Linguistics in the news

[s.t. bischoff]

I thought these might be of interest...the end of  TED presentation (and
comments at the website) along with the end of the science daily article are
also interesting in terms of the language of "profit driven research" and
the language of "curiosity driven research"...the attitudes of the public
towards such research (via the comments) are also interesting though not
surprising...

*Science Daily* (Mar. 15, 2011) — Learning a foreign language literally
changes the way we see the world, according to new research. Panos
Athanasopoulos, of Newcastle University, has found that bilingual speakers
think differently to those who only use one language.

And you don't need to be fluent in the language to feel the effects -- his
research showed that it is language use, not proficiency, which makes the
difference.

Working with both Japanese and English speakers, he looked at their language
use and proficiency, along with the length of time they had been in the
country, and matched this against how they perceived the colour blue.

 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110314132531.htm

-----------------------------------------------
Why I taped my son's childhood By *Deb Roy*, Special to CNN

*Cambridge, Massachusetts (CNN)* -- Little did I know that studying how my
son learned to speak would come to this: a TED Talk gone viral, partially
thanks to Ashton
Kutcher<http://twitter.com/aplusk/status/43013707692912641>and his 6
million Twitter followers -- and a technology platform that may
change the way we understand social, political and commercial
communications.

Six years ago, my wife and I, speech and cognitive scientists respectively,
wanted to understand how a child learned language comprehensively and
naturally, since most theories on language acquisition were grounded in
surprisingly incomplete observational data.

In my academic work, which involves teaching machines to learn and speak, a
data-based understanding of language development is crucial -- as it is to
my wife's work in studying speech disorders. So we decided to create a data
set to study. A really, really big data set.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/03/13/roy.tapes.childhood/index.html?hpt=T2