Langology

While most fluent foreign language speakers tend to agree on the vast majority of language learning DOs and DON’Ts, there is one area that always seems to cause heated debate: the importance of language input (i.e. listening and reading) versus language output (i.e. speaking and writing).

The brain can learn a new word in less than 15 minutes, according to scientists, whose finding will rob many of the excuse that they can’t learn a foreign language. All one needs to do is listen to a word 160 times over that period, found Cambridge neuroscientists.

The authors argue that personalities are not fixed. Instead the language a person is speaking—and with whom—can lead individuals to take on the personality traits of the culture associated with that language or person.

A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt.

At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and “taking statistics” on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.