Words R Us

This article discusses a study that explored the average rate that people read in their native languages. Through this study, it is evident that the various aspects that make up a language play a large role when it comes to the speed that a person reads at. Spanish speakers read the fastest syllables at 526 syllables per minute.

This Atlantic article explores a rare universal pattern in human languages--while some languages are spoken more quickly than others, the rate of information they get across is the same.

In many languages, pitch is as important as consonants and vowels for distinguishing one word from another. In English, "pay" and "bay" are different because they have different starting sounds. But imagine if "pay" said on a high pitch meant "to give money," while "pay" said on a low pitch meant "a broad inlet of the sea where the land curves inward." That's what it feels like to speak what linguists call a tonal language. At least a billion and a half people worldwide do it their entire lives and think nothing of it. The article goes on to talk about which areas of the world have the highest concentration of tonal languages and reasons why that might be, also some of the advantages of speaking a tonal language.

This is about how telehealth is being used during this pandemic, and the complications with expressing people's thoughts over video chat

This article talks about how new meanings for words have been created by women such as "spring cleaning"

This article discusses the linguistics of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia diagnoses are typically made on one or more of the following 3 symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized speech. Traditionally, none of these symptoms are associated with language, but the article suggests linguistic dimensions to each. Another aspect of schizophrenia manifests as Formal Thought Disorder, which is clearly linked to language and speech production. The article goes on to provide a language profile for schizophrenia and discuss the linguistics of psychosis. As someone who has OCD, I've noticed many instances where an obsession or compulsion has strong linguistic elements. I found it interesting that this linguistic influence can be found in schizophrenia and it strongly suggests that what we believe about language's effects on cognition are true!

This is a study that looks at speed of speech, across many different languages, as people prepare to say nouns and verbs. They found that regardless of what language a person speaks, the majority of people slow down (in pauses and articulation) significantly more before a noun than they do before a verb. The study suggests that this is because nouns always contain new information and therefore require more planning than verbs, which don't always contain new and important information.

This article talks about how some languages are more efficient than others, meaning that some languages pack in more information per syllable than others. This affects the speed of a language because the greater the density of information, the longer it takes one's brain to process and verbalize a thought. Therefor, languages with low efficiency (and low density of information) are spoken faster than languages with high efficiency (and high density of information).

This study from the University of Pennsylvania explores whether or not Asian-Americans have a certain "sound" to their speaking that distinguishes them from their White counterparts. White and Asian-American audio samples were curated for a test group to listen to in order to guess their races. On average, White and Asian-American participants in the study were around 65% accurate in their guesses, suggesting more success than random guessing. Some individual participants had accuracy as high as 85% or 90%. Some audio samples yielded guesses that were accurate upwards of 90% of the time. Asian-American participants were often more accurate in their guesses, but less able to express how they knew. White participants described the "upspeak" often used as a "lack of assertiveness." They also identified "increased pauses between words" and "jerkier speech". They also noted that Asian Americans used more "filler material" in their sentences like "um," "uh," or "like." I thought that was interesting because in Japanese, similar filler words like あのう and ええと are used. In Indonesian, we often hum as a filler, which I found to be different than typical English speakers' hums, and that I as a bilingual person have started to do when speaking English as well.

Check out this article to see how Psychologists use specific words and phrases to get their patients to open up and feel comfortable. This article goes into detail about how language helps people and why therapy can be good for someone.

This article from the LA Times talks about how the Corona Virus has changed our language during this time. It also includes the slang people are using and developing.

In this NPR interview, Trinidadian-American Lyiscott reflects on a moment where she'd been termed "articulate," a loaded term that got Lysicott reflecting on the ways certain varieties of language are privileged over others, and also the way "articulate" also suggests a perceived mismatch between the appearance/race of the person and their use of langugage, also how people judge others' intellect and capacity, based on how they speak.

This article talks about linguistic diversity in China and the many different dialects that exist in China. Before the coronavirus, China promoted Putonghua to eradicate poverty and improve the labor force. This is because, in China, not everyone speaks the standard variety of Chinese Mandarin and have to learn this standard version. However, the coronavirus has changed this fact and China started developing language resources to help those that don't speak standard Chinese Mandarin. Especially, because the outbreak was especially bad in Hubei, where residents speak Hubei Mandarin. Now, it's especially important for healthcare workers that don't live in Hubei but were sent down to help, to understand healthcare workers to be able to converse in Hubei Mandarin. It also touches on English being the global medium for scholarly articles, instead of any other language, such as Mandarin. Read this article to learn more about how the coronavirus is affecting the different dialects in China and how English is regarded in Chinese scholarly articles.

Credit goes to Zane Yamamoto for finding this resource! Thanks, Zane! Former Republican speechwriter Barton Swaim and Democratic speechwriter Jeffrey Nussbaum wrote a ​totally pandering bipartisan stump speech for an imaginary presidential candidate - one who ​espouses only positions that a majority of voters agree with. ​Here's the speech they wrote, including snarky notes to explain their phrasing, behind-the-scenes tips on appealing to voters, and the data they used to decide which positions to take. An entertaining read.

The brain's language regions work together as a co-ordinated network, with some parts involved in multiple functions and a level of redundancy in some processing pathways. So it's not simply a matter of one brain region doing one thing in isolation. Brain-imaging methods have revealed that much more of our brain is involved in language processing than previously thought. Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that numerous regions in every major lobe (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes; and the cerebellum, an area at the bottom of the brain) are involved in our ability to produce and comprehend language.

Languages a world apart have a similar habit of borrowing elevated vocabulary from other languages. In 1066, because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets-Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)-depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we'd proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It's amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English. The article also discusses a similar historical phenomenon in India, where much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (an Indo-European language used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.

If you want to understand how the peach emoji has come to represent both the potential impeachment of President Trump and a butt, you must first look to the ancient Sumerians. Cuneiform, their early system of writing, began as a series of pictograms, and some characters represented multiple words or concepts. But it could be "tricky to represent something in the abstract," said Vyvyan Evans, a British linguistics professor and author of "The Emoji Code." So the Sumerians would repurpose an existing pictogram that had resonance with the hard-to-illustrate concept.

Social media-from Facebook to Twitter-have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)-and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. Social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants-that is, in quality social connections-has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

When it comes to the popular naming of infectious diseases, xenophobia has long played a prominent role. Susan Sontag, in her 1988 work, AIDS and Its Metaphors (a follow-up to her extended essay from a decade earlier, Illness as Metaphor), observed that "there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien." Cognizant of how geographic labels have been unfairly used in the past, the WHO (World Health Organization) introduced a new set of best practices for naming infectious diseases, in 2015. Geographic names are to be avoided in order to "avoid causing offense," though the WHO did not insist that already established names like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, should be retroactively changed.

This is the second part of the article about political mass communication. It mostly deals with things like collocations, fill-ins, and framing. Collocations are words that are often used with others and so carry a particular connotations because of their association. For example, calling someone a rabid feminist vs. calling them a radical feminist would suggest more danger and wildness because of the use of the word rabid. Fill-ins refer to the use of deliberately obfuscating or vague language which encourages the listeners to respond by filling-in the gaps with their own preconceived notions or biases and can be a helpful persuasive tool. For example, saying something like, "they want to control you." The "they" here is vague and thus allows the listener to fill in with whatever they want. The article also touches on doublespeak and the use of euphemisms to refer to unpleasant topics (George W. Bush and enhanced interrogation anyone?). Framing, more broadly refers to the use of these tactics to get listeners to interpret the speech in certain ways favorable to the speaker.