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Michele W. Berger
Senior Science News Officer
mwberger@upenn.edu
Linguist Gareth Roberts of the School of Arts & Sciences uses “alien” languages and interactive games to show how social pressures shape our communication.
By analyzing Facebook posts, Penn researchers found that words associated with depression are often tied to emotions, whereas those associated with loneliness are linked to cognition.
This summer, rising second-years Audrey Keener and Nicholas Eiffert worked in the lab of Penn linguist Jianjing Kuang studying vowel articulation in song, running an in-person experiment and built a corpus of classical recordings by famous singers.
The GSE master’s student from Uganda taught the first ever course on this language in the spring of 2022. This fall the program continues with another intro class, followed by an advanced class next spring.
The open-access, online-only Glossa Psycholinguistics recently published its inaugural issue after more than two years of effort from Penn linguist Florian Schwarz and colleagues around the world.
Research from postdoc Lacey Wade confirmed this idea, what she calls expectation-driven convergence, in a controlled experiment for the first time. The work reveals just how much the subconscious factors into the way people speak.
Since the 1980s, linguist Eugene Buckley has studied this Native American language, now spoken by just a dozen or so people in northern California. In collaboration with members and descendants of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, he’s built a database of Kashaya words, sounds, and stories.
Season three of the School of Arts & Sciences podcast explores scientific ideas that get big reactions.
Researchers led by postdoc Colin Twomey and professor Joshua Plotkin developed an algorithm that can infer the communicative needs different linguistic communities place on colors.
Largely characterized as a Gen Z phenomenon, TikTok is a video-sharing app with more than 100 million active users in the U.S. alone—and it’s changing the way that we speak, says sociolinguist Nicole Holliday.
Michele W. Berger
Senior Science News Officer
mwberger@upenn.edu
Dani S. Bassett of the School of Arts & Sciences speaks on their new book, “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection,” co-authored with identical twin Perry Zurn, which investigates the foundations of curiosity.
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William Labov of the School of Arts & Sciences notes that while some Native American accents are fading, others are growing stronger.
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Lacey Wade of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about a phenomenon called “linguistic convergence” when people copy word choices, mirror sentence structures, or mimic pronunciations.
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Nicole Holliday of the School of Arts & Sciences interviewed experts about cooperative overlapping, which some cultures perceive as a sign of engagement and others view as a sign of disrespect.
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Nicole Holliday of the School of Arts & Sciences co-hosted a podcast episode about linguistics and TikTok.
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Gareth Roberts of the School of Arts & Sciences weighed in on a linguistic study that found that people can use vocal sounds to mimic parts of the idea they’re trying to convey, such using chewing noises to evoke the word “food.”
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