culturally ingrained in us that it's hard to see beyond: Self-reliance is paramount, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to solve your own problems is a matter of character. Of course, that's not quite how the world works. All of us need help from time to time, and the ability to ask is a learnable skill we seldom think about but one that can have a monumental impact on our goals and lives. So, how to ask? 4 tips: 1. Make sure the person you want to ask realizes you need help. Thanks to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, we're programmed to have the ability to take in and process only so much information, ignoring the rest. 2. Make a clear request. Otherwise your potential helper might fall victim to audience inhibition, or the fear of "looking foolish in front of other people," which can prevent people from offering help because they doubt their own intuition that you need help. 3. Ge specific with your request and make sure your helper knows why you're specifically asking him or her. This will make them feel invested in your success and actually want to help. 4. Make sure the person you're asking has the time and resources to help.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study produced by MIT and published Thursday in Science. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. "It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information," said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. "and that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature."

For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

Maori is having a revival across New Zealand. Indigenous people are increasingly embracing their language, rejecting generations of stigma and shame associated with its use. and white New Zealanders are looking to Maori language and culture to help them make sense of their own cultural identity. As of 2013, just 3.7 percent of New Zealanders spoke the language fluently, and many predicted that it would soon die out. But analysts say Maori's status is shifting, and a basic knowledge of the language has come to signify cultural cool in a country that continues to wrestle with its colonial and indigenous roots. Now New Zealand's government, which says it wants more than 20 percent of the country's population to speak basic Maori by 2040, has pledged to provide Maori lessons in all New Zealand schools by 2025, despite a dearth of teachers who can speak the language.

This article talks about how the native Maori language is being revived in New Zealand. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the 19th century. Since that time, Maori language was looked down upon making it the minority language, but now with the recent rise of Maori speakers, it has started to become a common language used. This article talks about how every school is teaching Maori in their classes, and how they want Maori to be one of the dominantly spoken languages in New Zealand by 2040.

This article discusses the history of the Maori language and its progression throughout recent history. The Maori language was threatened like many other native languages in the world due to the aggression from the British. In the article shows how the people of the country are coming to terms with the past in order to build a brighter future for the native Maori culture and language.

Recent History of Our Struggle to Make Foreign Languages Core Foreign language study is in the national education Goals 2000, which states: "By the year 2000 all American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography..."

Around the world more than half (around 60 to 75 percent) speak at least two languages. Most countries have more than one official national language. For example south Africa has 11. So being monolingual like most native english speakers are, we are becoming the minority.

Multilingualism serves an extremely practical purpose. Languages change and develop through social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans would have found themselves speaking different languages. Then, in order to communicate with other groups - for trade, travel and so on - it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other tongues. We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism may have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who survive today. "If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual," says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. "The rule is that one mustn't marry anyone in the same tribe or clan to have a child - it's taboo. So every single child's mum and dad speak a different language." The article also provides a useful summary of the benefits of speaking at least one other language: bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person's. Bilingualism can also delay the onset of dementia and increase cognitive recovery after a stroke. and in addition to social and cultural benefits, bil

This article discusses how numbers are not innately known and must be taught, thus as such our language and "defining" them cannot be exact. Through research and monitoring children as well as isolated people like the Piraha, one see's it is difficult to differenciate numbers such as 4 and 5 and 7. While telling the difference between big and small or 1 and 2 are easy.

Numbers are tools people invented a long time ago, and we know how to use them only because we find ourselves in a society in which that knowledge has been preserved and transmitted. Without these symbols, we, like the Pirahã, could not "see" divisions between most quantities. Anthropologist Caleb Everett asserts that when our ancestors learned to count, they "radically transformed the human condition," making possible such number-dependent developments as complex agriculture.

While this article is directed towards teachers, students can leverage this information to their advantage. Employ the following five strategies to aid retention: 1. Teach a friend. When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016). 2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016). 3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016). 4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015). 5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II wi

Children aged four and younger who speak two languages or are learning a second have more rapid improvements in inhibitory control, a study by the University of Oregon has said. Inhibitory control is the ability to stop a hasty reflexive response in behaviour or decision-making and use higher control to react in a more adaptive way. "Inhibitory control and executive function are important skills for academic success and positive health outcomes and well-being later in life," said Atika Khurana, the study's co-author and a professor in the Department of Counselling Psychology and Human Services and scientist at the UO's Prevention Science Institute. "The development of inhibitory control occurs rapidly during the preschool years," she said. "Children with strong inhibitory control are better able to pay attention, follow instructions and take turns. "This study shows one way in which environmental influences can impact the development of inhibitory control during younger years."

A few weeks ago, after I said goodbye to a friend who was moving across the country, I texted her an emoji of a crying face. She replied with an image of chick with its arms outstretched. This exchange might have been heartfelt. It could have been ironic.

Use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class-just like dialects or regional accents. Friend groups fall into the habit of using certain emoticons, just as they develop their own slang. Emoji have undoubtedly changed the way we text, Gchat, and tweet-but are they changing language itself? While emoji are more popular than ever, the idea behind them is actually quite old. "There's an old utopian ideal that we could create a kind of a universal pictorial language," says linguist Ben Zimmer. Emoji could even mark a return (regression?) to a more pictographic script. However, Ben Zimmer suggests that emoji help convey tone and emotion and enrich written language.

This article discusses both emoji use, and emoji effects in language and expression. The vast majority of web users use or have used emojis, and the emojis that we use can yield information about us such as our general age and interests. Furthermore, emojis may be a form of language simplification and a return to pictogram communications.

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

This article explains the reason why we call our parents mom and dad. The article gives examples of different ways to say mom and dad in different languages in a table, to show how similar the sounds of mom and dad are across those languages. The article then explained how social constructs and culture keeps us from calling our mom or dad their legal name.

This article discusses why children call their parents 'Mom' and 'Dad', and why not other names. It talks about how the role sounds play, and the role that cultural rules play in why most people refer their parents in this way.

describes techniques that memory-athletes use