Geography & Voice

Each individual language has a few number of sound units (phonemes) and research suggests geography may affect which phoneme's usage become commonplace.

The ejective consonant (e.g. "P" or "K") phoneme exists in ~20% of the languages. Of 500+ languages  studied, research shows that languages spoken at higher elevations were more likely to use ejective consonants. This may be because lower air pressure eases the burst of air characteristic of this phoneme.

Pronouns and Individualism

Researchers hypothesized that pronoun usage reflects increasing individualism in American culture. Their research found that for American books from 1960-2008, use of, "first person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us) decreased 10% first person singular pronouns (I, me) increased 42%, and second person pronouns (you, your) quadrupled."

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica

A study examined content-framing of encyclopedia entries of top Fortune companies in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica in 2006, 2008, and 2010. While  Britannica was predominantly neutral, "Wikipedia entries were significantly longer, were more positively and negatively framed, and focused more on corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues ... The findings stress that the knowledge-generation processes in society appear to be fundamentally shifting because of the use of social media collaboration."

Weak Arguments for Weak Minds

Research argues that providing someone with weak arguments for a cause they believe in is more powerful than providing strong arguments.

Research found that people were more likely to persuade others to vote for their cause if provided with weak arguments because it fooled them into thinking they could also contribute. Weak arguments were found to inspire people if their self-belief was relatively low. Weak arguments against one's position also increased participation. So, to increase participation, advocacy groups may want to show their supporters weak arguments for and against their position!

Turkish English

Science has published a study revealing that modern Indo-European languages - which includes English - originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago. This rejects the prevailing theory of the language family originating 5,000 years ago in SW Russia.

Researchers studied "virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose."

Linguists identify language families by looking for similar sounding (and, often, meaning) words in modern languages (e.g. water & wasser - German) - the closer the words, the closer the languages.

Baboons That Can Read

A video clip summarizing a study that demonstrates that baboons can read basic English words.

Teaching Helps Writing

Research finds that science grad students who did research and taught improved their written research proposals over 1 academic year more than those who just researched. Differences in written quality "could not account for the results, because only specific skills among those analyzed showed improvement as a function of the teaching experience."

The Twitter Algorithm

Research discovered a method to predict a tweet's popularity with 84% accuracy, allowing tweeters to maximize their content exposure pre-tweeting. The algorithm has 4 factors:

• The news source of the article: i.e. brand reflects trustworthiness
• The new category: Technology ranked 1st, Health 2nd, Fun Stuff 3rd (see full chart)
• Objective language = Emotional language: surprisingly, emotional rhetoric doesn't affect popularity ... so STOP WITH THE CAPS LOCKS!!!
• Mentioning celebrities, brands, etc

Metallica and Monkeys

A study revealed that cottontop tamarins listened to a variety of music (Bach, Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, etc.) but only calmed down when listening to Metallica.

Like in music, in human speech, changing the tone of one's voice, the rhythm, pitch or speed allows one to gauge the emotional state of the speaker. For example, we use long tones for calming a baby while using short tones to indicate seriousness. The study found that monkeys, "interpret rising and falling tones differently than humans."

Want to Multitask? Learn Languages

Researchers find that bilingual people are better multitaskers. Because the other languages are always present in the person's brain, a multilingual person is always making choices in selecting the appropriate language for a situation. This holds true for deaf students who use American Sign Language and written English.

Researchers say bilingual children are also better at prioritizing tasks and multilingualism may help protect against age-related mental decline (e.g. Alzheimers, dementia.)

Imitate Accent to Understand

Research finds that imitating a foreign accent increased understanding vs. simply listening to those with a foreign accent. In the study, psychologists spoke to volunteers in an invented accent. Subjects who imitated the odd sounds had a better understanding of what was said vs. those who listened or repeated the sentence in their normal voice.

Baby Babble

This video of twin babies "talking" has received 55 million+ views. But are they really talking? Probably not.

Babies normally babble by 10 months and use identifiable words by 14 months. Experts say the twins are engaging in “reduplicated babbling,” where they simply repeat a sound without knowing what is really going on.

But they are exhibiting a lot of the characteristics of normal speech (evidently from viewing others around them): taking turns babbling, imitating various speech intonations, emphatically ending sentences or exclamations, using gestures to supplement the babbling and body distance is "very appropriate for most Americans; not too close, but not too far either."

Ummmm

Why do we say words like "um"?

1) No reason: Father of modern day linguistics, Prof. Noam Chomsky believes such phrases are simply "errors in applying knowledge of language in actual performance."

2) For Control: One school, for example, believes the usage is deliberate - if anticipating a delay in speech, the speaker uses these signals to inform the listener we need a second to formulate our thoughts. Otherwise, the listener may feel the speaker is finished. They say "um" almost always sets up a long delay in speech, while "uh" signals a brief pause. Speakers also extend vowels of words if searching for the next word. They say such "disfluencies" make up 6-10% of spontaneous speech and all languages have these "disfluencies".

3) For Comprehension: Other research argues toddlers use disfluencies to focus on words that follow. As compared with a normal sentence, toddlers over 2 years of age tended to pay more attention when they heard a sentence with "um" or "uh". Researchers argue this is because 2 year olds understand that "uhs" often precede unknowns.

All Animals Sound the Same

Researchers compared the calls of 500 different animals - insects, mammals, reptiles, fish - you name it. They found that the basic features of every animal’s cry (e.g. frequency, duration) depend on the animal’s metabolism, which depends on the animal’s size and body temperature.

When the calls account for body size and temperature, a whale sounds a lot like a frog and vice versa. Researchers think a metabolic link exists, because energy use affects the nerves and muscles animals use to make noise.

Driving Affects Listening

Studies have shown that talking on a cell phone can impair our ability to drive. A new study shows that driving makes it hard to hear.

96 participants were paired in a simulator - 1 driving, 1 talking as a passenger or on the phone. Drivers and talkers were told a number of stories. Sure enough, drivers had 20% less ability to recall the details as compared with the passengers. And their conversational skills were the worst when navigate intersections or handling traffic.

Talk it Out

Research finds that students who worked out math problems out loud got more accurate results, and faster. Math students solved math problems and researchers found that students who reasoned through their thinking out loud, or drew out pictures for the problem, answered questions quicker and more accurately than their counterparts

Best Draft Pick = Best Speaker?

Experts argue words college athletes use in media interviews signal levels of confidence, conceptual complexity, team orientation, self-centeredness and distrust. In other words, studying media interviews supposedly can inform a pro-team if the player they will draft is a good fit.

For example, in 2005 the San Francisco 49ers had to decide between Alex Smith or Aaron Rodgers - both stars and both scored very high on football proficiency exams. But Smith didn’t use common leadership words while Rodgers did. For those who don't know, Aaron Rogers was MVP of the 2011 Superbowl (his team won). Smith, however, hasn't done as well.

Obama vs. Osama

UPENN linguistics professor Mark Liberman explains that the common slip between "Obama" and "Osama" is due to the "syntactic category rule" (SCR) phenomenon and "priming."

SCR occurs when two words are confused for one another and occur when nouns replace nouns, verbs replace verbs, etc. If "Obama" were an adjective, not a noun, we probably wouldn't confuse "Obama" with the noun "Osama."

"Priming" (which seems to be an evolutionary adaptation) is when your brain makes certain words more accessible when they resemble (sound, meaning) words you frequently hear. So when we've read/heard/thought about hospitals, "doctor" and "nurse" will be recognized quicker and more likely to be used in a slip of the tongue.

Swearing Alleviates Pain

College students put their hands in a tub of cold water and repeated the swear word of their choice. Students tolerance was much higher if they swore. These students also had increased heart rates, indicating that swearing activates a classic “fight or flight” response. However, the more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become. Without emotion, only the swearword remains.

Researchers say swear word are different than most language, activating emotional centers in the brain's right side instead of the brain's left side - used for regular communication.

Werid But Cool

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