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With its complex interweaving of symbols, structure, and meaning, human language stands apart from other forms of animal communication. But where did it come from? A new paper suggests that researchers look to bird songs and monkey calls to understand how human language might have evolved from simpler, preexisting abilities. 
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Computer scientists have reconstructed ancient Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Polynesia, among other places (credit: A. Via Apmel
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An 81-year-old Englishman woke up after having suffered from a stroke speaking only Welsh.
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Sakis Koukouvis's insight:
Sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from our capacity to process music, supporting the idea of an evolutionary link between musical and language domains in the brain.
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Your personality is revealed in the way you speak, according to new research. Introverts tend to use more concrete words and are more precise, in contrast to extraverts, whose words are more abstract and vague.
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Linguist James Gee talks about the deep learning principles found in video games. More on VIDEO GAMES: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=Video%20Game
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A new study published in Science by Carnegie Mellon University's Charles Kemp and the University of California at Berkeley's Terry Regier shows that kinship categories across languages reflect general principles of communication. The same principles can potentially be applied to other kinds of categories, such as colors and spatial relationships. Ultimately, then, the work may lead to a general theory of how different languages carve the world up into categories.
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The conceptual metaphor explanation is transformative—it flies in the face of the accepted idea that metaphor is just a linguistic device based on similarity. In an instant, it made us rethink 2000 years of received wisdom.
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Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
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From
io9
The way people discuss the future varies from language to language. Some have a well-defined future tense, while others distinguish much between present and future. But does this point of grammar actually affect how we see the world?
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The linguist G. K. Zipf discovered that the frequencies of words in a language are distributed according to a power-law. They fall into an L-shaped curve with a tall spine containing a large number of rare words (like deliquesce, kankedort, and apotropaic) and a long tail containing a small number of extremely common ones (like the, be, and of). In any corpus of language, a small number of the most common words account for a large proportion of word tokens. The physicist and psychologist Lewis F. Richardson discovered that the frequencies of wars between 1815 and 1952 are distributed according to a power-law.
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Brain imaging shows that premature babies process speech in similar ways to adults.
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Automated reconstruction of long-extinct languages can test theories on how words evolve.
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A multimedia feature published this week in the New York Times, “Pushing Science’s Limits in Sign Language Lexicon,” outlines efforts in the United States and Europe to develop sign language versions of specialized terms used in science, technology, engineering and mathematics
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WHERE do new words come from? On Twitter at least, they often begin life in cities with large African American populations before spreading more widely, according to a study of the language used on the social network.
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Cognitive scientists have good news for linguistic purists terrified about the corruption of their mother tongue.Using an artificial language in a carefully controlled laboratory experiment, a team from the University of Rochester and Georgetown University has found that many changes to language are simply the brain's way of ensuring that communication is as precise and concise as possible.
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At Discover Magazine, Veronique Greenwood has a really interesting story about a mathematician who is helping to preserve Scottish Gaelic. How? The researcher, Anne Kandler, has put together some equations that can help native language supporters target their programs and plan their goals. Via Bilingual
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Why are men generally more reluctant to try vegetarian products? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers are influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity.
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It may seem surprising, but in this age where geographic mobility and instant communication have increased our exposure to people outside of our neighborhoods or towns, American regional dialects are pulling further apart from each other, rather than moving closer together. And renowned linguist William Labov thinks there’s a connection between political and linguistic segregation.
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You don’t have to be a language maven to find the direct object in a basic English-language sentence. Just look next to the verb.
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Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in Anthropology at Stanford, and his longtime collaborator Murray Gell-Mann, a founder and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute, have mapped the evolution of word order in a paper titled "The Origin and Evolution of Word Order," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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