Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The idea that men and women use language differently is conventional wisdom-appearing everywhere from Cosmo and Glamour to The Journal of Psychology and Anthropological Linguistics. Recent research, though, suggests that the most important variable is not the sex of the person doing the talking, but that of the person being spoken to.

With texting, we tend to play this ridiculous game that revolves around who has the power in the conversation. The person who has yet to respond leaves the other person on tenterhooks, wondering if that was a dumb thing to say, if they were just scared off, if they're really on a date with someone much more interesting right now - any number of possibilities, really.

When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them. Researchers Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) ran 2 experiments. In the first experiment, students had to move glass marbles upward or downward into one of two cardboard boxes, with both hands simultaneously, timed by a metronome. Meanwhile, they had to recount autobiographical memories with either positive or negative emotional valence, like "Tell me about a time when you felt proud of yourself', or 'a time when you felt ashamed of yourself.' Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants' motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. The second experiment tested whether seemingly meaningless motor actions, e.g. moving marbles up or down, could influence the content of people's memories. Participants were given neutral-valence prompts, like "Tell me about something that happened during high school," so they could choose to retell something happy or sad. Their choices were determined, in part, by the direction in which they were assigned to move marbles. Moving marbles upward encouraged students to recount positive high school experiences like "winning an award," but moving them downward to recall negative experiences like "failing a test." "These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren't just in language," Casasanto says, "linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activati

Suppose you are preparing for a potentially contentious meeting with someone with whom you've worked closely for years. She could be a fellow manager you want to convince to support an initiative but whose position in the matter differs from yours: how do you convince that person? While coercion and logic are not effective, "relationship-raising" is. According to a 2002 psychology study by Oriña, Wood, and Simpson, before making a request for change, mention your existing relationship with the other person and any mutually-shared goals/objectives, before delivering your appeal. " Or, in the most streamlined version of the relationship-raising approach, incorporate the pronouns "we," "our," and "us" into the request. The outcome? The relationship partners exposed to this technique shifted significantly in the requested direction. Similarly, in a British longitudinal study of effective professional negotiators, researchers found that the most successful bargainers spent 400% more time looking for areas of mutuality (e.g., shared interests) than did their mediocre counterparts.

This is a great site for getting an idea of what colleges are looking for in an essay. My idea of a good college essay changed after reading the top voted college essay.

The top essay was a very descriptive piece. It sounded like a short story, and I didn't know you could write about those kind of topics on a college essay. This site really helps me get a better idea of what an essay should look like when the time comes to submit one.

It really helps to be able to read examples of good college essays. It gives you an idea of not only what to write about but how to write it. I never would have guessed some of the top voted college essays would be written on such simple, everyday topics. I have a lot of work to do haha.

From my personal blog

"New research is showing that speakers shouldn't discard those "ums" and "ahs" and other speech fillers if they want to be understood by listeners. ... "One finding that we had is that if you're listening to a story or a speech, people remember the content better if the person says 'uh' and 'um' in it than if the story is completely fluent," Watson said. ... "This is speculation, but if the speaker doesn't know what they're saying very well, you pay attention more because you think you need to work harder to get it. One thing that disfluencies do is buy speakers more time. They are a signal to the person listening that I need more time."" Link to study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X11000234

"Researchers identified subtle variations caused by differences in the shape of individual whales' heads. It's the first time that sperm whale vocalizations have been linked to specific individuals. ... While the whales tended to possess the same basic repertoire of "codas" - the technical name for each distinctive series of clicks - one female had a completely different set. ... The question of whether it's appropriate to think of sperm whales as having names is a controversial one. Some scientists think that many cetaceans should be considered persons ..." See also "Sperm Whales Really Do Learn From Each Other" (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/sperm-whales/) - "Yes, sperm whale culture really is culture."

Responsive interactions are the key to toddlers' ability to learn language, according to a new study. Researchers studied 36 two-year-olds, who learned new verbs either through training with a live person, live video chat technology such as Skype, or prerecorded video instruction. Children learned new words only when conversing with a person live and in the video chat, both of which involve responsive social interactions, thus highlighting the importance of responsive interactions for language learning.

Researchers at Georgia State University's Language Research Center examined how two language-trained chimpanzees communicated with a human experimenter to find food. Their results are the most compelling evidence to date that primates can use gestures to coordinate actions in pursuit of a specific goal. Dr. Charles Menzel, a senior research scientist, notes, "The chimpanzees used gestures to recruit the assistance of an otherwise uninformed person and to direct the person to hidden objects 10 or more meters away...the findings illustrate the high level of intentionality chimpanzees are capable of, including their use of directional gestures. This study adds to our understanding of how well chimpanzees can remember and communicate about their environment."

How different aspects of speech, such as intonation and dynamics, affect how we perceive other people's personalities

A few of the words recently added to Dictionary.com Deep web: the portion of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines, as by encryption; the aggregate of unindexed websites: Dox: Slang. to publish the private personal information of (another person) without the consent of that individual Haptics: the branch of psychology that investigates sensory data and sensation derived from the sense of touch and localized on the skin. Glanceable: noting or relating to information on an electronic screen that can be understood quickly or at a glance:

"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail - or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author's idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?"

"Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others... Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students' major."

Even though this is an .com site it's written by someone who has experience in this matter and it's really interesting because it basically tells you what to do. And when the author did this, he got into a really good school.

This website has many well-written examples of sample college essays. The only problem with these is that they are not categorized into either well written, or really long. How to conceive, create, and perfect it essay is right because it is very difficult to start your essay. Basically this essay is talking about how this person got writer's block, and how she overcame it.

Essays should be more about how an experience affected a writer, and should give insight about the writer than just telling a story. Doing so will personalize the essay more and let the reader set the writer apart from the other thousands of applicants.

The writer can make their essay sound more personal by focusing on specific events or qualities within a larger event.

The writer needs to be able to convey how they changed or show specific qualities that they gained from events that impacted their lives. rather then just explaining a story in their lives because the admissions officer wont be able to know the real you.

listserve response to request for linguistics resources

Abstract : According to Byram (1997), intercultural competence means to be able to interact efficiently with persons from various countries in a foreign language. The paper introduces a new (...)