On Wednesday 11 December the American TIME Magazine will announce its 'Person of the Year' 2013. An international team of computational linguists has now built a quantitative model that has predicted the outcome for 2013.
Computer Sciences
Dec 11, 2013
10
1
(PhysOrg.com) -- Learning a language can be difficult for some, but for babies it seems quite easy. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), linguist Jeffrey Heinz and mechanical engineer Bert Tanner have ...
Robotics
Jun 28, 2011
0
0
There was a time when everyone living in Michigan grew up speaking the native language of the area's indigenous people. Now less than 10 people born in the state are fluent, yet more than 2,700 people "like" the language ...
Other
Feb 21, 2012
0
0
In the early 1990s, comedian Mike Myers regularly dressed up in a giant wig, gaudy fake nails and gigantic sunglasses to become Linda Richman -- a stereotypical New Yorker who had fits of feeling "verklempt" and thought that ...
Social Sciences
Jan 20, 2010
0
0
Even though they are not needed to make the specific sounds, parts of Mandarin Chinese speakers' faces—their eyebrows and lips—mimic the rising and falling pitch that distinguishes one word spelled exactly the same from ...
Social Sciences
Sep 24, 2019
0
108
Gestures and visual animations can help reveal the cognitive origins of meaning, indicating that our minds can assign a linguistic structure to new informational content "on the fly"—even if it is not linguistic in nature.
Social Sciences
Apr 25, 2019
1
341
Today it would seem odd to describe a flower with the word "bastard"—why apply a term of personal abuse to a flower? But in Shakespeare's time, "bastard" was a technical term describing certain plants.
Mathematics
Sep 7, 2023
0
4
Writers, publishers, teachers and parents need to closely scrutinise gender construction in children's literature so that young children are presented with stories that promote equality and respect for both sexes according ...
Social Sciences
Jan 17, 2013
0
0
(Phys.org)—Usually, there's a clear distinction between "popular science" shows and the educational lectures and conference videos aimed specifically at scientists. An endeavor at MIT called "Cambridge Nights" attempts ...
A new linguistic study of how individuals interpret various types of utterances sheds more light on how literal and contextual meaning are distinguished. The study, "A novel empirical paradigm for distinguishing between What ...
Social Sciences
Mar 9, 2012
0
0
