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Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language . It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can. However, in the 1990s, scientists began testing the language-module theory using "functional" MRI technology that let them watch the brain respond to words. And what they saw didn't look like a module, says Benjamin Bergen, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the book _Louder Than Words_. "They found something totally surprising," Bergen says. "It's not just certain specific little regions in the brain, regions dedicated to language, that were lighting up. It was kind of a whole-brain type of process." The brain appears to be taking words, which are just arbitrary symbols, and translating them into things we can see or hear or do; language processing, rather than being a singular module, is "a highly distributed system" encompassing many areas of the brain. Our sensory experiences can also be applied to imagining novel concepts like "flying pigs". Our sensory capacities, ancestral features shared with our primate relatives, have been co-opted for more recent purposes, namely words and language. Bergen comments, "What evolution has done is to build a new machine, a capacity for language, something that nothing else in the known universe can do," he says. "And it's done so using the spare parts that it had lying around in the old primate brain."

"Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. ... His analysis systematically rules out not only common languages from within the Assyrian Empire, but also other languages of the time -- including Egyptian, Elamite, Urartian or West Semitic. Even at its most generous, his assessment suggests that only 15 of the legible names belong to a language previously known to historians. ... More convincing is the theory that the language in question may have been spoken by a people from somewhere else in the Assyrian Empire who were forcibly moved by the administration." More coverage: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ancient-language-discovered-on-clay-tablets-found-amid-ruins-of-2800-year-old-middle-eastern-palace-7728894.html Link to the study: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/664450?uid=3738032&uid=2132&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=56160246193

"Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages. ... Dr. Atkinson's work has integrated a large amount of information with a computational method that has proved successful in evolutionary studies. But his results may not sway supporters of the rival theory, who believe the Indo-European languages were spread some 5,000 years later by warlike pastoralists who conquered Europe and India from the Black Sea steppe."

2006 NPR interactive news special on the social underpinnings of language, containing short sound bites with various language researchers. 5 topics are covered: the importance of context in helping deduce meaning, social connections and language, Theory of Mind (how humans observe each other, gauging the effect that words are having on listeners, in order to assess others' beliefs, intentions and desires), and empathy. The video clip of Kanzi, the bonobo ape, cooking hamburgers with his human friends is a classic!

The more parents talk to their children, the faster those children's vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. The problem seems to be cumulative. By the time children are two, there is a six-month disparity in the language-processing skills and vocabulary of toddlers from low-income families. Toddlers learn new words from their context, so the faster a child understands the words he already knows, the easier it is for him to attend to those he does not. Dr Anne Fernald, of Stanford, found that words spoken directly to a child, rather than those simply heard in the home, are what builds vocabulary. Plonking children in front of the television does not have the same effect. Neither does letting them sit at the feet of academic parents while the grown-ups converse about Plato. The effects can be seen directly in the brain. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University studies how linguistic disparities are reflected in the structure of the parts of the brain involved in processing language. Although she cannot yet prove that hearing speech causes the brain to grow, it would fit with existing theories of how experience shapes the brain. Babies are born with about 100 billion neurons, and connections between these form at an exponentially rising rate in the first years of life. It is the pattern of these connections which determines how well the brain works, and what it learns. By the time a child is three, there will be about 1,000 trillion connections in his brain, and that child's experiences continuously determine which are strengthened and which pruned. This process, gradual and more-or-less irreversible, shapes the trajectory of the child's life.And it is this gap, more than a year's pre-schooling at the age of four, which seems to determine a child's chances for the rest of his life.

This article examines Nadine Gaab's 2014 study which established a connection - in both children and adults - between learning to play an instrument and improved executive functioning, like problem-solving, switching between tasks and focus. The article also cites the research of neuropsychologist Ani Patel, who advances the OPERA theory of music's benefits for learning. Patel notes "music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there's overlap, that's the 'O' of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth," he says. "The 'P' in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it's just slightly out of tune." That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains' musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech. "And the last three components of OPERA, the 'E-R-A,' are emotion, repetition and attention," he says. "These are factors that are known to promote what's called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain's structure as a function of experience."

Researches might be closer to discovering the root of English. They discuss new theories and evidence.

Negative vs. Positive Language

Just having a feminine voice means you're probably not as capable at your job. At least, studies suggest, that's what many people in the United States think. There's a gender bias in how Americans perceive feminine voices: as insecure, less competent and less trustworthy.

Why are people so frequently betrayed by their mouths? Scientists and psychologists have different theories about this special breed of mortification. People say between two and six words per second, which affords plenty of room for mistakes. For Dr. Geoff Goodman, a psychoanalyst in New York and professor at Long Island University, using the wrong word or name "reveals a secret desire forbidden by society or one's self." Before the mind goes into censor mode, the unconscious, hidden thoughts can spill out.

Historical linguists agree that Japanese is a Japonic language, but do not agree further about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several competing theories: Japanese is a relative of extinct languages spoken by historic cultures in what are now the Korean peninsula and Manchuria.

Does the Turkish word küçük (pronounced coo-chook) mean "big" or "small"? If you guessed the latter without knowing the language, you're right-and there may be a cognitive explanation for your instinct. In a study published in Cognition earlier this year, researchers tested people's ability to guess at the meanings of words based on their sounds. The lead researcher of the study, Kaitlyn Bankieris, a cognitive scientist from the University of Rochester, noted, "Our study provides a potential neural grounding for sound symbolism." In linguistics, the idea of "sound symbolism" is that there's an underlying relationship between how words sound and what they mean-and it is sometimes used to support the theory that there's some underlying cross-language meaning that humans are hardwired to attach to certain sounds.

Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

Robert Bowers, the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue killer, had an online life like many thousands of anti-Semitic Americans. He had Twitter and Facebook accounts and was an active user of Gab, a right-wing Twitter knockoff with a hands-off approach to policing speech. The Times of Israel reported that among anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and slurs, Bowers had recently posted a picture of "a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps used to cremate Jews, writing the caption 'Make Ovens 1488F Again,'" a white-supremacist reference. Then he made one last post, saying, "I'm going in," and allegedly went to kill 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Only then did his accounts come down, just like Cesar Sayoc's, the mail-bomb suspect. This is how it goes now. Both of these guys made nasty, violent, prejudiced posts. Yet, as reporter after reporter has noted, their online lives were-to the human eye at least-indistinguishable from the legions of other trolls who say despicable things. There is just no telling who will stay in the comments section and who will try to kill people in the real world. It was not long ago that free-speech absolutism was the order of the day in Silicon Valley. But that was before anti-Semitic attacks spiked; before the Charlottesville, Virginia, killing; before the kind of open racism that had lost purchase in American culture made its ugly resurgence. Each new incident ratchets up the pressure on technology companies to rid themselves of their trolls. But the culture they've created will not prove easy to stamp out.