While the garbled translation of a newspaper article in a foreign language may be nothing more than an annoyance, uses of machine translation technology extend to higher-stakes settings as well: In a hospital emergency room, ...
Apr 3, 2024
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In the most comprehensive genetic study of the people living in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea to date, researchers from Papua New Guinea and the U.K. reveal the complex population structure and migration patterns ...
Mar 19, 2024
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To improve upon current scientific understanding of how our feelings, emotions, and moods relate to and impact human behavior—known in the field as "affective science"—an interdisciplinary task force of 173 scientists ...
Feb 12, 2024
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Students learning medicine must learn a whole new language to allow them to express their clinical impressions to others accurately. In time, this becomes second nature and soon they can be heard babbling away confidently ...
Dec 6, 2022
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Infants can differentiate most sounds soon after birth, and by age 1, they become language-specific listeners. But researchers are still trying to understand how babies recognize which acoustic dimensions of their language ...
Sep 19, 2022
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The brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, researchers from the ...
Jul 14, 2022
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Disadvantaged communities not only suffer disproportionately from COVID, they are even more likely to be impacted by the cascading effects of long COVID.
Jun 20, 2022
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With the new year on the way, no doubt many headlines will be urging readers to set resolutions to lose the weight they may have put on over the holidays. However, the way the British press talks about weight, obesity and ...
Dec 14, 2021
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Bilingual people can effortlessly switch between languages during everyday interactions. But beyond its usefulness in communication, being bilingual could affect how the brain works and enhance certain abilities. Studies ...
Jan 12, 2021
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Visual cues can change listeners' perception of others' accents, and people's past exposure to varied speech can also impact their perception of accents.
Dec 9, 2020
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Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context.
The first is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.
The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).
Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.
Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and intersect with it. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
