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Why Do Languages Die? Urbanization, the state and the rise of nationalism “The history of the world’s languages is largely a story of loss and decline. At around 8000 BC, linguists estimate that... 
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It turns out to be difficult to tell when other people are lying. There are lots of cues that we believe will tip us off to whether someone is telling the truth. But, these cues aren't really reliable indicators of truth telling.
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A surprising chart suggests that Americans see second languages as a cultural luxury rather than a competitive advantage.
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During the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they're actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years.
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We tend to associate certain vowel sounds like "E"s and "I"s with light objects while "O"s and "U"s suggest heavier things. Could there be some evolutionary reason for this?
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In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. Wierzbicka (2005) delves into this problem in detail. She argues that speakers of a particular language make assumptions about what must be universal based on their own ability to imagine doing without a certain concept. Important cross-cultural differences in meaning become lost in translation.
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Children's reasoning about language and race can take unexpected turns, according to University of Chicago researchers, who found that for younger white children in particular, language can loom larger than race in defining a person's identity.
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A team of Cambridge linguists has embarked on an ambitious project to identify how the languages of the world are built – from Inuit Yupik to sub-Saharan Bantu, from Navajo to Nepalese.
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Pop quiz: When does learning begin? Answer: Before we are born. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul talks through new research that shows how much we learn in the womb -- from the lilt of our native language to our soon-to-be-favorite foods....
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Languages, like genes, can tell evolutionary tales...
Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data.
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Distinct neural pathways are important for different aspects of language processing, researchers have discovered, studying patients with language impairments caused by neurodegenerative diseases.
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A mutation that appeared more than half a million years ago may have helped humans learn the complex muscle movements that are critical to speech and language.
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A mutation that appeared more than half a million years ago may have helped humans learn the complex muscle movements that are critical to speech and language.
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"As adults, we know that words are very predictive. If you use words to guide you, they won't often let you down," said Sloutsky. "But for children, words are just another feature among many to consider when they're trying to classify an object. Adults believe words do have a unique power to classify things, but young children don't think the same way."
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Purpose meanwhile, is like a cardinal direction. It doesn’t depend on me. It doesn’t change when I change. It’s something immovable –around which I must orient myself. It can’t be “work” (a process) or “money” (a temporal and changeable end). Maybe it can’t even be a person or a thing at all, because all people and all things can change or fade away. Purpose, rather, is something immutable and permanent – an ideal, a direction. It may be unique to each of us (as Bill George encourages, our “True North”), but it doesn’t depend on us.
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What is the relationship between language and thought? According to one school of philosophy, our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language: this is what students of language call the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. According to the LOT hypothesis, it is because human thoughts already have a linguistic structure that the emergence of common, natural languages was possible in the first place.
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A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which 'sound better' to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created, suggesting that, like biological...
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Scientists in Japan have begun studying the 'language' of oysters in an effort to find out what they are saying about their environment.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A computerized method for determining when prehistoric languages were spoken has been developed by an international group of scholars known as the ASJP (Automated Similarity Judgment Program) consortium.
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The ability to communicate using language is fundamental to the distinctive and remarkable success of the modern human.
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Previous studies have suggested a particular hotspot in the brain might be responsible for perceiving pitch, but auditory neuroscientists are still debating whether this 'pitch center' actually exists.
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A mutation may have helped humans learn how to create complex speech and language.
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Sue Savage-Rumbaugh on Human Language—Human Consciousness. A personal narrative arises through the vehicle of language Jamie Marie Waelchli, Thought Map No. 8 “Human language, coupled with human...
Micki Pacific's curator insight,
March 4, 2013 3:15 PM
Science has now become aware of the power of initial conditions, through chaos theory, the work of Mandelbrot with fractal geometric forms, and the work of Wolfram and the patterns that can be produced by digital reiterations of simple and only slightly different starting conditions. Within the fertilized egg lie the initial starting conditions of every human.
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In the hyperconnected Western world, our preoccupation with technology is evident in the glut of new expressions now in common parlance. Cringeworthy they may be, but expressions such as 'Let's take this offline, 'Do you have bandwidth?' and 'My brain needs a reboot' signify tech has become interwoven into our language. But is technology having a more lasting impact on our words? How are the digital communications tools we use shaping what we say and type? The birth of new words, and new meanings for existing words, are the most obvious signs of what technology has wrought in linguistic terms.
Blake Turnbull's curator insight,
April 8, 2013 9:57 PM
An interesting look at technology factors on language change including text-talk in the digital age and young people's technology driven language use.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists are developing a computer that can read vast amounts of scientific literature, make connections between facts and develop hypotheses.
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