Words R Us

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of "Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy," reviews the research on how to retain learning and also read and study more effectively and efficiently.

In this article, researches hypothesize how the expansion of dopaminergic systems may have contributed to the development of many of our unique cognitive abilities including language.

In this article, they discuss the different strategies researches have been debating about using to communicate with uncontacted tribes. They discuss using certain handmotions and signals to show that they are friendly and others ways of communicating without posing any threat or danger.

Although a densely academic article, Professor Patrick Heinrich of the University of Venice, discusses the history of colonization in Okinawa and its detrimental effect on the indigenous languages of the region. The Ryūkyūans are a group of indigenous peoples living in the Ryūkyū archipelago, which stretches southwest of the main Japanese island of Kyūshū towards Taiwan. The largest and most populated island of the archipelago, Okinawa Island, is actually closer to Manila, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul than it is to Tokyo. Though considered by the Japanese as speaking a dialect, the Ryūkyūans speak separate languages such as Okinawan, also known as Uchinaguchi, as well as Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. All are part of the Japonic language family, to which the Japanese language also belongs, and all are recognized as endangered languages by UNESCO. Language reclamation in the contemporary Ryukyus departs from a keen awareness that language loss is bigger than language itself. Activists know that losing a language entails the loss of an entire world of symbolic representations, and therefore, of how to place oneself in the world. Concepts of self, society, and place change when one language is replaced by another (Guay 2023). Language loss is no trivial loss. Language loss and the sociocultural displacement accompanying it are responsible for many problems in endangered speech communities worldwide, including those in Japan. Endangered language communities like the Ryukyuans and the Ainu are more likely than the majority Japanese to suffer from prejudice, poverty, spiritual disconnectedness from their heritage culture, family instability, or difficulties to climb the social ladder (see Onai 2011). Language loss also causes a weakening of cultural autonomy. It becomes more difficult to support the community's self-image if majority languages are adopted (Heinrich and Ishihara 2018). Language reclamation addresses these problems and in so doing contribut

The culture of Okinawa, Japan is quite distinct from other Japanese islands. It became a part of Japan in 1879, but has a strong American influence because of three decades of military occupation following WWII. Today, 20% of the island is made up of over 30 U.S. military bases. This history has resulted in the near extinction of the Okinawan language, called Uchinaguchi, which was systematically suppressed when the island was annexed by Japan. Because of ubiquitous U.S. presence, Okinawans perceive more of a need for English competence than for learning the language of their ancestors. Once the U.S. ceded control of the island back to Japan in the 1970's, the island underwent changes that many Okinawans perceived as another occupation, but this time instead of U.S. military projects, Japanese business took over the island. Japanese power over Okinawa can even be seen in the language politics: Uchinaguchi was long considered a dialect of Japanese despite the two languages having less than 60% in common. In 2009 UNESCO recognized Okinawan as its own language along with five others spoken in the region, all of which are endangered. Native speakers are aging and dying off. Efforts to revitalize Uchinaguchi on the island are regularly stifled by the local government's indifference towards the language. Nonetheless, the language is praised for its folkloric value and is featured in local theater. Some schools offer language classes, such as Okinawa Christian University. Because Uchinaguchi is a low priority in the political field, the cultural field is the site of language revitalization and resistance to its extinction. One benefit of promoting the language through culture is that, unlike the government, the culture can have influence overseas.

Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons. It's important to understand how a chatbot works, employing a "neural network": a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. The chatbot works by scraping the internet for digital text or images. It gathers information from a variety of places, including websites, social media platforms and databases, but it does not necessarily choose the most reliable sources. In other words, even though chatbots may appear authoritative, rigorous and trustworthy, they are not always reliable and can produce content that is offensive, racist, biased, outdated, incorrect or simply inappropriate.

In this article, they discuss what slang words are and where they originate from. It talks about how language grows and evolves over time, and how people can create new words and meanings for old words.

This article talks about how language is the most important part of culture. I thought this article was an interesting read because I believe it builds upon one of the small group discussions we've had in class earlier on in the semester. I am intrigued by the fact that many different countries have developed a language over time as a way to communicate, and has now become one of the things that define their culture.

I thought this was an intersting article that builds upon the topic we've learned in class. With the evolution of language overtime, there is a trend that it get simpler and simpler. It's fascinating to see as we look back on past variations of English to see how complicated it is for us to understand but 200 years from now, people will be looking back at our time and wondering why we spoke the way we do now.

In this article, they talk about why public speaking is hard and feared by so many. The main takeaway I got from it is that public speaking is much easier when you aim to "communicate" the topic rather tell people about it. You need to understand what you're talking about and that will give you the confidence to be great at public speaking.

I think that many of us have heard that swearing can help to improve pain tolerance, but this study shows that only using "real" swear words help. This makes me wonder what makes swear words so bad, and why it is so taboo to say them. I don't think it has very much to do with how rude the meaning of the word is. For example, I can say something like "explosive diarrhea" in class, but I can't say "sh*t". Also, why does text censoring make it better? We all know what the word says.

In this article they talk about how certain words can dampen the effect of negative emotions. Furthermore they talk about how talking about how you feel can often improve your mood.

This article explains how learning a language improves functions like attention and alertness. It has also been shown that people who speak other languages have more empathy and global views.

This article talks about why children are able to learn languages faster than an adult. It explains why a toddler is able to learn two languages at once while an adult may take years to learn one language. It also talks about how the brain works when a child learns another language.

This article talks about the advantages that being bilingual has on children in terms of brain development. It talks about how learning two languages while growing up can positively impact a child's brain development.

This article talked about the relationship between music and language. For a while, it was believed that language and music used different hemispheres of the brain, but this article looked into various studies that proved otherwise. One example that it explained was that growing up speaking a tonal language, such as Mandarin, can make people more sensitive to pitch changes and interval differences between notes.

This article describes how music and language affect each other in the brain, as well as ways that they can influence other aspects of learning. It also describes their similarity in brain activity.

This article discusses the history of Trinidad Creole English, also known as TCE. It explains the history, sociolinguistic situation, and phonology of TCE. Published by The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, this factual page contains statistics and a detailed overview of how TCE came about and how it has evolved throughout the years. There are charts of Trinidad's population and the languages spoken in Trinidad & Tobago. The article includes lists of practice sentences and pronunciation lessons.

This article explains Trinidad Creole English, or TCE, from the perspective of a native TCE speaker. Karel Mc Intosh demonstrates her passion for TCE along with the challenges that come with it. TCE speakers love their "broken English." It is a part of their culture and identity. Although it is a comfortable way of conversing with each other, TCE speakers are looked down upon by those who do not understand it and are not used to it. This causes many TCE speakers to code switch, which means speaking with an accent in relaxed settings and speaking proper English in more formal settings. Intosh describes her experiences as a TCE speaker and states her opinion on the negative perception that follows it.

For centuries, Central America's Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people have kept the culture's oral history alive through their ancestors' native language. But decades of modernization, haphazard native-language training in Garifuna schools, intermarriage between cultures, and the ridicule of young people who speak the language, collectively led to Garifuna being listed on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages in 2001. Today, linguists estimate that about 100,000 speakers remain. The threat of language extinction isn't new. Some linguists estimate a language dies every two weeks, as some languages become dominant tools for social and economic exchange, while others are pushed to the margins. But there are ways to save at-risk languages, as well. The key is that the language needs to be thought of less as preserved, "but indeed part of their present and their future," says Liliana Sánchez, a linguist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's exactly what the Garinagu (Garifuna people) are doing. For the past two decades, Garifuna artists have used a cultural cornerstone-spirited dance music-to inspire young Garinagu to learn and share their native language. Now, with a new Garifuna Tourism Trail project in Belize, travelers can experience and support the cultural renaissance, too. Elements of the Garifuna culture-including music, dance, and language-were listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Around that same time, Garifuna musicians and cultural activists hatched a plan: Create irresistible melodies, sung entirely in Garifuna, to rally young Garinagu to embrace the culture and learn the language. Will music save the Garifuna language? Time will tell. Garifuna remains on UNESCO's endangered-language list, last updated in 2010. And, as the Hawaiians learned from revitalizing their own language post colonization, this kind of revival is a long, multi-generational road.

When a human baby is born, its first cry is a normal sign of good health. Having never taken a breath before, the baby signals its first inhalation and exhalation-in the form of a screech. How do babies know to create a sound they've never made before? And is their first yelp truly the start of speech development? As it turns out, human babies may be practicing how to cry long before they ever make a sound. That is, if they're anything like marmosets, humans' primate cousins. A study of marmosets by Daniel Takahashi, a co-author of the study and an animal behaviorist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. shows fetal monkeys practicing crying in the womb. Takahashi notes, "marmosets are monkeys that we know vocalize a lot, and they share a lot of features with humans." For instance, both male and female parents raise their offspring together, and unlike other primates, marmoset babies are relatively helpless when they're born, like human infants. Takahashi says the central finding will help illuminate when speech development begins, and that studying pre-birth-rather than the moment of birth-may help identify speech or motor development problems earlier. "There are a lot of things going on in the womb that might be relevant to what's going on afterwards," he says.