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A look at why less Hispanics are speaking Spanish in the U.S.

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El contacto entre español y AAVE en Nueva York

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El contacto entre español y AAVE en Nueva York

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The Future of Spanish in the United States

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In the United States, college students are flocking to learn the language. Major U.S. book companies are publishing Spanish-language editions, available at your local Borders bookstore. Corporate America is increasingly selling itself through Spanish-language ads, and following the lead of CNN en Español, new arrival CBS Telenoticias is competing head-to-head with Univisión and Telemundo for U.S.

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La variación fonética de los dialectos del español

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La variación fonética de los dialectos del español

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Introduction: The Dialectoteca del Español is an innovative way to experience the diversity of Spanish pronunciation. It is an audiovisual library, which uses speech samples from a wide variety of native speakers to document the most representative patterns in the pronunciation of modern spoken Spanish.

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El significado sociolingüístico de la /t/ en el habla de los políticos

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El significado sociolingüístico de la /t/ en el habla de los políticos

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Previous studies on released /t/ collectively suggest that the linguistic feature is associated with intelligence and education, social meanings that can be recruited in constructing articulate personas. This study examines the production of released /t/ by six prominent U.S. political figures, as well as the social meanings listeners attribute to the variant. Employing a matched guise technique facilitated by digital stimulus manipulation, we find that the social meanings associated with released /t/ are constrained by linguistic and social factors. Regarding the former, word-medial /t/ releases carry stronger social meanings than those appearing word-finally. With respect to social factors, listener interpretations vary according to the identity of the speaker and knowledge of how frequently particular speakers produce /t/ releases. Thus, even though conventionalized associations between linguistic forms and meanings can be drawn upon to construct articulate personas, not all speakers can do so with equal effectiveness.

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Constraints on the social meaning of released /t/: A production and perception study of U.S. politicians | Language Variation and Change | Cambridge Core

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Previous studies on released /t/ collectively suggest that the linguistic feature is associated with intelligence and education, social meanings that can be recruited in constructing articulate personas. This study examines the production of released /t/ by six prominent U.S. political figures, as well as the social meanings listeners attribute to the variant.

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¿Dónde se habla el español "más bonito"?

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¿Dónde se habla el español "más bonito"?

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¿Qué país tiene el acento Español mas bonito ?

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Opinen colocando su país de origen pero con la condición de no votar por él para que sea genuina el resultado final y voten solo por un país. Yo soy de venezuela y me gusta el acento colombiano.

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Un juego para descubrir cómo suena en cada país la lengua castellana

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La variación en el idiolecto de Hillary Clinton

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La variación en el idiolecto de Hillary Clinton

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3 ways to speak English (register and accommodation)

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3 ways to speak English (register and accommodation)

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English | TED

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Monday, April 8, marked the launch of Code Switch, our new blog covering race, ethnicity and culture. To commemorate the blog's launch, all week we solicited stories about code-switching - the practice of shifting the languages you use or the way you express yourself in your conversations.

People sent us hundreds of stories illustrating the many ways we code-switch and the many reasons for doing it. Five of those motivations came up again and again in the stories we read:

Eventually, I started code-switch-screaming English profanities.

1) Our lizard brains take over: The most common examples of code-switching were completely inadvertent; folks would slip into a different language or accent without even realizing it or intending to do it. One such story came from Lisa Okamoto, who told us she was born and raised in Los Angeles by two parents from Japan, a place she's visited all her life. This trip was particularly memorable (warning, profanity euphemisms ahead):

If you ever watched the original Ring movie, I think you will understand this: the Japanese take horror stories pretty seriously, but in a very creepy quiet way. I find Japanese horror movies and haunted houses to be ten times scarier than the American counter-part.

I went back to Japan with a friend during the summer of 2009, the height of haunted house season in Japan. (The Japanese have this concept that the summertime is the best time to tell scary stories, because the chill you feel from fright will cool you down during the humid months.) My friend loves scary stories, and she wanted to go into a haunted maze when we were visiting Yokohama. I protested and protested but eventually she convinced me to go through the haunted maze, instead of making her go through it alone.

The premise of the haunted maze was the following: The setting was a haunted middle school, where a little girl named Mi-chan died a tragic death. She died so suddenly that she didn't properly enter the after world, and her spirit was still lingering at the school. You were supposed to go through this maze with an amulet, find Mi-chan, and place it on her so that she can properly enter the afterlife.

We were handed a flashlight and an amulet prop, and entered into the maze. I already knew I was getting myself into trouble, but I didn't expect how scary it was going to be. It was terrifying. Periodically, you would hear quiet scratches and taps on the walls of the maze, with a voice saying, " Watashi wa Mi-Chan" - translation: I am Mi-Chan.

I was talking in Japanese when entering the maze, but I started losing control because I was just so scared. Eventually, I started code-switch-screaming English profanities - "OH MY F-ING GOD, GET ME THE F OUT OF HERE!" - etc., etc. You can fill in the blanks with your imagination. I consider myself fully bilingual, but I realized at this moment that, when I'm in a fight or flight/survivor instinct situation, my mind switches to English. (This is probably because I've lived in the US all my life, and never lived in Japan.)

I was yelling and screaming in English throughout the whole maze, and still hearing the " watashi wa Mi-Chan" voice here and there. But suddenly the voice said, " Watashi wa Mi-Chan... watashi wa... I am... My name is Mi-Chan," in the most awkward, Japanese-accented English possible. The staff had taken such pity on my rude profanity-stricken fear that they also code-switched for me. When I heard that awkward English, I literally fell to the floor and cried and laughed at the same time. I was so scared, but the English took me by such surprise, and I felt the oddest combination of release.

2) We want to fit in: Very often, people code-switch - both consciously and unconsciously - to act or talk more like those around them. While this can be effective, it can also be perilous, as John Davis told us:

I am a Spanish teacher in a high-needs school in Nashville. I grew up in a homogenous town in rural Pennsylvania. Foreign languages came easily for me, so I majored in Spanish and minored in French at the University of Pittsburgh. When I moved to my school in Nashville, I had to learn another language: Southern, African American English. I entered my learning experience with fervor. My students taught me almost as much as I taught them in my first years. Now that I am well versed in the language, I have trouble code switching back to Standard American English.

One day my principal walked into my room and asked me, "Mr. Davis, I didn't receive your editions to the School Improvement Plan." I replied, "Nah, you flaugin' bruh, I put that on your desk yesterday." My boss froze, with his jaw dropped and one eyebrow raised. After a moment he shook his head and said, "you're spending too much time with the kids." "My bad."

In our pitch to users for stories about code-switching, we asked jokingly whether anyone learned Farsi to eavesdrop on their in-laws. And sure enough, in came this story from Amy Proulx:

Yes, I actually did secretly learn Farsi to snoop on the in-laws. I married an Iranian-Canadian, and after torturing myself trying to learn through the standard language tapes and computer programs, I sort of gave up, and instead, started watching Iranian soap operas. Oh the drama, the intrigue, the suspicion and suspense! What a way to learn Farsi, through the vice of sappy television.

My bad habit lead to good Farsi skills, but my handle on slang and colloquial language was the real kicker. When at a memorial ceremony for my late-father-in-law, I proceed to intone a rather dramatic, but reasonably common Shi'ite prayer (courtesy of my TV watching). My brother-in-law, in the middle of this most dramatic and somber moment, nearly fell over laughing. He declared that I proclaimed this Shi'ite prayer with perfect diction and pronunciation, and that I was a model of a perfect daughter and sister-in-law. I was in the in-crowd with the in-laws, thanks to soap operas.

3) We want to get something: A lot of folks code-switch not just to fit in, but to actively ingratiate themselves to others. We can not tell you how many dozens of stories we got from people who work in service industries who said that a Southern accent is a surefire way to get better tips and more sympathetic customers. Apparently everyone who works in a restaurant picks up "y'all" immediately upon arriving at their job. If you can pull off the right accent in the right context, you can get all kinds of favors, as this story from Patti Hollingshead illustrates:

We lived in Ireland some years ago and noticed there were often two prices for goods and services - reasonable prices for the locals and much more expensive costs for others (Americans). It was not easy, but I practiced my Irish accent until we qualified for 'local pricing'. Still, they would often ask me where I was from, as my accent was anything but flawless. But I'd come up with the name of some obscure town hundreds of miles away, which explained my 'odd' Irish accent and usually satisfied them. Once, to my, "Ack, I'm from dahn twards Clara Bog," the guy responded in Gaelic.

I had no idea what he was saying. I continued to smile, laugh, and nod at what I hoped were appropriate times as he excitedly talked on and on. Finally, another English speaking customer entered the shop and he flipped back to English then whispered to me, "We need to be careful here (in Northern Ireland) about speaking Irish." "Oh, aye," I replied.

I pulled my wallet out to pay for my my flowers and he held up his hands, "No, me lass, keep yer money. 'twas a pleasure speakin' to ya."

4) We want to say something in secret: We collected many sweet stories of people code-switching in order to hide in plain sight, a habit most common among people in love. Because this tactic often relies on assumptions, it can get one in trouble, as Veronica Rodriguez can attest:

I am from Venezuela and speak Spanish and English fluently and without an accent in either language. However, I look what most would describe as "Middle Eastern," this means that not only do people assume that I am from Turkey or Lebanon and try to speak to me in Farsi or Arabic and become very disappointed when I don't, but many times Hispanic people assume that I don't speak Spanish. This ultimately leads to someone speaking very candidly around me thinking that I cannot understand what they are saying.

I also speak French fluently enough to get myself into trouble. Living in Chicago during college I encountered lots of interesting people on the L. We often chose to comment on some of these people in French rather than English or Spanish since it was far less likely that someone would understand us. One rainy afternoon a very nice-looking man ran into the train, and my friend and I made some comments to each other in French about how handsome he was. To our surprise, he answered back, " Merçi!" - in perfect French.

Suffice to say,we were both extremely embarrassed and decided that maybe we would keep our comments to ourselves from then on.

5) It helps us convey a thought: Certain concepts need that perfectbon mot to come across effectively. Many people switch languages or employ colloquialisms to express particular ideas, as in this story from Jennifer Monahan:

I ... work in a bilingual school, and my coworkers and I code-switch constantly. Here ... code-switching centers around lexical gaps: Nonprofit fundraising is a very American idea, so the French speakers tend to switch to English when that's the topic. Same with technology; if I learned about a piece of equipment or software in English I have a hard time discussing it in French. It's not just a language proficiency issue, my coworkers who are native French speakers follow the same pattern. So we tend to talk about "le smartboard" or "un programme de planned giving." And some concepts just don't translate. French kids eat lunch in the school cafeteria; the notion of bringing lunch from home is, well, foreign. So is the notion of having a designated container to bring your lunch from home. So we all refer to "le lunchbox."

The reasons people code-switch and the ways in which they do it are far more numerous than the few examples we've listed here. While many people told us they code-switched to fit in, for example, several also told us they did it to stand out. What the stories reiterated most of all, though, is what our colleague Gene Demby pointed out in his inaugural post: No matter your race, ethnicity, class or cultural background, you probably do it.

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Monday, April 8, marked the launch of Code Switch, our new blog covering race, ethnicity and culture. To commemorate the blog's launch, all week we solicited stories about code-switching - the practice of shifting the languages you use or the way you express yourself in your conversations.

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By Anatoly Liberman

There is something righteous about the right hand: it is supposed to point in the right direction and do everything right. In older Indo-European, even a special word existed for "right hand," as evidenced by Greek dexios (stress on the last syllable), Latin dexter, and others. A strong association connects the right hand with the south and the left hand with the north. Someone standing with his face turned to the rising sun (for example, while praying), will have his right hand stretched to the south and his left hand to the north. Old Irish tuath meant both "north" and "left" (when facing east). This case is not unique. Here is a variant of the most common definition of "left" in our dictionaries: "Connected with that part of the body which is situated to the west when one faces north." Compare right: "straight, direct, not curved or bent; further from the main part of the heart." In an old post on the etymology of , I discussed the tie between the concepts "left" and "north" and the possibility of explaining north as meaning "left." If Sanskrit naraka- "the kingdom of the dead" is related to Engl. (which is uncertain), we can assume that in the opinion of the ancient Indians the Other Word was a cold place, rather than hell with its eternal fire, frying pans, and boiling pots, as we see it in medieval European pictures. Reference to "down" in north and some words for "left" cannot be excluded either. But the most noticeable thing is the paucity of Indo-European words for "right hand," as opposed to the abundance of names coined for its opposite.

A first look at Latin dexter "right" and sinister "left" shows that both end in -er, an element reminiscent of, though not identical with, -er in Engl. smaller, longer, and the like. Both Latin words are comparative degrees. However, it is unclear what their bases designate (more than what?). A right-handed man emerges from language studies as adroit, and the left-handed one as awkward. The derivation of many words for "left" poses almost insoluble problems. Engl. left (from lyft-; originally "weak, worthless," but the origin of left is debatable) has nothing to do with the verb leave and it past tense (or past participle) left. It looks like Russian levyi and its Latin congener laevus; yet it is not related to them. The Old English for "left" was winstre, familiar from its modern Scandinavian cognates: Norwegian vinstre, Swedish vänster, and Danish venstre (Old and Modern Icelandic vinstri). All of them end in -tre/-tri/-tra resembling -ter in dexter and sinister and may mean "more friendly, more auspicious." If so, this is a rare case of ascribing something good to the left side. The Romans treated the left side as more favorable and faced south when taking auspices, so that the left side was to the east, or fortunate quarter; also it was closer to the heart.

The Goths called the left side hlidumei, from an etymological point of view "the weakest, the most crooked," perhaps with the suffix of the superlative degree, but this part of the interpretation has been contested. Italian manco "left" has developed from "crippled, deficient" (the same root appears in French manchot "a person having one hand or one arm") The Standard German for "left" is link (perhaps from "awkward" or "lame"), while Bavarians have lerz among other similar-sounding forms, and elsewhere one hears glink, from gelink, and slink, that is, s-link. (Reinforcing s- is equally typical of English dialects; that is why many people believe that lang has been derived from uage.) British dialects, especially in Ireland and the north, display a great profusion of words for "left" beginning with c-/k-: keg-handed, cork(y)-handed, corry-handed, car-handed, cat-handed, coochy-handed, and so forth. The source of most, if not of all of them, can be found in Danish kejte "left" (Swedish dialectal kaitu also exists). This is the word that ended up as the first element of American Engl. cater-corner, changed in the Midwest by folk etymology to kitty- ~ kiddy-corner. In many northern British dialects, cater means "diagonal," so again "bent, crooked." ( Cater-corner was the subject of another old post in this blog.) The numerous variants- cat-, keg-, corky- handed, and so forth-appear to be attempts to make the otherwise opaque word sound like something familiar, even if meaningless, for what is cat- or corky-handed? One can understand why Italians use mana stanca, literally "tired hand," for "left hand," but keg-handed.... Wallet-handed and t'other hand afore, which also occur or at one time were current in British local speech, make better sense. The Irish word kitoque "left-handed" goes back to Old Irish cittach and has the same origin as cater- in cater-corner (from Scandinavian).

Then there is the much-discussed gaulick-handed, competing in northern British dialects with gaulish-, gallack-, and gallick-handed. French gauche "left" and Engl. gawk(y) immediately spring to mind. The origin of those words, though it has been debated for more than a century and a half, is still unascertained. Despite the cautiously negative attitude of the OED toward this etymology, gawk may be a variant of the older noun gowk "cuckoo." The attempt to present gawk as a contraction of gaulick carries little conviction, and the origin of gaulick remains unknown. We cannot even be sure whether it is an English or French word. Gaul- is either its root or an element taken for the word's root, for otherwise gaulish would not have been formed. By contrast, gauche may be a borrowing from Germanic, though the etymons proposed for it in dictionaries should be taken with a whole pinch of salt. Once again we are confronted with an array of unexplained adjectives for "left." The reason may be that such words are sometimes slangy, and slang is notoriously hard to etymologize. Our guides-"weak," "bent downward," "crooked," "turned in the direction of the north," "inauspicious," or conversely, "friendly; favorable," the latter as in the practice of the augurs-fail us. It may be that gaulick and gauche are related, but we are unable to pinpoint the nature of that relationship. One of them or both may mean "weak" or "crooked," or "inauspicious," but again we lack the resources to detect the sought-for meaning in their form.

Obviously, etymology is partial toward right-handed people. In playing favorites, it follows nature that made most of us right-handed. When it comes to physiology, it pays off to remain with the crowd. But not everything is lost. We no longer torment left-handed people by making them switch to the other side. Also, a colleague in my department is left-handed, and his daughter gave him a cup with the words engraved on it: "Lefties are the best lovers." If this is a true statement, the corky-handed have more than made up for the trick nature played on the hemispheres of their brain.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins...And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he'll do his best to avoid responding with "origin unknown."

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The Sinister Influence of the Left Hand | OUPblog

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By Anatoly Liberman There is something righteous about the right hand: it is supposed to point in the right direction and do everything right. In older Indo-European, even a special word existed for "right hand," as evidenced by Greek dexios (stress on the last syllable), Latin dexter, and others.

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Categories of Semantic Difficulty of Phrasal Verbs | SEA - Supporting English Acquisition

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Nobody has succeeded in finding a successful way of categorizing phrasal verbs semantically, that is, in terms of meaning. Linguists who try to categorize them disagree sharply. But for the purpose of learning and teaching them more easily, it is quite useful to posit the following three broad categories of semantic difficulty: 1.

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Neale Gifford writes: "One practice that annoys me is the use of 'one-year anniversary' or 'five-year anniversary' instead of 'first' or 'fifth.' Reason? Anniversary is derived from the Latin annus meaning 'year.' " Ed Morman writes of "n-year anniversary," "It's not very mellifluous and it is, of course redundant. Help me bring back 'nth anniversary.' "

Gifford and Morman aren't alone in their irritation. A few years ago, when The San Francisco Chronicle ran a headline reading, "Four-year anniversary draws protests," an irate reader left a profanity-riddled voicemail that unkindly insinuated what substance could be found between the ears of Phil Bronstein, then the editor of The Chronicle. (The same reader was even more offended by the appearance of " pilotless drone" in the newspaper, and his recorded rant became something of a Web sensation.)

The New York Times, too, is hardly immune to this redundancy. The June 28 edition, for instance, featured an article on Dylan Ratigan's "one-year anniversary at MSNBC" and another stating that New York's first gay pride parade commemorated "the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising." Philip Corbett, the newsroom's style guru, has frequently complained about this usage in his " After Deadline" blog but laments that his reminders have "little effect."

What has happened to the word anniversary? Even though the idea of yearly recurrence is built into the word etymologically, that idea has been clouded over centuries of use. And when an element of a word's meaning becomes more opaque, redundancy is one method, however inelegant, that gets used to unmuddy the waters.

As the annual aspect has moved to the background of anniversary, the shift has opened the door for use of the term to mark the passing of shorter units of time. The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in its entry for the word, states that anniversary can refer more broadly to a date following a notable event "by a specified period of time measured in units other than years," giving the example, "the 6-month anniversary of the accident."

Linguists call this process "semantic bleaching": the lessening of a word's force through generalization. The bleaching of anniversary has been going on for quite a while, even if dictionaries are only now catching up. For more than a century, English speakers have been modifying anniversary with numbers of days, weeks or months. An article in the May 5, 1901, Atlanta Constitution described the Vanderbilt family's Biltmore mansion in North Carolina, where little Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt "celebrated the three-months anniversary of her birth by planting out a tree on the estate." A few years later, The San Jose Evening News reported on the unseemly nature of a widow marrying on "the third-month anniversary of her husband's death."

Anniversary has been pressed into service for nonannual commemorations in part because English has no other commonly used terms that can fill the gap. At various times since the 19th century, the monthly equivalent of anniversary has been dubbed a mensiversary, using the Latin root mensis for "month," but this ad-hoc coinage has never caught on. (Members of the Facebook group " Make 'Mensiversary' a Word" continue to fight the good fight.) A more recent suggestion is the clunky English-Latin hybrid monthiversary.

With pressure on anniversary to expand its reach to subannual units, it's no wonder that "nth anniversary" can somehow feel insufficient for traditional yearly celebrations, in need of the more explicit form, "n-year anniversary." But if you don't want to see the meaning of the word weakened any further, stick to the "nth" version and trust that others will have the good sense to discern anniversary's annualness.

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Neale Gifford writes: "One practice that annoys me is the use of 'one-year anniversary' or 'five-year anniversary' instead of 'first' or 'fifth.' Reason? Anniversary is derived from the Latin annus meaning 'year.' " Ed Morman writes of "n-year anniversary," "It's not very mellifluous and it is, of course redundant.

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Capítulo 6: la semántica y la pragmática

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Capítulo 6: la semántica y la pragmática

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Link al libro "Breve historia de la lengua española" (versión electrónica)

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Link al libro "Breve historia de la lengua española" (versión electrónica)

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University of Texas Libraries / All Locations

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Keyword Advanced Search Title Journal Title Author Author + Title Subject Heading Call Number ISBN or Other Nos. Course Reserves Music Search

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English is a trickster of a language, evidenced by the fact that two words that appear to be antonyms can actually mean the exact same thing. For the most part we manage to bumble along without confusing the two, and can figure out which meaning is intended based on context (although in the case of some extra time is needed for teeth-gnashing). We know that inhabitable refers to a place that is habitable, and don't feel any need to stop our conversation to point out the superfluous in- prefix.

However, every once in a while we come across a pair of words that it really would be better to not confuse. A fine example of this is flammable and inflammable.

Looking at similar words, it is clear that such matters could be very simple; after all, combustible means "capable of catching on fire and burning you to death" and incombustible means "this thing is safe to play with matches around" (more or less). Yet flammable and inflammable both mean "able to be set on fire." Why in the world is this? Do the language gods have a cruel streak?

There is a fairly clear reason for why both these words carry the same meaning: the prefix in- does not always function as a negative prefix. Sometimes (and this is one of those times) it serves as an intensifier. It's fairly obvious how this could lead to problems.

Surprisingly, both flammable and inflammable coexisted peacefully in English for hundreds of years before anyone decided to do something about it. Inflammable is the older of the two, with recorded use as far back as 1574. Flammable begins to appear in 1655, when Margaret Cavendish described oil as being "hot burning and flamable" in her Philosophical and Physical Opinions. One of the reasons there was little confusion about these words is that flammable was used much less often than inflammable.

But in the 1920s the eagle-eyed language guardians of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) realized that many people were viewing the in- in inflammable as a negative prefix, and were at risk of consequently incinerating themselves at a much higher rate than was desirable. The NFPA advocated to have flammable used exclusively for warning labels (such as are found on mattresses, oil cans, and other things that will catch on fire if you put a match to them), and managed to slightly nudge our language toward a more sensible path. Though in the recent past flammable is used more often than inflammable, this pair still incites controversy-and laughter.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8mD2hsxrhQ[/youtube]

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Ammon Shea is the author of Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation and Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. He lives in New York City with his wife (a former lexicographer), son (a potential future lexicographer), and two non-lexical dogs.

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Why Do Flammable and Inflammable Mean the Same Thing? - Everything After Z by Dictionary.com

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English is a trickster of a language, evidenced by the fact that two words that appear to be antonyms can actually mean the exact same thing. For the most part we manage to bumble along without confusing the two, and can figure out which meaning is intended based on context (although in the case of regardless and irregardless some extra time is needed for teeth-gnashing).

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African-American Vernacular English - Wikipedia

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African-American Vernacular English ( AAVE), known less precisely as Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular ( BEV), Black Vernacular English ( BVE), or colloquially (a controversial term), is the variety ( dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of English natively spoken by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians, particularly in urban communities.

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In Spanish, most nouns default to masculine or feminine, as do the adjectives that describe them. So if you're referring to a group of people that includes a man, the word you'd use for that group would be masculine - even if that group is mostly made up of women.

(For a handy explainer on how words in languages become gendered, check out the "When Nouns Grow Genitals" episode of Slate's Lexicon Valley.)

To get around this, a growing number of activists, academics and bloggers have taken to employing the webby appellation "Latin@," which includes both the masculine "o" and the feminine "a," as a way to describe people with Latin American roots.

The University of Wisconsin uses it this way in the official name for its Department of Latin@ and Chican@ Studies. Karma Chavez, a professor there, said that the push toward gender neutrality in Spanish has been going on for decades.

"As far as I know, this challenge to language occurred more or less to other feminist challenges to language in the United States," Chavez said. "The late author Gloria Anzaldúa talks about the first time she encountered the word nosotras" -- the Spanish word for "us" or "we" - "as she had no idea that that term could be written in the feminine."

OK, but how would you actually say it aloud?

"Well, this is where things get complicated," Chavez said. "Most people end up just saying Chicano and Chicana." Others, she says, prefer to make an "ow" sound, like "cow." But, she admits, there's no real consensus on this.

So, Two-Way readers: Have you seen this usage in your online travels? Do you use it? And how would you pronounce it?

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'Latin@' Offers A Gender-Neutral Choice; But How To Pronounce It?

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In Spanish, most nouns default to masculine or feminine, as do the adjectives that describe them. So if you're referring to a group of people that includes a man, the word you'd use for that group would be masculine - even if that group is mostly made up of women.

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If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns -even inanimate objects- have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine. Speakers of these languages must take care to mark gender with definite articles and pronouns. They also must alter adjectives and even verbs for gender agreement.

As it turns out, a language's grammatical gender can have significant and surprising effects on cognition. In one study, for example, Russian speakers were asked to personify the days of the week. They consistently personified the grammatically masculine days (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) as males and the grammatically feminine days (Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) as females. When asked why they did this, they were unable to explain themselves.

So linguistic gender can spill over into other mental processes, leading us to judge and categorize inanimate and abstract nouns as truly having a gender, even though we logically know better. But the Russians in this study were tested in their native language. Can grammatical gender influence speakers' cognitive processes when they're speaking another language entirely?

In 2002, researchers set out to answer that question. They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine. Speaking English and using materials written in English, the researchers asked a group of native Spanish speakers and a group of native German speakers -all of whom were proficient in English- to generate three adjectives for each item on the list.

Across the board, object gender influenced the participants' judgments. For example, the word "key" is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers in the study tended to describe keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, used words such as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and tiny when describing keys. The word "bridge" is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.

In the same study, German and Spanish speakers looked at picture pairs. Each pair included a picture of a person and a picture of an object. The participants rated how similar the two pictures were. There were no written labels, and participants did not speak during the task. Both Spanish and German speakers judged pairs to be more similar when the grammatical gender of the object matched the biological sex of the person in the picture. A pair consisting of a bridge and a man, for example, seemed quite similar to a Spanish speaker but not similar at all to a German speaker.

As these studies show, grammatical gender can influence people's thinking, even when they're speaking a language with no grammatical gender to speak of -and even when they're not speaking any language at all!

Many of us like to believe we live in a post-sexism world, with the worst of gender prejudice behind us. But if gendered conventions of language can influence our thoughts -making a key seem prettier or a bridge seem sturdier- then it seems we are not yet free of gender stereotypes. Small, unnoticed features of language can influence our thoughts, sometimes in big ways. Knowing that, imagine how else language, culture, and society might affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Mind-boggling, isn't it?
Sources Cited:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, ed. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow, pp. 61- 80. Cambridge University Press.

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Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters)

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If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns -even inanimate objects- have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine.

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At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages).

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This story originally ran on PR Daily in February 2013.

No authoritarian authority exists that determines whether a given word is valid or bogus. In any language, there's a complex and imperfect vetting procedure; at least in English, most serious writers agree on the correct or preferred form of a word that is one of two or more variants or on whether a word is acceptable at all.

Here's a list of words that have been under scrutiny in this approval process:

1. Administrate: A back-formation of administration and an unnecessary extension of administer

2. Commentate: A back-formation of commentator and an unnecessary extension of comment

3. Dimunition: Erroneous; the correct form is diminution (think of diminutive)

5. Firstly: As with secondly and thirdly, erroneous when enumerating points; use first and so on

6. Heighth: Rarely appears in print, but a frequent error in spoken discourse (Why isn't height modeled on the form of depth, length, and width? Because it doesn't shift in spelling and pronunciation from its associated term, tall, like the others, which are derived from deep, long, and wide, do. Neither do we say or write weighth.)

7. Irregardless: An unnecessary extension of regardless on the analogy of irrespective but ignoring that regardless, though it is not an antonym of regard, already has an antonymic affix

9. Orientate: A back-formation of orientation and an unnecessary extension of orient

14. 'Til: Also rendered til and till, an clipped form of until that is correct but informal English; use the full word except in colloquial usage

A version of this article first appeared on DailyWritingTips.com.

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15 common words that are (probably) made up

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This story originally ran on PR Daily in February 2013. No authoritarian authority exists that determines whether a given word is valid or bogus. In any language, there's a complex and imperfect vetting procedure; at least in English, most serious writers agree on the correct or preferred form of a word that is one of two or more variants or on whether a word is acceptable at all.

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Before every scandal became a "gate," there was Watergate. Before every event that lasts longer than it should was labeled a "thon," there was Marathon. Now the headlines about Britain's decision to leave the European Union have resulted in a spate of "Brexit"-inspired puns.

In fact, the term Brexit itself isn't the original source for this play on words - a simple smash-up of "Britain" and "exit." The Brit use of the term was inspired by "Grexit," a word created to label speculation that financially troubled Greece would exit the European Union in 2015.

Now the term "Frexit" is being bandied about by even the stuffiest of old-school media outlets to discuss the possibility of France leaving the EU, while stateside there is increasing use of "Texit" and "Calexit" to describe movements in the nation's two most populous states.

This straightforward, if occasionally clunky, slapping of known suffixes to form new words is just something we humans love to do. It's a form of linguistic and cultural shorthand we use when trying to communicate a concept that may lack a single, defining term.

Want something that sounds like economics but has to do with buying and selling cheese and all the market fluctuations involved? "Cheese-nomics." Done.

Other word evolutions don't make much sense outside of a cultural context, like with the proliferation of words ending with "gate" to suggest a scandal. Did Deflategate have anything to do with an apartment complex in Washington, D.C.? No, but that "gate" implies something shady and secretive by referencing the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate complex and its subsequent cover-up.

Herewith, we present a slew of suffixes that have been swiped, borrowed, and otherwise used to make a new word when we humans can't come up with anything else.

Origin: As mentioned above, the "gate" suffix got its start with Watergate. The complex itself is named after a large wooden water gate that marks the spot where the Ohio Canal meets the Potomac River, The Washington Post noted in 2004.
How it's used now: The suffix is now used to suggest the existence of a far-reaching scandal, unethical behavior, or perhaps a cover-up of some sort. There's football's Deflategate (did the New England Patriots illegally deflate footballs?), Nipplegate (born the moment Justin Timberlake showed the world Janet Jackson's nipple during a Super Bowl halftime show), and Bendgate (in which iPhone 6 Plus users claimed their phones were bending), to name just a few.

"The diorama, a recent invention, which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama. The Maison Vauquer had caught the infection from a young artist among the boarders.

'Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret,' said the employé from the Museacute;um, 'how is your health-orama?" ...'There is an uncommon frozerama outside!" said Vautrin. ...

'Aha! here is a magnificent soupe-au-rama," cried Poiret as Christophe came in bearing the soup with cautious heed.

'I beg your pardon, sir," said Mme. Vauquer; 'it is soupe aux choux."

All the young men roared with laughter."

Origin: It all started with "panorama," from the Greek "pan" plus "horama," meaning view, or sight, advice column Straight Dope said back in 1984. The panorama was what a guy named Robert Barker called his invention in 1789, "a type of painting showing a wide-angle view of some notable scene." Diorama followed, and that seems to have kicked off the -arama fad, as Balzac wrote in his 1834 novel (see excerpt at right).
How it's used now: If there's a sight to behold, it's gonna have -rama on the end of it, whether it's a sale-o-rama, a spell-o-rama, cheese-o-rama, or drama-o-rama. With your mama. Some guy on the internet listed a whole bunch more here, in this list-o-rama.

Origin: Vacation comes from the Latin, vacare, to be unoccupied. In modern English, it means taking time off from work or school to go somewhere fun.
How it's used now: At some point in the early 21st century, some thoroughly awful evil person decided that tacking the word "cation" on anything that rhymes with "bay" was acceptable to mean "I'm unoccupied," so we now have bastardized versions of the word like the utterly deplorable "staycation" (staying at home and not working),"playcation" (playing on vacation?), and "daycation" (just taking the day off). Then we all just gave up, and beachcation, sleepcation, footballcation, campcation, and generally just stuck any word in front of the suffix. Honestly? Vacation is all I ever wanted. That and a cheesecation.

Origin: When something was extraordinarily good, or extraordinarily large, or just an extraordinary tale, it was called fantastic. "My, isn't Aaron Rodgers a fantastic quarterback?" or, "That cheesehead looks fantastic on you!"
How it's used now: Starting in the 1930s, anything with "tastic" tacked on meant "forming adjectives denoting someone or something regarded as an extremely good example of their particular type," as Oxford Dictionaries puts it. Or sometimes, things that are large in number. "This cheese cave is cheesetastic." Other examples include but are not limited to: Funtastic, crapcastic, beertastic, cattastic, pizzatastic, smashtastic, Mr. Boombastic, and of course, Comcastic.

Origin: This one will save you absolutely no time, as it's just one letter off "apocalypse," which is "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale," Oxford Dictionaries says.
How it's used now: If it's the end of some kind of world as you know it, you can slap a -pocalypse on it to say so. There was New York City's Snowpocalypse, which really turned into boozepocalypse; Chipotlapocalypse; Twinkiepocalypse; or heaven forbid, a cheesepocalypse. Did it just start raining a lot? It must be a rainpocalypse!

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"Brexit"-Inspired Puns Join "-gate," "-gasm" & "-pocalypse" In Baker's Dozen Of Abused Suffixes

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Before every scandal became a "gate," there was Watergate. Before every event that lasts longer than it should was labeled a "thon," there was Marathon. Now the headlines about Britain's decision to leave the European Union have resulted in a spate of "Brexit"-inspired puns.

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What Spanish-accented English sounds (and looks) like

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What Spanish-accented English sounds (and looks) like

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afrikaans3, male, pretoria, transvaal, south africa

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Chapter 2. Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

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The importance of pronunciation in your L2

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The importance of pronunciation in your L2

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UC San Francisco researchers are reporting a detailed account of how speech sounds are identified by the human brain, offering an unprecedented insight into the basis of human language.

The finding, they said, may add to our understanding of language disorders, including dyslexia.

Scientists have known for some time the location in the brain where speech sounds are interpreted, but little has been discovered about how this process works.

Now, in the Jan. 30 edition of Science Express, the fast-tracked online version of the journal Science, the UCSF team reports that the brain does not respond to the individual sound segments known as phonemes - such as the b sound in "boy" - but is instead exquisitely tuned to detect simpler elements, which are known to linguists as "features."

This organization may give listeners an important advantage in interpreting speech, the researchers said, since the articulation of phonemes varies considerably across speakers, and even in individual speakers over time.

The work may add to our understanding of reading disorders, in which printed words are imperfectly mapped onto speech sounds. But because speech and language are a defining human behavior, the findings are significant in their own right, said UCSF neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Edward F. Chang, MD, senior author of the new study.

"This is a very an intriguing glimpse into speech processing," said Chang, associate professor of neurological surgery and physiology. "The brain regions where speech is processed in the brain had been identified, but no one has really known how that processing happens."

Breaking Down Speech into Acoustic Features

Although we usually find it effortless to understand other people when they speak, parsing the speech stream is an impressive perceptual feat.

Speech is a highly complex and variable acoustic signal, and our ability to instantaneously break that signal down into individual phonemes and then build those segments back up into words, sentences and meaning is a remarkable capability.

How Does Your Brain Process Spoken Words?

UCSF scientists placed electrodes on the brains of six volunteers - patients who were going in for epilepsy surgery - and recorded what happened as they listened to 500 unique English sentences spoken by 400 different people.

Watch the video below to see the electrical patterns created in an area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus (STG) when you hear the sentence, "And what eyes they were."

Because of this complexity, previous studies have analyzed brain responses to just a few natural or synthesized speech sounds, but the new research employed spoken natural sentences containing the complete inventory of phonemes in the English language.

To capture the very rapid brain changes involved in processing speech, the UCSF scientists gathered their data from neural recording devices that were placed directly on the surface of the brains of six patients as part of their epilepsy surgery.

The patients listened to a collection of 500 unique English sentences spoken by 400 different people while the researchers recorded from a brain area called the superior temporal gyrus (STG; also known as Wernicke's area), which previous research has shown to be involved in speech perception. The utterances contained multiple instances of every English speech sound.

Many researchers have presumed that brain cells in the STG would respond to phonemes. But the researchers found instead that regions of the STG are tuned to respond to even more elemental acoustic features that reference the particular way that speech sounds are generated from the vocal tract. "These regions are spread out over the STG," said first author Nima Mesgarani, PhD, now an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Chang's laboratory. "As a result, when we hear someone talk, different areas in the brain 'light up' as we hear the stream of different speech elements."

'Like Elements in the Periodic Table'

"Features," as linguists use the term, are distinctive acoustic signatures created when speakers move the lips, tongue or vocal cords.

Nima Mesgarani, PhD

Keith Johnson, PhD

For example, consonants such as p, t, k, b and d require speakers to use the lips or tongue to obstruct air flowing from the lungs. When this occlusion is released, there is a brief burst of air, which has led linguists to categorize these sounds as "plosives." Others, such as s, z and v, are grouped together as "fricatives," because they only partially obstruct the airway, creating friction in the vocal tract.

The articulation of each plosive creates an acoustic pattern common to the entire class of these consonants, as does the turbulence created by fricatives. The Chang group found that particular regions of the STG are precisely tuned to robustly respond to these broad, shared features rather than to individual phonemes like b or z.

Chang said the arrangement the team discovered in the STG is reminiscent of feature detectors in the visual system for edges and shapes, which allow us to recognize objects, like bottles, no matter which perspective we view them from. Given the variability of speech across speakers and situations, it makes sense, said co-author Keith Johnson, PhD, professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, for the brain to employ this sort of feature-based algorithm to reliably identify phonemes.

"It's the conjunctions of responses in combination that give you the higher idea of a phoneme as an complete object," Chang said. "By studying all of the speech sounds in English, we found is that the brain has a systematic organization for basic sound feature units, kind of like elements in the periodic table."

The research team also included Connie Cheung, a UCSF graduate student in bioengineering.

The work was funded by grants to Chang from the National Institutes of Health and the Ester A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund.

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UCSF Team Reveals How the Brain Recognizes Speech Sounds

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UC San Francisco researchers are reporting a detailed account of how speech sounds are identified by the human brain, offering an unprecedented insight into the basis of human language. The finding, they said, may add to our understanding of language disorders, including dyslexia.

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Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research.

The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal "social cues" - such as photographs of Chinese Canadians - can affect how we comprehend speech.

"This research brings to light our internal biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other," says Molly Babel, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor with UBC's Department of Linguistics.

One of the study's tasks involved participants from the UBC community transcribing pre-recorded sentences amid background static. The sentences were recorded by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers self-identified as White, and the other half self-identified as Chinese. All speakers were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., which is south of Vancouver.

The pre-recorded sentences were accompanied by either black and white photos of the speakers, or by an image of three crosses. Overall, listeners found the Chinese Canadians more difficult to understand than the White Canadians - but only when they were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian due to the photo prompt.

Sample audio: "The house had a nice garden" with background static

Sample audio: "The house had a nice garden" without background static

Participants were also asked to rate the strength of the accents of the speakers. They were asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker - one accompanied by the speaker's photo, the other by an image of crosses. "Once participants were aware that they were listening to a White Canadian, suddenly the candidate was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native speaker of Canadian English," says Babel.

"It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry," notes Jamie Russell, the study's co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC's Department of Linguistics during the project.
Background
The study, " Expectations and Speech Intelligibility," is published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The authors are Molly Babel and Jamie Russell, both of UBC's Department of Linguistics.

The study involved five tasks: speech perception in noise, accentedness rating, an implicit measure of ethnic bias, an explicit measure of ethnic bias and a social network self-assessment.

The study was supported by an AMS/UBC Impact Grant, which promotes wellbeing on campus for the student community.

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How racial stereotypes impact the way we communicate

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Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research. The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , highlights how non-verbal "social cues" - such as photographs of Chinese Canadians - can affect how we comprehend speech.

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The world's languages (all 7,097 of them)

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The world's languages (all 7,097 of them)

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A language of Nigeria. Population: 9,970,000, all users. L1 users: 5,470,000 (2015). L2 users: 4,500,000 (2013 SIL). Status: 3 (Wider communication). De facto language of provincial identity in Akwa Ibom, Abia, and Rivers states;...

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A language of Nigeria. Population: 9,970,000, all users. L1 users: 5,470,000 (2015). L2 users: 4,500,000 (2013 SIL). Status: 3 (Wider communication). De facto language of provincial identity in Akwa Ibom, Abia, and Rivers states;...

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Bilingual babies and language acquisition

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Bilingual babies and language acquisition

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In a crowded restaurant, your eyes might drift to your dining companions' lips to make out what they're saying over the din. That's because when speech is hard to make out, lip-reading provides extra clues for comprehension. In a new study of monolingual and bilingual infants, Northeastern University professor David Lewkowicz and colleagues found that babies do the same, shifting their gaze to a speaker's lips when they hear unfamiliar languages. But babies raised in bilingual households spend significantly more time studying the mouth than their monolingual counterparts-which suggests that lip reading could be a vital skill for language learners of all ages.

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What Bilingual Babies Can Teach Us About Language Learning - Science Friday

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In a crowded restaurant, your eyes might drift to your dining companions' lips to make out what they're saying over the din. That's because when speech is hard to make out, lip-reading provides extra clues for comprehension.

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Moral judgments in our first and second languages

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Moral judgments in our first and second languages

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What is uncontroversial is that your reaction to this dilemma should not depend on morally irrelevant aspects of the situation, like what color shirt the large man is wearing, or what the weather is, or whether you are being presented with the dilemma on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday.

But we've got some surprising news. In a study recently published in the journal PloS One, our two research teams, working independently, discovered that when people are presented with the trolley problem in a foreign language, they are more willing to sacrifice one person to save five than when they are presented with the dilemma in their native tongue.

One research team, working in Barcelona, recruited native Spanish speakers studying English (and vice versa) and randomly assigned them to read this dilemma in either English or Spanish. In their native tongue, only 18 percent said they would push the man, but in a foreign language, almost half (44 percent) would do so. The other research team, working in Chicago, found similar results with languages as diverse as Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English and Spanish. For more than 1,000 participants, moral choice was influenced by whether the language was native or foreign. In practice, our moral code might be much more pliable than we think.

Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? The answer, we believe, is reminiscent of Nelson Mandela's advice about negotiation: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." As psychology researchers such as Catherine Caldwell-Harris have shown, in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language.

An aversion to pushing the large man onto the tracks seems to engage a deeply emotional part of us, whereas privileging five lives over one appears to result from a less emotional, more utilitarian calculus. Accordingly, when our participants faced this dilemma in their native tongue, they reacted more emotionally and spared the man. Whereas a foreign language seemed to provide participants with an emotional distance that resulted in the less visceral choice to save the five people.

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What is uncontroversial is that your reaction to this dilemma should not depend on morally irrelevant aspects of the situation, like what color shirt the large man is wearing, or what the weather is, or whether you are being presented with the dilemma on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday.

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Neuroscientists have found that a gene mutation that arose more than half a million years ago may be key to humans' unique ability to produce and understand speech.

Researchers from MIT and several European universities have shown that the human version of a gene called Foxp2 makes it easier to transform new experiences into routine procedures. When they engineered mice to express humanized Foxp2, the mice learned to run a maze much more quickly than normal mice.

The findings suggest that Foxp2 may help humans with a key component of learning language - transforming experiences, such as hearing the word "glass" when we are shown a glass of water, into a nearly automatic association of that word with objects that look and function like glasses, says Ann Graybiel, an MIT Institute Professor, member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and a senior author of the study.

"This really is an important brick in the wall saying that the form of the gene that allowed us to speak may have something to do with a special kind of learning, which takes us from having to make conscious associations in order to act to a nearly automatic-pilot way of acting based on the cues around us," Graybiel says.

Wolfgang Enard, a professor of anthropology and human genetics at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany, is also a senior author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. The paper's lead authors are Christiane Schreiweis, a former visiting graduate student at MIT, and Ulrich Bornschein of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

All animal species communicate with each other, but humans have a unique ability to generate and comprehend language. Foxp2 is one of several genes that scientists believe may have contributed to the development of these linguistic skills. The gene was first identified in a group of family members who had severe difficulties in speaking and understanding speech, and who were found to carry a mutated version of the Foxp2 gene.

In 2009, Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and his team engineered mice to express the human form of the Foxp2 gene, which encodes a protein that differs from the mouse version by only two amino acids. His team found that these mice had longer dendrites - the slender extensions that neurons use to communicate with each other - in the striatum, a part of the brain implicated in habit formation. They were also better at forming new synapses, or connections between neurons.

Pääbo, who is also an author of the new PNAS paper, and Enard enlisted Graybiel, an expert in the striatum, to help study the behavioral effects of replacing Foxp2. They found that the mice with humanized Foxp2 were better at learning to run a T-shaped maze, in which the mice must decide whether to turn left or right at a T-shaped junction, based on the texture of the maze floor, to earn a food reward.

The first phase of this type of learning requires using declarative memory, or memory for events and places. Over time, these memory cues become embedded as habits and are encoded through procedural memory - the type of memory necessary for routine tasks, such as driving to work every day or hitting a tennis forehand after thousands of practice strokes.

Using another type of maze called a cross-maze, Schreiweis and her MIT colleagues were able to test the mice's ability in each of type of memory alone, as well as the interaction of the two types. They found that the mice with humanized Foxp2 performed the same as normal mice when just one type of memory was needed, but their performance was superior when the learning task required them to convert declarative memories into habitual routines. The key finding was therefore that the humanized Foxp2 gene makes it easier to turn mindful actions into behavioral routines.

The protein produced by Foxp2 is a transcription factor, meaning that it turns other genes on and off. In this study, the researchers found that Foxp2 appears to turn on genes involved in the regulation of synaptic connections between neurons. They also found enhanced dopamine activity in a part of the striatum that is involved in forming procedures. In addition, the neurons of some striatal regions could be turned off for longer periods in response to prolonged activation - a phenomenon known as long-term depression, which is necessary for learning new tasks and forming memories.

Together, these changes help to "tune" the brain differently to adapt it to speech and language acquisition, the researchers believe. They are now further investigating how Foxp2 may interact with other genes to produce its effects on learning and language.

This study "provides new ways to think about the evolution of Foxp2 function in the brain," says Genevieve Konopka, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who was not involved in the research. "It suggests that human Foxp2 facilitates learning that has been conducive for the emergence of speech and language in humans. The observed differences in dopamine levels and long-term depression in a region-specific manner are also striking and begin to provide mechanistic details of how the molecular evolution of one gene might lead to alterations in behavior."

The research was funded by the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, and the Max Planck Society.

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Neuroscientists identify key role of language gene

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Neuroscientists have found that a gene mutation that arose more than half a million years ago may be key to humans' unique ability to produce and understand speech. Researchers from MIT and several European universities have shown that the human version of a gene called Foxp2 makes it easier to transform new experiences into routine procedures.

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Code-switching between Indonesian, French and English

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Code-switching between Indonesian, French and English

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Code switching between Indonesian, French and English

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Opinion | Why Bilinguals Are Smarter (Published 2012)

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Being bilingual makes you smarter and can have a profound effect on your brain.

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Capítulo 1: La linguística como ciencia cognitiva

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Capítulo 1: La linguística como ciencia cognitiva

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Mis horas de oficina para Fall 2016 serán los martes y jueves a las 9:30-11:00AM, en BEN 4.102, escritorio #9b.