Phonetish...

When Naomi Enzinna read a newspaper story that claimed Miami was developing its own dialect, she wanted to test out the theory for herself. Four years and a qualifying paper later, Enzinna’s research has found that Miami English does have some Spanish-like features. Her dissertation is focused on finding out how and why those variations occur.

Did you know that in every language, the most frequent word occurs twice as often as the second most frequent word? This phenomenon called 'Zipf's law' is more than one century old, but until now, scientists have not been able to elucidate it exactly. Sander Lestrade, a linguist at Radboud University in The Netherlands, proposes a new solution to this notorious problem in PLOS ONE.                                

Zipf's law describes how the frequency of a word in natural language, is dependent on its rank in the frequency table. So the most frequent word occurs twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the subsequent word, and so on until the least frequent word (see Figure 1). The law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who was the first who tried to explain it around 1935.

Biggest mystery in computational linguistics

Consequences and recommendations

How do people refer to the bread pictured here?

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Research provides partial guidance. In her April Physics Today feature, "From Sound to Meaning," University of Connecticut cognitive scientist Emily Myers recounts her group's discovery that people retain what they've learned in a language class better if they go to bed before they get the chance hear a lot of their own language during the rest of the day. Evening classes are better.

That and other findings draw on big strides in a cross-disciplinary effort that is currently advancing understanding of how people derive meaning from sounds.

Myers starts off by explaining phonemes, the "abstract units of perception and production that, when swapped, produce a change in the word." Phonemes vary across cultures. For example, for an English speaker, the "r" and "l" are heard as distinct phonemes. In contrast, the Japanese do not have distinct "r" and "l" phonemes. To a Japanese listener, "play" and "pray" sound the same.

To a baby, the world changes rapidly. At birth, everything is a blur, with visual acuity around 5% of that for an adult. Stereoscopic vision has yet to kick in, with babies unable to perceive depth until several months old, while faces are only discernable at around 30cm – a distance similar to that between a mother’s face and her breast. But change is rapid. “The early stages of learning to see colour and basic forms happen relatively quickly,” says Alex Wade, professor of psychology at the University of York, and an expert in visual processes. By the age of six months, babies have more or less adult levels of visual acuity.

‘General superiority’

Anita Staneva, co-author of the report, said: “Bilingual children showed a general superiority over their peers in a range of cognitive outcomes such as the British Ability Scale Word reading, pattern construction and math tests.”

According to the researchers, the results suggested that migrant parents compensated for what they perceived as a disadvantage in speaking another language at home, which led to longer term improvements.

Dr Staneva added that migrant parents were also more likely to encourage their children to study hard at school.

“It may well be that immigrant families, who came all the way to the UK, emphasise education and place more value on learning at home so that their children would have better future,” she said.

The research also pointed to recent advances in technology, which have revealed that people who speak more than one language have a greater control over certain functions of the brain, which enables children to “learn more efficiently”.

The report states: “Over the past few decades, technological advances have allowed researchers to investigate how bilingualism interacts with, and possibly changes the cognitive and neurological systems. To maintain the relative balance between two languages, the bilingual brain relies on executive functions, a regulatory system of general cognitive abilities,” the report states.

SOME 17m people in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro speak variations of what used to be called Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. Officially though, the language that once united Yugoslavia has, like the country, ceased to exist. Instead, it now has four names: Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin. But are these all the same language?

The 20th Century is often called "The American Century". The 21st Century is looking a lot less American. To be sure, it's not looking like the British century either. That came the century before. American culture (and words) could easily spread in the 20th century because it was hard to produce and distribute recorded entertainment, but the US had the capacity and the economy and the marketing savvy to do so [And I mustn't forget the Marshall Plan, which my colleague just mentioned to me.] America was inventing and manufacturing all sorts of things and putting names on them and selling them everywhere. Two world wars and the cold war had Americans stationed all over the world using their slang in the presence of young recruits from other countries. The 21st century is looking rather different. The 20th century brought us talking pictures and television. Radio, the most affordable form of broadcast, remained a more local proposition--though the recorded music could be imported. (Though the word radio, well that's an Americanism.) The 21st century is the time of the internet and of personali{s/z}ed entertainment. The popular songs are less universally popular, because people have more access to more different kinds of music on download. Instead of two or three or four choices on television, there are hundreds. And if you don't like what you're seeing you can go on YouTube or SoundCloud (or other things I'm too old and [orig. AmE] uncool to know about) and find all sorts of people doing all sorts of things. People go on the internet and meet each other and talk to each other, meaning that there's more opportunity than ever for there to be exchange of words between people, rather than just reception of words from the media. The slangs that young people use are sometimes local to their school or area and sometimes particular to an international online gaming community or music fandom. The notion of community, for many people, has internationali{s/z}ed. Language is moving in different ways now than it ever had the chance to move in the 20th century.

Interaction as the driving force

The brains of some adults with autism are able to compensate for language comprehension challenges that are a hallmark of the disorder in children, research shows.

Children with autism have difficulty sorting out pairs of words that are unrelated—like “clock” and “frog”—from those that are related—like “baby” and “bottle”—making it hard for them to process written or spoken language. Scientists have believed that for most children with autism, this struggle with language persisted throughout their lives.

But a study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders indicates that at least some adults with autism process unrelated words as well as adults without the disorder—and that their brains use distinct learning strategies to do so.