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This article talks about the combined efforts of a team of academics in reconstructing the voice of an Ancient Egyptian priest. It's really interesting to see how linguists work to help figure out which tonal sounds Ancient Egyptian made, and how that would effect the voice of the Priest. It also brought me a question on the ethics of trying to bring someone "back to life" via their voice.

Nice overview of the neurological and other benefits conferred by bilingualism. Being fluent in two languages, particularly from early childhood, not only enhances a person's ability to concentrate, but might also protect against the onset of dementia and other age-related cognitive decline. More recently, scientists have discovered that bilingual adults have denser gray matter (brain tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers), especially in the brain's left hemisphere, where most language and communication skills are controlled. The effect is strongest in people who learned a second language before the age of five and in those who are most proficient at their second language. This finding suggests that being bilingual from an early age significantly alters the brain's structure.

We use language every day to express our emotions. This article explores whether or not language has the ability to affect what and how we feel. Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore how interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being.

whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an effective method for treating for people with spider phobias

We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being.

Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki - the irresistible urge to "shuck off your clothes as you dance"? Perhaps a little kilig - the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien - which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind? Tim Lomas' Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all - think "frisson", from French, or "schadenfreude", from German - but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far - and he's only just begun. Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. "They offer a very different way of seeing the world."

Article provides a quick overview re: the neuroscience of positive thinking and its effect on emotional and physical health.

Western literature exhibits a gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn't have to be. When people's choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one's own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters' inner experiences may sharpen readers' general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that's the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

It was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months.

Researchers looked at international adoptees (babies that were adopted at a couple months old and grew up hearing a different language than they heard while in the womb) and were able to see what babies hear in the womb and soon after birth has an affect on how they perceive sounds. Newborn babies can actually recognize the voices they've been hearing for the last three months in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers. When born, babies prefer these familiar voices to strangers voices. Babies can also detect rhythm and prefer other languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with different rhythms.

When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children's literacy abilities. In addition, it is possible that children's grammar system is affected by textese as well, as grammar rules are often transgressed in this register.

Born between 1995 and 2012, teens are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet. There is compelling evidence that the devices we've placed in young people's hands are having profound effects on their lives-and making them seriously unhappy.. Some interesting (and disturbing) findings: 1. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 2. While teens are physically safer than they've ever been, they're also more isolated and more subject to psychological harm. Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. In addition, the number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It's not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. 3. Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy. 4. Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today's teens. Boys' depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls' increased by 50 percent-more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. While boys tend to bully one another physically, girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim's social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform to ostracize and exclude other girls 24/7. 5. Sleep deprivation: nearly all teens sleep with their phones in close proximity, and the devices are interfering with sleep: Many teens now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is signific

Food for thought--what were our lives like pre-Internet? Emma Rathbone's short, nostalgic literary meditation makes us think about our digitally-leashed lives. Then "you'd walk outside and squint at the sky, just you in your body, not tethered to any network, adrift by yourself in a world of strangers in the sunlight." Rathbone also gets style points for her effective use of rhetoric, specifically anaphora

Learning English as a second language is far from uncommon around the world. Looking more specifically, what is it like learning English as a Chinese first language individual. This paper covers three main topics: 1. The differences between the Chinese and English languages 2. The differences between Chinese and American culture 3. The differences between Chinese and American educational practices When teaching English as a second language, it is important to know the what fits the students particular needs in learning and how your teaching will be most effective. This paper allows teachers to understand more about their Chinese students and their general linguistic and cultural background.

A study in 1994 tested 50 surgeons' ability to perform their daily operation room tasks while listening to music. The surgeons were split into three groups. The first group was allowed to choose what music they were going to listen to, while the second group had the music chosen by the experimenters. The third group did not listen to any music. The results showed that the first group had the highest task speed and accuracy, while the third group had the lowest task speed and accuracy.

This was a study done on university students that tested the effects of different kinds of music on cognitively demanding tasks (math problems). The results showed that people who were in silence scored much higher than those who listened to music. It also showed no significant difference between heavy-rock and piano music.

This research article was published to the Journal of Experimental Psychology, but this experiment did include linguistics. The experiments purpose was to see if more engaged working memory could quickly determine whether a word was really a word, thus the effect of the working memory on semantic meaning. They found that a high working memory load impaired the prime and task efficiency.

This journal article looks at how bilingual individuals manage to toggle between two languages and the effects of being bilingual. Some researchers see bilingualism as a burden from having to learn and memorize another set of vocabulary, grammar, and structure, but there are many benefits that can be seen as early as infancy. Being bilingual in childhood has shown to increase complex cognitive thinking throughout one's life, and even into old age when the brain is in decline.

This study looks at how age of acquisition affects second language learning and how it can influence cognitive processing. Bilingual Spanish and English speakers appear to have an advantage over monolingual individuals, with bilingualism shaping word learning and memory capacity. Specifically, early bilinguals performed better than monolingual individuals and late bilingual learners. There were two mechanisms discussed at the end of the study. The first is based on the critical-period-based phenomenon. The second is based on longer exposure to the two languages, which contributes to bilingual advantages.

This article describes the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world's languages. It considers model population size and the proportion of second language speakers in the speech community as sociolinguistic predictors, and other factors that have recently been suggested to influence typological and sociolinguistic language variations.

This article includes new information about how the coronavirus lockdowns have negatively impacted children's speech and language skills. It has small anecdotes of real families with young children where their language progress was practically stalled during the lockdowns but able to bounce back through rigorous language assistance schools. It even touches on how by adulthood, "four times more likely to struggle with reading, three time more likely to have mental health issues, twice as likely to be unemployed and have social-mobility issues, " if someone has issues with language in childhood.

Chinese characters have been an obstacle preventing the development of Chinese proficiency for learners of Chinese whose native language does not have characters. A substantial literature review identified linguistic, pedagogical, and political factors as causes of those difficulties. Tone changes represent different meanings of a word. Compound characters include the phonetic component radicals that do not always sound the same as the phonetic radicals. These unique linguistic features of the Chinese language add even more challenges for learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).Technology integration has been found to facilitate the teaching and learning foreign languages in many efficient and effective ways.

This article talks about different dialects in America and how American dialects are continuing to diverge, primarily with their vowel sounds. In particular, cities in the Great Lakes have been observed as revolutionizing the sound of English. Linguists have observed what's called a "chain shift," where by changing one sound, such as the short "a" sound, would have an effect in changing multiple sounds and therefore altering the Northern Cities dialects. This article goes on to outline the history behind these changes, the unawareness factor people from these cities experience, the racial aspect of how this dialect is diverging, and other points.