The evolution of sign languages globally revealed through computational analyses
From American Association for the Advancement of Science/AAAS 13/02/24 A computational analysis has highlighted the poorly understood relationships and elusive histories of modern sign languages worldwide, revealing two major sign language families shaped by geopolitical forces and relevant signing communities. The findings show that the computational methods applied – which have been useful in understanding […]
‘Mom talk:’ Immigrant bilingual Latina mothers have dual-language personalities
From Florida Atlantic University 05/02/24 Children who hear a language other than English at home currently make up more than 25 percent of the school-aged population in the United States. A large majority of those children hear Spanish because that is the native language of their parents. When their parents came to the U.S., they […]
Robots versus humans: Which would children trust more when learning new information?
From Singapore University of Technology and Design 06/01/24 In this digital age, children are exposed to overwhelming amounts of information online, some of it unverified and increasingly generated by non-human sources, such as AI-driven language models. As children grow older, the ability to assess a source’s reliability is an important skill in cultivating critical thinking. […]
Mummified feces reveal diverse plant diet of pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures
From PLOS 28/10/23 DNA analysis of mummified poop reveals two pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures ate a wide variety of plants, like maize, sweet potato, and peanuts—and tobacco and cotton traces were detected too. According to a study published October 11, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jelissa Reynoso-García from the University of Puerto Rico, […]
English language innovation: Have you heard about the “whom of which” trend?
From Massachusetts Institute of Technology 29/09/23 Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: “The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert.” Relative clauses often feature “who,” “which,” “that,” and so on. Before […]