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This study suggests how a language sounds is affected by the altitude of its speakers. The study analyzes 600 languages.

This article talks about the academic learning gaps between deaf and hearing students and how new technologies could be the solution to this problem. Although this animation could be a new translator, it is a difficult process as English and ASL are just as different as English and Chinese.

It's traditional during Chinese New Year to offer good wishes: positive language sets up the new year for happiness. This page provides some classic 4 word idioms （成語）to ensure good luck.

A man in Spain was abandoned as a child after learning some language skills. He then lived in nature without contact with humans for almost a decade. When he was found again, he had trouble pronouncing words, but his greater problems were adapting to society and understanding nonverbal cues.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

Research from Concordia University in Montreal reveals a new perk visible in the problem-solving skills of bilingual toddlers. The study assessed the vocabularies of 39 bilingual children and 43 monolinguals when they were aged 24 months, and then again at 31 months. During the second assessment, the researchers also had the young participants perform a battery of tasks to test their cognitive flexibility and memory skills. While overall, there was little difference between the bilingual and monolingual toddlers, bilingual children performed significantly better on the conflict inhibition tasks than did their monolingual counterparts. Conflict inhibition refers to the mental process of overriding a well-learned rule that you would normally pay attention to. These were the two tasks: 1. Reverse categorization -- participants were told to put a set of little blocks into a little bucket and big blocks into a big bucket. Then the instructions were switched -- big blocks in the little bucket and little blocks in the big bucket. 2. Shape conflict -- participants were shown pictures of different sized fruit and asked to name them. Then a new series of images was shown, with a small fruit embedded inside a large one. Toddlers were asked to point to the little fruit. Crivello, one of the lead researchers, commented that "Language switching underlies the bilingual advantage on conflict tasks. In conflict inhibition, the child has to ignore certain information -- the size of a block relative to a bucket, or the fact that one fruit is inside another. That mirrors the experience of having to switch between languages, using a second language, even though the word from a first language might be more easily accessible."

This article talks about how headlines affect the way we think. This is speaking about headlines of news articles. Studies show that by drawing attention to certain details or facts, a headline can affect what existing knowledge is activated in your head. It explains how differently worded headlines can change what you remember when reading an article.

Adapting to a new set of cultural expectations and social norms - while staying true to your own sense of self - is never easy. Below are a few tips to make the transition a smooth one.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

This article shows new evidence which suggests that language is learned in circuits that are used for many other purposes, instead of the common claim that language acquisition occurs in a specific part of the brain dedicated to the purpose. How good we are at remembering vocabulary relates to how good we are at declarative memory, which is used to remember shopping lists or people's faces. Grammar in children, on the other hand, correlates most strongly to procedural memory which is used for driving or playing an instrument.

The more parents exaggerate vowels and raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, the more the babies babble, new research shows. Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear, the faster their vocabulary grows.

If you're looking for the species that most closely matches our linguistic prowess, surprisingly, you won't find it in the apes, the primates, or even in the mammals. You have to travel to a far more distant relative, all the way to a family of birds known as the songbirds. The vocal life of a songbird is similar to ours in many ways. They learn songs by imitating their elders. Like human speech, these songs are passed down from one generation to the next. Songbirds are also best equipped to learn songs in their youth, and they have to practice to develop their ability. They can improvise and string together riffs into new songs, and over generations these modified songs can turn into new dialects. And like us, they come hard-wired with 'speech-centers' in their brain that are dedicated to language processing. An experiment from 2009 by Fehér and colleagues took newly hatched songbirds of the zebra finch species and raised them in sound proof chambers. They did this during their critical period of language development. Surprisingly, this culturally isolated generation of birds began to develop their own songs. These songs were less musical than your typical songbird song - they had irregular rhythms, they would stutter their notes, and the notes would sound more noisy. But the researchers were curious where this would lead. They listened to the songs of the next few generations of pupils, the offspring of these children of silence. What they found was quite amazing. In just two generations, the songs started to change in unexpected ways - they were becoming more musical. In fact, they started to converge upon the song of the wild songbirds, even though none of these birds had ever heard the wild songs. The Feher study suggests, but does not prove, that songbirds must have an innate understanding of the structures of their language. In other words, they seem to have a built-in intuition about grammar. Over time, they may be using these intuitions to develo

Studies show that people with musical training have an easier time finding minor differences in syllables. They can also pick up the difference between rapidly changing sounds which play a distinct role in processing language.

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.

"Because" previously had two usages: finite clause or prepositional phrase. With changing language use, "because" has evolved as a preposition. Now, instead of saying "I need to do the dishes because I have chores" which uses "because" as a finite clause, now it's acceptable to say: "I need to do the dishes, because chores" which uses "because" as a preposition.

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.

This article discusses hundreds of the world's endangered & threatened languages in New York. Linguist Ross Perlin introduces the work he has done to document language extinction in NY for over 11 years. It introduces/provides an interview of the people who speak languages that are going extinct.

Two graduate economics students from Washington State University used Twitter to analyze how sports pundits' reputation was affected by their confidence and accuracy at predicting the outcomes to sporting events. They analysed tweets in which professional pundits and fans made predictions about the winners of a series of high-profile baseball and American Football matches. Each tweet was given a "confidence" rating depending on its language, with words like "destroy" and "annihilate" scoring higher than "beat", for example. Both the pundits and fans' predictions were worse than chance, with the professional analysts only proving correct 47 per cent of the time and amateurs 45 per cent of the time. Yet pundits' confidence was measured as 50 per cent higher than amateurs, and they gained more followers on the networking website as a result, the researchers said. Presenting their findings at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance earlier this year, the researchers explained that being confident could increase a pundit's following by 17 per cent, while predicting every game correctly only raised it by 3.4 per cent.There was a similar pattern among amateurs, with brash people increasing their following by 20 per cent but correct guesses only raising it by 7.3 per cent. In general, pundits are better served by being brash and making people excited, they claimed.