The three features of the computer technology that are relevant to the presentation phase of the instructional cycle are multimedia, easy access and timing control. We will now examine the application of these three features in turn.

Multimedia presentation, which render CALL programs far superior to conventional textbooks, have been used to various extent in all CALL programs . All programs mentioned in this paper feature digital audio. Half of the programs (ABC, HC, PIC, SC, WL) feature animated demonstration of character writing. ABC, PIC use animation and PM uses movie clips to demonstrate the production of speech sounds. WL uses still graphics to show character shapes at various historical time periods. TRS depends solely on graphics to convey meanings. But despite the potential presentational advantages of CALL programs, the basic format of presentation remains similar to conventional textbooks. In most of the programs referred to in this paper, the initial presentation is still done mostly with the written form, either in romanization or in Chinese script. Meanings are also mostly conveyed with English glosses.

Why is it a problem to present with the written form? Most importantly, speech is primary while writing is secondary. The question is not whether written representation should be used but when to introduce the written form relative to the spoken form. With a human teacher, the spoken form can be introduced before the written form; in a conventional textbook, the spoken form cannot be presented without the written form. But there is no need for CALL programs to put up with the limitations of the print medium. As programs already provide audio along with the written form, it is then just as easy to present the spoken form without the written form. One program that does allow audio-first presentation is TRS, which clearly separates text and voice and offers all the possible combinations, such as text with voice, text without voice and voice without text. The second problem with pure written presentation is the assumption of literacy, which cannot always be made. So if someone does not know romanization or characters, it does not mean that s/he does not know how to speak, and vice versa. This realization can be especially important in a testing situation, where the validity of the test can be compromised by a mixing of skills.

The problem with the exclusive use of English glosses to convey meaning is that it is indirect as well as possibly misleading. Admittedly, CALL programs are not particularly worse than conventional textbooks, which do the same thing. But CALL programs can have many more resources than a conventional textbook. A more direct mode of presentation, especially for concrete vocabulary, is eminently possible. An early program developed by Yao and Mowry, modestly named Miss Li and Mr. Wang, uses simple animation to teach the action verbs for dressing and undressing⁸. Of the programs mentioned in this paper, TRS's conveying of meanings is exclusively with pictures. PIC uses pictures to convey meanings in both the flashcard stack and the interactive vocabulary builder.

The easy access allowed by the computer has a number of desirable consequences for presentation. It allows instant retrieval of help for pronunciation and comprehension, with the simple 'when in doubt, click' format. We can thus avoid the pre-teaching of vocabulary, which is out of context and can miss the target altogether due to individual differences in learner backgrounds. The easy availability of help also enables, paradoxically, the option of hiding the help initially, hence making it possible for the learner to challenge themselves. Furthermore, since every grammatical and vocabulary item in a lesson can be linked to a shared pool of glosses and explanations, an extreme form of redundancy and recycling is possible. This redundancy and recycling further encourages learner-choice in lesson selection and sequencing.

The programs reviewed here make use of the easy access feature to various extents. For example, while ABC, HC, PIC and SC opt to present part or whole of a dialog on the screen, CX presents it one sentence at a time, in a sequential fashion. Obviously, it is harder for a CX user to locate a particular word or sentence. While most programs do not pre-teach vocabulary, HC presents the vocabulary separately, before the dialogs, thus taking the vocabulary out of context and making it hard to provide help for every linguistic item in the dialogs. While SC, ABC and PIC provide on-line vocabulary and grammar explanation only when requested, HC uses such optional on-line help for grammar only and opts to provide glosses to words and sentences obligatorily, thus missing an opportunity to challenge the learner. Programs also differ in exploiting the maximum redundancy the easy access feature makes possible. With no graded lessons of its own, WL has to provide instant lookup to every word and character. Though their vocabulary help is a bit hard to use, ABC and PIC also provide glosses for every character and word in the text. SC , however, provides vocabulary help for only pre-determined new words and expressions. By having pre-determined vocabulary for every lesson, HC also does not provide maximum redundancy.

Timing, impossible to do in a printed textbook, has been used in some CALL programs. Users of CCT can opt to incorporate delay of different amount in the presentation of audio, text or characters. It too uses user-selectable time limit in its tests. In its vocabulary drills, HC uses delay in presenting the audio or the written form. The use of delay introduces the element of challenge without actually turning it into a test.

Peace

The wind is now

a roaring, smashing

monster of destruction,

raking all man's work

from the valleys,

from the vales,

and sends them spinning,

broken flying -

but all of that is

not its core,

its center is in truth

eternal stillness

bright blue skies

and all you hear

are gentle whispers

far away

and unimportant.

by Silvia Hartmann

Introduction to the Metaphor Poem Examples

Let's face it - there is no such thing as a poem that is NOT a metaphor. But people keep asking me about metaphor poems, what they are, and to give examples of metaphor poetry.

So for the beginners amongst us, let's start with the observation that some poems are one single metaphor all the way through, and others use a variety of different metaphors to describe one single thing.

Remember that all language, symbol and metaphor are seeking to describe a REALITY THAT EXISTS for real and outside any one single human being. If you try and reach through the words and the images the metaphor is calling up to the REALITY BEYOND those things, you can get the drift of the ESSENCE of what is being transmitted in a metaphor poem.

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day ..?

To start with, here is probably the most famous example of metaphor poetry in the English language, namely Sonnet 18 by "William Shakespeare" whoever that may have been:

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day
Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The cool thing is that old Will doesn't tell us who "thee" would be when they are at home, and leaves it up to the metaphor to explain it to us.

This poem is a riddle, and nicely done at that. But it is easy to solve if we just take the information as is:

What is the one thing about a person that is immortal and grows in eternal lines through time?

The question at the front of this poem is the "set up", the starting point into the metaphorical domain: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

If you want to have some fun, take that same topic and ask another question.

"Shall I compare thee to a golden horse? Thou art more lovely and more fleet of foot! Thou can't be caught, thou can't be caged, thou can't be ridden - free thou flyest over hill and vale ..."

The basic pattern of "Shall I compare thee ..." allows you to GENERATE metaphor poetry at will, so this teaching poem by Will is in a nutshell what metaphor poems are all about.

The title of this article is from an old Russian proverb yet it is very true today in all cultures of the world. It is not the circumstances that you are in that determine your outcome. Given the same circumstances some people thrive while others perish. Let's look at how to thrive.

In the title above the hammer represents the challenges of life, the glass represents the people who are defeated by those challenges and the steel represents the people who use those same challenges to forge a stronger character and go on to become all that they can be.

What is it that the steel people have and the glass people do not have?

Firstly the steel people believe that they can control their own destiny.

Some of these people are totally self reliant and believe that they hold inside themselves the ability to achieve whatever they want to achieve regardless of the roadblocks and challenges that they encounter along the way.

Others believe that there is a higher power that determines their outcomes but that if they ask for the help of this higher power then it will give them all the strength and potential they need in order to achieve their goals regardless of the circumstances or setbacks. All they have to do is then apply that strength and potential to overcome the roadblocks and challenges.

Even though the two beliefs are very different from the perspective of who wields the ultimate power they are identical from the perspective that it is the person himself or herself that thinks the appropriate thoughts and takes the appropriate actions to bring their goal into reality regardless of circumstances.

The glass people tend to see themselves as being at the mercy of their circumstances. Whether they believe these circumstances are controlled by a higher power or by predetermined fate or by pure luck they still believe that they need favorable circumstances in order to achieve.

If you believe that the circumstances hold the ultimate power then you never do more than 'try' to overcome them. The word 'try' has an implication of failing. The steel people never 'try'. The steel people persist and brainstorm and take action until they are successful.

Because the glass people have the underlying model that circumstance hold the power then they are prone to offering excuses to themselves and to others. Excuses are a means to shift responsibility away from yourself and to put it onto something that is beyond your control. Excuses are a way of avoiding doing what it takes to succeed.

The steel people aren't into excuses. The steel people take total responsibility for their own outcomes whether those outcomes are good or bad. When you take total responsibility then you are empowering yourself to triumph over circumstances and achieve your goals.

By taking responsibility the steel people have to develop their own character in order to equip it with the tools for success. They forge the steel by becoming more than they were before they encountered the challenge. They follow the philosophy of working for a stronger back rather than wishing for a lighter load.

The glass people use their mental energy wishing that circumstances would be kinder to them. They assume that the people who do better in life do so because they have a lighter load or because they were born rich enough to be given their own forklift to carry the load for them.

If you choose to be a glass person then your life is in the hands of fate but if you choose to be a steel person your life is in your own hands and anything is possible for you. Which have you been choosing to be in your life; glass or steel?

You don't have to be suicidal or depressed to be a threat to yourself. Sometimes, as performance anxiety or status anxiety pushes us to do more and be more, we lead ourselves down a dangerous path. Athletes, in particular, are always eager to push themselves to limit to win in highly competitive sports. They often risk what seems like little things, such as knee pain or muscle spasms, just to see if they can raise the level of their game just one notch above their competition. While this is an excellent celebration of the competitive spirit and the human ability to improve one's self, it can also sometimes end up becoming the first step down the spiral of self-destruction.

Some observers have noted that modern civilization, with its intense focus on competition and achieving dominance, has put people and organizations along that downward spiral. No place is self-destructive behavior more prominent than in the arena of sports. In sports such as American football, baseball, and basketball, more and more athletes are coming under fire for taking performance enhancers such as anabolic steroids to enhance their physique and athletic performance. The trouble is that these athletes also develop addictions to muscle relaxants. The intense focus on becoming better and better has driven some to engage in training regimens that their bodies can't handle. Sure, they are capable of ignoring the lower back pain or the attacks of chronic pain in their joints for a while, but it eventually adds up. Observers note that it only gets worse the more exposure an athlete gets, as the media puts even more pressure on them than the sport does.

In the field of entertainment, the self-destruction is not only recorded by the media for all to see but, in some ways, even marketed. The media is constantly pushing people to appear more and more like the waif-like celebrities they admire, subconsciously causing them to follow suit. As the obsession with getting as thin as possible takes hold, everything from weight loss pills to unhealthy fad diets are used and abused by not only the general population, but also the celebrities themselves. Unlike the self-destructive tendencies of athletes, the tendencies present among celebrities stems more from vanity and fashion than the desire to attain a higher level of physical prowess. While it is arguable on whether or not athletes are actually improving themselves with their actions, it is clear that the extreme dieting that the media espouses is unhealthy and fatal.

Ordinary people also seem to be affected by this unusual tendency towards self-destruction, albeit in an entirely different manner. While celebrities and athletes that are on the path of self-destruction tend to be doing it in a physical manner of their own will, most people who are self-destructive are such because of outside factors. The stress and anxiety of work, the pressure to perform both as a member of society and as an individual, and the stress of dealing with the daily paradoxes of life are starting to take more and more tolls from the average person. Statistics show that more and more people are developing a variety of mental health disorders, with depression, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia being the most common. Some observers have noted this and have connected it to the nature of modern life, which puts people under such tremendous social, professional, and emotional pressure that the “breaking point” is being crossed more and more often.

While it is highly pessimistic to assume that this self-destruction is as widespread as some claim, it is rather alarming. There are more and more news reports claiming that athletes are engaging in dangerous training regimens and abusing various medications. Celebrities and models are progressively getting thinner and thinner, despite the constant warnings otherwise. In contrast, obesity is at an all-time high among the general population, despite the widespread availability ofweight loss pills . Finally driving the issues home is the increasing number of people who have experienced or are experiencing some form of mental health disorder. The situation is not nearly as negative as some put it out to be, but there is a distinct possibility that it is getting there.

What is the West? Who are parts of the West? Or who defines the West? There have been endless questions on the western world and its various aspects. Practically speaking, the word ‘West’ does not hold an international definition; it is a social, cultural and political concept passed down through ages to its present day connotation.

Ordinarily speaking, the Western world comprises the cultures and values of the people, who are direct descendants of the European culture. Europe, North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are some cultures which constitutethe West . There is a common thread running between all of them—they have common history, religion, values, beliefs and other traditions. And the whole ofthe West, taken together, with all its prosperity and failings, have cast a deep influence on other cultures worldwide.

The diverse aspects of the West have gradually seeped into other cultures with time. And the influence is so humongous that modernization has become synonymous with westernization. Huge number of cultural groups have adopted Western values and living in their day-to-day lives. And this has led to a lot of debate time and again. Like all big things,the West also has its good influences and bad. Some look down upon the influences of western civilization with contempt, while others religiously follow their footsteps.

The West has always been the nerve-center for major technological progresses and social evolution. The Westerners keep adding to their cultures and traditions every day and is never static. This practice of continuity and constant evolution has been imbibed by the cultures worldwide. The entire human race takes part in new discoveries, new cultural phenomena, new pieces of art and literature, new ideologies, and many more.

The West has been particularly influential in propagating intellectual freedom and individualism, both socially and politically. Being a democratic society, it lays the foundation to the supremacy of the individual. Even capitalism, which has its roots in thewestern world, is linked to the individualistic preferences of the West . Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of life, and more, are all distributaries of mainstream western ideologies. This, in turn, has inspired the rest of the world to become individualistic and socially, politically, and culturally emancipated.

The freedom of the western civilisation finds palpable expression in consumerism, which again has Western origins. Consumerism that was in a molecular form with the Occident has now grown to such an extent that people are no longer voracious consumers by choice, but by natural need.

Apart from all these, global influences of the West can also be traced in areas, such as gender equality, civil rights, intellectual freedom, etc. Cultures will continue to grow and perish in the coming centuries, but the deep-rooted impact of the West will, perhaps, never phase out.


Wain Roy is an internet marketing professional expert in various industries like real estate, web design, finance, medical tourism and western civilisation

The traditional culture of Korea is historically shared by North Korea and South Korea. Nevertheless, the current political separation of the north and the south of the peninsula results in some regional variance in the Korean culture. The different aspects of Korean culture, society, and customs can be observed by taking an in-depth look into life in Korea.

Oriental Astrology : Oriental astrology assigns twelve animals according to the year of ones birth. It is opposite to western astrology which goes by the month of ones birth. Koreans have firm belief that ones animal determines ones personality and fate. Each year holds different things in store for each animal.

Korean Buddhism : Buddhism was originated in India over 2,600 years ago. This religion was introduced to Korea by the travelers around the fourth century A.D. Since that time, Buddhism has greatly influenced Korean society, culture, and the arts.

Traditional Alcohol : Korea has created unique alcohols using rice malt.

Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) : The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the symbol of the ideological dispute between North and South Korea and poignant reminder of the Korean War (1950-53), winds 155 miles across the Korean Peninsula. An uneasy truce continues between the antagonists, but no peace treaty has ever been signed. Review the Korean War and the various parts of the DMZ.

Taekwondo : Taekwondo is one of the most systematic and scientific of Korean traditional martial arts. This modern sport has gained an international reputation and has been included among the official sports in the Olympic Games.

Rice Cakes (Deok) : Korean traditional cakes have great importance on many occasions of happiness and sorrow. These cakes have long been shared among neighbors and friends on these special occasions.The cake shape, content, and color vary from one region to another.

Samulnori : basically means "four instruments" and refers to the four instruments (kwaengwari, jing, janggu, buk) played by the musicians. It has roots in Buddhist and folk music. However, the style has changed through the years and evolved in different ways. Samulnori is the name of the traditional musical group. This group has great contributions in reviving interest in Korean traditional arts.

Traditional Patterns and Symbols : Korean people traditionally adapted to and found meaning in the order of nature. They have created beautiful and diverse patterns in order to teach the hidden meanings of nature to their children. They also want their children to believe nature as law and order in their daily lives. These patterns can be found in every aspect of Korean life, from the Taegeuk in the national flag to the animal designs on chopsticks in restaurants. Many symbols are similar to the Chinese characters for luck, fortune, longevity, and fertility.

Traditional Tools and Utensils : Many Korean traditional tools and utensils look very similar to those found in other agricultural societies: stone mills for grinding grains into powder, weaving looms for making clothes, and measuring tools for dispensing agricultural products. Korea also has many tools and utensils made from bamboo and straw.

Kimchi : Most people think Kimchi as Korea’s firey hot and red food .Kimchi has many nutrients. Over the years, Koreans have created many types of foods from kimchi.

Child's First Birthday : (Tol) The death rate for children in Korea was extremely high in the last few years. A great number of children were failed to survive the first year of life. As a result, the first birthday marked a major milestone in a child's life. The ceremony of the Tol celebrates the child's life with praying for longevity, preparation of special food to be shared with family members and neighbors, and a special event which is supposed to foretell the child's future.

Traditional Marriage : Marriage in Korea like any other culture represents one of the major stages of ones life. Ceremonies vary according to the region where they are performed and the social status of the participants. However, they all follow the same basic format.

Traditional Clothing : Korean traditional clothing is both brilliant in its bright colorings and subdued in its flowing lines and the way it hides the body shape. During national holidays and festive occasions, the colorful national costume hanbok is worn. The designs and colors of the various forms represent the rich culture and society of traditional Korea.

Festivals of the lunar calendar : The Korean lunar calendar is divided into 24 turning points (jeolgi), each lasting about 15 days. Traditional festivals are still celebrated according to the lunar calendar. The biggest of which is the New Year's Day (gujeong). Other important festivals include the first full moon (jeongwol daeboreum), the spring festival (dano) and the harvest festival (chuseok). Older generations still celebrate their birthdays according to the lunar calendar.

youthink.com

I realize that I may be young, but that does not preclude me from making judgments on society. Let’s face it. Everything in life as society knows it is controlled by what others think of you. If an interviewer doesn’t think you fit the professional, educated, capable mold that they’re looking for, you aren’t going to get hired. If a customer doesn’t feel think you are qualified to sell them a product, you aren’t going to get that sale. Everything is based on perception and judgment. Often times, I find myself having this one conversation with my oldest sister. She has her group of female friends and I have my group of male friends. She’s also been made well aware of my prejudice against most females in my age bracket (18-29). Normally, the retort she uses is “It’s not wise to hate more than half of the population” or “Your development is sorely lacking if you can’t develop the patience to tolerate other women.” It didn’t occur to me until about two hours before I sat down to write this that her view is affected by the noticeable age gap between us. She’s in her fifties. Society has changed a lot, especially women. Feminism had already been born a considerable time before I and my peers were. And so, we are the product of the earthquake. Consider us the aftershocks if you will. I can’t really tell you what exactly messed up the whole “woman’s movement”, but I can tell you what kind of disastrous effects it’s had on the female society of the world. I don’t have a degree in sociology and I haven’t conducted mass amounts of interviews. Do you know what qualifies me to speak on the subject? Years and years of sitting back and watching others, those are my credentials.

There are two types of feminism that exist in this world: True Feminism and Popular Feminism. The latter is the kind that’s lead society straight to the sewer. True Feminism is the pursuit of equal terms, acceptance and fairness. Popular Feminism seems to translate into the belief that all men are dogs; women have the right to be promiscuous; and as long as the woman is in total control, she’s independent. First of all let’s deal with this crap about sex and double standards. It’s the biggest joke ever created. The argument is that a man can go out and fornicate with twenty women and he’s labeled “the man” by his boys and women call him a “dog” while a woman can do the same thing with twenty men and men call her a whore. What are her girls calling her? An “independent woman” who goes after what she wants. If she wants to get laid, she goes out and gets laid. What possible double standard is there? Double standards only come into play when women as a group call the chick a “whore” and the man “Casanova”. This day and age women have locked onto this perversion of feminism that is both dangerous and degrading. Being an “independent woman” doesn’t mean going to a club and hitting on a man before he hits on you and then going home to have sex with him. Being an “independent woman” does not mean dating older men to use them for their money, which is in effect turning you into a whore. Being an “independent woman” means educating yourself. It means being self-supportive financially. It means taking steps to achieve your goals and building a family.

By Meghan O'Rourke

In The Feminine Mystique, the late Betty Friedan attributed the malaise of married women largely to traditionalist marriages in which wives ran the home and men did the bread-winning. Her book helped spark the sexual revolution of the 1970s and fueled the notion that egalitarian partnerships—where both partners have domestic responsibilities and pursue jobs—would make wives happier. Last week, two sociologists at the University of Virginia published an exhaustive study of marital happiness among women that challenges this assumption. Stay-at-home wives, according to the authors, are more content than their working counterparts. And happiness, they found, has less to do with division of labor than with the level of commitment and "emotional work" men contribute (or are perceived to contribute). But the most interesting data may be that the women who strongly identify as progressive—the 15 percent who agree most with feminist ideals—have a harder time being happy than their peers, according to an analysis that has been provided exclusively to Slate. Feminist ideals, not domestic duties, seem to be what make wives morose. Progressive married women—who should be enjoying some or all of the fruits that Freidan lobbied for—are less happy, it would appear, than women who live as if Friedan never existed.

Of course, conclusions like these are never cut-and-dried. This study is based on surveys conducted between 1992 and 1994, and measuring marital happiness is a little like trying to quantify sex appeal. But the data are nonetheless worth pausing over, especially if, like me, you've long subscribed to the view that so-called companionate couples have the best chance at sustaining a happy partnership. Among all the married women surveyed, 52 percent of homemakers considered themselves very happy. Yet only 45 percent of the most progressive-minded homemakers considered themselves happy. This might not seem surprising—presumably, many progressive women prefer to work than stay at home. But the difference in happiness persists even among working wives. Forty-one percent of all the working wives surveyed said they were happy, compared with 38 percent of the progressive working wives. The same was the case when it came to earnings. Forty-two percent of wives who earned one-third or more of the couple's income reported being happy, compared with 34 percent of progressive women in the same position. Perhaps the progressive women had hoped to earn more. But they wereless happy than their peers about being a primary breadwinner—though you might expect the opposite. Across the board, progressive women are less likely to feel content, whether they are working or at home, and no matter how much they are making.

What's really going on here? The conservative explanation, of course, is that the findings suggest that women don't know what they really want (as John Tierney implied in the New York Times, and Charlotte Allen suggested in theLos Angeles Times). Feminism, they argue, has only undermined the sturdy institution of marriage for everyone. The feminist and liberal argument is that reality hasn't yet caught up to women's expectations. Women have entered the workforce, but men still haven't picked up the domestic slack—working wives continue to do 70 percent or more of the housework, according to one study. If you work hard and come home and find you have to do much more than your husband does, it's little wonder that you would be angry and frustrated.

By the thirteenth century, the English had learned that the Welsh were treacherous and fickle. (1) In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the English trembled when the Welsh both raided English territory and produced an alarming increase in the number of settlers migrating into English border counties. (2) After the widespread Welsh uprising in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the English realized that the Welsh were not the submissive and deferential natives they had feigned to be, but were a perfidious people, on par with the wild Irish. (3) These "insights" into the nature of the Welsh were widely held perceptions among the English in the late Middle Ages. Lest the English forget that the Welsh possessed these characteristics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) was prepared to remind them.

SGGK was thoroughly tied to England's colonial project in Wales when the poem was composed. SGGK is typically dated between 1350 and 1400 (a common ascription being the last quarter of the fourteenth century), a period during which the English were attempting to complete their colonization of Wales, while the Welsh violently opposed such domination. Resembling several Arthurian histories from medieval Britain, (4) SGGK is structured by these colonial conflicts and, appropriately, arises from a border culture: the poem is conventionally believed to have been composed in northwest England, alongside the Welsh border, and employs a northwest midlands dialect, specifically, the dialect of Lancashire and Cheshire. Appropriately, the bulk of SGGK's narrative action unfolds in the English-Welsh borderland. This location is specified at the beginning of Gawain's quest to find the Green Knight. Gawain initially journeys through the realm of Logres (England, south of the Humber) (5) and eventually reaches northern Wales. Gawain passes the Anglesey Islands, fords rivers near the headlands, crosses at Holy Head, and lands "In [thorn]e wyldrenesse of Wyrale" ("In the wilderness of Wirral," 701), (6) a peninsula just inside England, by the northeastern border of Wales. Gawain is in Wirral when Bertilak's castle magically appears, making SGGK a border romance.

This article investigates SGGK's participation in colonial struggles between the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century. As the models of ideology employed in British cultural studies attest, a text does not simply reflect the political climate in which it is composed but intervenes in the political terrain and participates in the production of the social formation. Hence, using a methodology in dialogue with Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci, (7) this article examines how the ideologies speaking through SGGK attempted to reformulate readers' conceptions of themselves and of their neighbors and thus shape their perceptions of how to negotiate English-Welsh conflicts.

The defining work of SGGK in relation to England's colonization of Wales is that of Patricia Clare Ingham, and we disagree dramatically about how to understand the English-Welsh negotiations embedded in the poem. Ingham argues that, as the poem unfolds, the issues surrounding colonization raised early in the text disappear and that the ethnic and geographic disparities between the English and the Welsh in the first half of the poem collapse to be replaced by gender difference. (8) I maintain that SGGK insists throughout the entire poem--as did, in general, the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century--that the two peoples differed greatly. Ethnic and geographic incongruities are not effaced as SGGK unfolds, but are reinscribed at the locus of gender--more precisely, at the site of female sexuality--in a conventional move that acts to further elaborate and consolidate colonial power by buttressing ideologies of colonialism with ideologies of gender.

This divergence points to a more fundamental disagreement between Ingham's work and my own. We understand the English colonization of the Welsh, and hence the poem's colonialist politics, very differently. Ingham writes,

    Welsh and English interaction in march towns, at regional    marketplaces, on the battlefield, or in the narrative tropes of a    Middle English poem become the multiple places where unity is forged    from ethnic heterogeneities. Colonial union becomes an act of cultural    synchronicity, a coordination of capitulation ... Rhetorics of    distance and differentiation-the desire to separate "Welsheries" from    "Englishries" in late medieval histories, or in the case before us to    determine once and for all which parts of Gawain are Welsh or    English--efface the familiarities, shared dreamings, common spaces of    household and story. (9)  

Ingham views the intermixing of the Welsh and English (in the poem and in Wales) as the creation of a hybridity, a conflation which is, for the most part, a reasonably pleasant cultural and geographical commingling. Rhonda Knight's work on SGGK and colonization also centers on hybridity, insisting that Gawain's identity is a "cultural collage" and that Bertilak embodies Anglo-Welsh hybridity, reflective of the border region. (10) Knight acknowledges the harshness of England's seizure of Wales but claims that by the time SGGK was composed, the intensity of conquest and occupation had subsided to be replaced by a more settled coexistence. (11) Hence, both Knight and Ingham seem unaware that the English conquest of the Welsh in the late fourteenth century was frequently bloody: many Welshmen and women were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods; and many were killed by the invaders. Focusing more strongly on consensual relations than coercive ones, Ingham roots her discussion in the dialectical (specifically in Homi Bhabha's formulation of mimicry); (12) but when discussing a dialectic, it is important to emphasize that two disparate groups do not approach their convergence on equal terms, as Ingham's work frequently seems to imply. As Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall argue, when a dominant group seeks to produce hegemony, there is a dialectic, where, in order to be effective, the ruling group must take account of the interests and tendencies of the subaltern groups over whom hegemony will be exercised. However, such compromise does not imply equity, and the two groups do not contribute equally to the production of the new social formation. (13) Ingham and Knight make the power relations in the poem and in Wales seem more equitable and especially more palatable, I would argue, than they indeed were. As the historical discussion in this article will demonstrate, relations between the Welsh and the colonizing English--including in northeastern Wales and in the Marches in the southeast (14)--were generally bitter in the second half of the fourteenth century. Accordingly, rather than arguing for the leveling of dissimilarities and the liquidation of "ethnic heterogeneities ... into nothing more than the differences of an extended family," as Ingham holds (15) or for some collage of identities as Knight maintains, this article argues that SGGK insists that the Welsh and the English are two distinct groups and that the poem promoted England's conquest of Wales.

“WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

“Where are your books?–that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

“You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!”

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

“The eye–it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.

“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

“–Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,”

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (16 March 2009) -- Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published today in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE.

According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.

Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.

Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and "because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap."

The aim of this study was to look at two specific reading subskills – vocabulary and verbal sequencing – which, according to the authors, are "are cornerstone components in the continuum of literacy development and a window into the subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills such as decoding and reading comprehension."

Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.

Children in the intervention school (n=46) studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program. Children attending the control school (n=57) received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study. Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.

All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure.

Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group. This finding, conclude the authors, provides evidence to support the increasingly common practice of "educators incorporating a variety of approaches, including music, in their teaching practice in continuing efforts to improve reading achievement in children".

However, further interpretation of the results revealed some complexity within the overall outcomes. An interesting observation was that when the study began, the music-learning group had already experienced two years of piano lessons yet their reading scores were nearly identical to the control group at the start of the experiment.

So, ask the authors, "If the children receiving piano instruction already had two years of music involvement, why did they not significantly outscore the musically naïve students on both measures at the outset?" Addressing previous findings showing that music instruction has been demonstrated to exert cortical changes in certain cognitive areas such as spatial-temporal performance fairly quickly, Piro and Ortiz propose three factors to explain the lack of evidence of early benefit for music in the present study.

First, children were tested for their baseline reading skills at the beginning of the school year, after an extended holiday period. Perhaps the absence of any music instruction during a lengthy summer recess may have reversed any earlier temporary cortical reorganization experienced by students in the music group, a finding reported in other related research. Another explanation could be that the duration of music study required to improve reading and associated skills is fairly long, so the initial two years were not sufficient.

A third explanation involves the specific developmental time period during which children were receiving the tuition. During the course of their third year of music lessons, the music-learning group was in second grade and approaching the age of seven. There is evidence that there are significant spurts of brain growth and gray matter distribution around this developmental period and, coupled with the increased complexity of the study matter in this year, brain changes that promote reading skills may have been more likely to accrue at this time than in the earlier two years.

"All of this adds a compelling layer of meaning to the experimental outcomes, perhaps signalling that decisions on 'when' to teach are at least as important as 'what' to teach when probing differential neural pathways and investigating their associative cognitive substrates," note the authors.

"Study of how music may also assist cognitive development will help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined 'music makes you smarter' claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive areas," they conclude.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Forget about unreliable polygraph lie detectors for identifying liars. A new study claims the best way to find out if someone is a liar is to look at their handwriting, rather than analyzing their word choice, eye movements and body language.

The study by Gil Luria and Sara Rosenblum from the University of Haifa in Israel, tested 34 volunteers, who were each asked to write two stories using a system called ComPET (Computerized Penmanship Evaluation Tool), which comprises a piece of paper positioned on a computer tablet and a wireless electronic pen with a pressure-sensitive tip. Using the system, the subjects wrote one paragraph about a true memory, and one that was made up.

The researchers analyzed the writing and discovered that in the untrue paragraphs the subjects on average pressed down harder on the paper and made significantly longer strokes and taller letters than in the true paragraphs. The differences were not visible to the eye, but were detectable by computer analysis. There were no differences in writing speed.

The scientists suggest that handwriting changes because the brain is forced to work harder since it is inventing information, and this interferes with normal writing.

People hesitate when they lie, Dr Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire told the Daily Mail, and some companies use this knowledge to check how long people take to tick boxes in online surveys. The new research is promising, he said, but needs larger scale testing.

The study was published in the Applied Cognitive Psychology journal. Research is in its early stages but ComPET could one day find practical application in testing the truthfulness of handwritten insurance claims or loan applications, or in handwriting tests during job interviews. Handwriting analyses could also be combined with lie detectors to identify whether or not people were lying.

by: Danielle Moore

Learning their community language outside the home enhances minority ethnic children's development, according to research led from the University of Birmingham. The research, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that attending language classes at complementary schools has a positive impact on students.

Complementary schools provide out-of-school-hours community language learning for children and young people from minority groups. They aim to develop students' multilingualism, strengthen the link between home and the community, and connect them with wider social networks. The study found that the parents believed that bilingualism had economic benefits for their children as it improved their chances of success in the global jobs market.

According to Angela Creese, Professor of Educational Linguistics, who led the research, there is a growing interest in complementary schools because they are unique, offering students the opportunity to develop their verbal and written language skills across a variety of languages 'It is rare to find an environment where two or more languages are used in teaching and learning,' she explains. 'Teachers and young people move between languages, and our findings show that the children are proud of their flexible language skills. One Turkish boy told us he was learning four languages and loved being able to show off to his friends.'

The research builds on an earlier study of complementary schools in Leicester that found significant evidence of the value of these schools. Consisting of linked case studies of schools serving four of Britain's linguistic minority communities, the study focused on Bengali schools in Birmingham, Chinese schools in Manchester, Gujarati schools in Leicester, and Turkish schools in London. It explored the social, cultural and linguistic significance of these schools in their communities and in wider society.

The findings highlight the general view among minority communities that children need to study language, heritage and culture at school rather than in isolation at home. A Chinese parent told the researchers that children who were taught by private tutors had a limited experience: 'They need to learn with other kids, to see how other children learn, their attitudes and so on. Then they can decide for themselves what kind of person they should be.'

The research team found that, for students in complementary schools, being bilingual is associated with contemporary, cosmopolitan identities. Students often see themselves as 'successful learners' as well as 'multicultural' and 'bilingual', the report says. 'Teachers and students alike see the complementary schools as places where they can develop multicultural, multilingual identities', says Professor Creese.

Babies who use gestures to communicate when they are 14 months old have much larger vocabularies when they start school than those who don't, say US researchers.

They say babies with wealthier, better-educated parents tend to gesture more and this may help explain why some children from low-income families fare less well in school.

"When children enter school, there is a large socioeconomic gap in their vocabularies," says the University of Chicago's Dr Meredith Rowe, whose study appears in the journal Science.

Gestures could help explain the difference, Rowe told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago.

Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success. Earlier research shows that well-off, educated parents tend to talk to their children more than their poorer, less-educated peers.

"What we are doing here is going one step earlier and asking, does this socioeconomic status relate to gesture, and can that explain some of the gap we see at school entry," says Rowe.

Early foundations

The researchers filmed 50 Chicago-area children and parents from diverse economic backgrounds and counted the number of gestures, such as pointing at a picture.

The team found that 14-month-olds from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings during each 90-minute session, compared with 13 meanings conveyed by children from lower-income families.

When the same children entered school at age four and a half years, those from higher-income families had better vocabulary scores on standardised tests.

"At 14 months, an age when there aren't even socioeconomic differences in their talk yet, we see there are differences in their gestures," says Rowe.

The videos revealed that parents from wealthier families gestured more with their children than the other parents.

Rowe says the findings suggest that gestures can at least partly explain vocabulary differences between the groups, and may prove useful as the basis for interventions.

"Can we manipulate how much parents and children gesture, and if so, will it increase their vocabulary?" he says.

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2008) — First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny. Published June 12, The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old question of what is humour. Clarke explains how and why we find things funny and identifies the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants.

Clarke explains: “For some time now it’s been assumed that a global theory of humour is impossible. This theory changes thousands of years of incorrect analyses and mini-theories that have applied to only a small proportion of instances of humour. It offers a vital answer as to why humour exists in every human society.”

Previous theories from philosophers, literary critics and psychologists have focused on what we laugh at, on ‘getting the joke’. “Humour cannot be explained in terms of content or subject matter. A group of individuals can respond completely differently to the same content, and so to understand humour we have to examine the structures underlying it and analyse the process by which each individual responds to them. Pattern Recognition Theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why an individual finds something funny. Effectively it explains that humour occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that this recognition is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response.” says Clarke.

Humour is not about comedy it is about a fundamental cognitive function. Clarke explains: “An ability to recognize patterns instantly and unconsciously has proved a fundamental weapon in the cognitive arsenal of human beings.” Recognising patterns enables us to quickly understand our environment and function effectively within it: language, which is unique to humans, is based on patterns.

Clarke’s theory has wider implications: “It sheds light on infantile cognitive development, will lead to a revision of tests on ‘humour’ to diagnose psychological or neurological conditions and will have implications regarding the development of language. It will lead to a clarification of whether other animals have a sense of humour, and has an important role to play in the production of artificial intelligence being that will feel a bit less robotic thanks to its sense of humour.”

Alastair Clarke explains: “The development of pattern recognition as displayed in humour could form the basis of humankind’s instinctive linguistic ability. Syntax and grammar function in fundamental patterns for which a child has an innate facility. All that differs from one individual to the next is the content of those patterns in terms of vocabulary.”

Pattern Recognition Theory identifies further correlation between the development of humour and the development of cognitive ability in infants. Previous research has shown that children respond to humour long before they can comprehend language or develop long-term memory. Humour is present as one of the early fundamental cognitive processes. Alastair Clarke explains: “Amusing childish games such as peek-a-boo and clap hands all exhibit the precise mechanism of humour as it appears in any adult form. Peek-a-boo can elicit a humorous response in infants as young as four months, and is, effectively, a simple process of surprise repetition, forming a clear, basic pattern. As the infant develops, the patterns in childish humour become more complex and compounded and attain spatial as well as temporal elements until, finally, the child begins to grapple with the patterns involved in linguistic humour.”

Alastair Clarke explains that the Pattern Recognition Theory “can not say categorically what is funny. The individual is of paramount importance in determining what they find amusing, bringing memories, associations, meta-meaning, disposition, their ability to recognize patterns and their comprehension of similarity to the equation. But the following two examples illustrate its basic structure. A common form of humour is the juxtaposition of two pictures, normally of people, in whom we recognize a similarity. What we are witnessing here is spatial repetition, a simple two-term pattern featuring the outline or the features of the first repeated in those of the second. If the pattern is sufficiently convincing (as in the degree to which we perceive repetition), and we are surprised by recognizing it, we will find the stimulus amusing.”

“As a second example, related to the first but in a different medium, stand-up comedy regularly features what we might call the It’s so true form of humour. As with the first example, the brain recognizes a two-term pattern of repetition between the comedian’s depiction and its retained mental image, and if the recognition is surprising, it will be found amusing. The individual may be surprised to hear such things being talked about in public, perhaps because they are taboo, or because the individual has never heard them being articulated before. The only difference between the two examples is that in the first the pattern is recognized between one photograph and the next, and in the second it occurs between the comedian’s words and the mental image retained by the individual of the matter being portrayed.”

“Both of these examples use simple patterns of exact repetition, even if the fidelity of that repetition is poor (for example if the photographs are only vaguely similar). But pattern types can be surprisingly varied, including reflection, reversal, minification and magnification and so on. Sarcasm, for example, functions around a basic pattern of reversal, otherwise known as repetition in opposites. Patterns can also contain many stages, whereas the ones depicted here feature only two terms.”

by; University of Haifa
The more empathy one has for another, the lighter the accent will be when speaking in a second language. This is the conclusion of a new study carried out at the University of Haifa by Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim and Dr. Mark Leikin of the Department of Learning Disabilities and Prof. Zohar Eviatar of the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa. The study has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism. “In addition to personal-affective factors, it has been found that the ‘language ego’ is also influenced by the sociopolitical position of the speaker towards the majority group,” the researchers stated.

We all know how to identify the average Hebrew speaker trying to speak English: the Israeli accent is an easy give-away. But why is there an accent and what are the factors that make one speaker have a heavier accent than another? One possibility is based on the cognitive discipline, which suggests that our language system limits the creation of language pronunciations in a non-native language. Another explanation is derived from the socio-lingual field, which claims that socio-affective elements have an effect on accent and that the second language constitutes an image label for the speaker in the presence of a majority group.

“Israel is a perfect lab location for testing the topic of second languages, because of the complex composition of its population. This population is made up of immigrants who learn Hebrew at an advanced age; an ethnic minority of Arabs, some of whom learn Hebrew from an early age, and others who learn the language as mature adults; and a majority group of native Hebrew speakers,” the researchers explained.

The first stage of the study divided participants - students from the University of Haifa - into three groups: 20 native Hebrew speakers, 20 Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew at the age of 7-8, and 20 Russian immigrants who learned Hebrew after age 13. The participants’ socioeconomic characteristics were identical. All were asked to read out a section from a report in Hebrew, and then to describe - in Hebrew - an image that was shown to them. The pieces were recorded and divided into two-minute sections. Additionally, the participants filled out a questionnaire that measures empathetic abilities in 29 statements.

The second stage of the study took 20 different native Hebrew speaking participants. They listened to the pieces that had been recorded in the first stage, and rated each piece according to accent “heaviness”. Subsequently, each participant from the first stage was given a score on the weight of his or her accent and another score for level of empathy.

The study has shown that the accent level of Russian immigrants and of native Arabic speakers is similar. It also revealed that for the Russian immigrants, there is a direct link between the two measures: the higher the ability to exhibit empathy for the other, the weaker the accent. Amongst the Arabic speakers, however, no such link - either positive or negative - between level of empathy and heaviness of accent could be seen.

The researchers’ hypothesis is that in the group of Arabic speakers, a new factor enters the ‘language ego’ equation: sociopolitical position. “We believe that the pattern among Arabic speakers demonstrates their sentiment toward the Hebrew-speaking majority group, and the former consider their accent as something that distinguishes them from the majority.

Our research shows that both personal and sociopolitical aspects have an influence on accent in speaking a second language, and teachers giving instruction in languages as second languages, especially among minority groups, must relate to the social and political connection when teaching,” the researchers explain.

by :Eurekalert

Language in humans has evolved culturally rather than genetically, according to a study by UCL (University College London) and US researchers. By modelling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. Thus, the biological machinery upon which human language is built appears to predate the emergence of language.

According to a phenomenon known as the Baldwin effect, characteristics that are learned or developed over a lifespan may become gradually encoded in the genome over many generations, because organisms with a stronger predisposition to acquire a trait have a selective advantage. Over generations, the amount of environmental exposure required to develop the trait decreases, and eventually no environmental exposure may be needed - the trait is genetically encoded. An example of the Baldwin effect is the development of calluses on the keels and sterna of ostriches. The calluses may initially have developed in response to abrasion where the keel and sterna touch the ground during sitting. Natural selection then favored individuals that could develop calluses more rapidly, until callus development became triggered within the embryo and could occur without environmental stimulation. The PNAS paper explored circumstances under which a similar evolutionary mechanism could genetically assimilate properties of language – a theory that has been widely favoured by those arguing for the existence of 'language genes'.

The study modelled ways in which genes encoding language-specific properties could have coevolved with language itself. The key finding was that genes for language could have coevolved only in a highly stable linguistic environment; a rapidly changing linguistic environment would not provide a stable target for natural selection. Thus, a biological endowment could not coevolve with properties of language that began as learned cultural conventions, because cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes.

The authors conclude that it is unlikely that humans possess a genetic 'language module' which has evolved by natural selection. The genetic basis of human language appears to primarily predate the emergence of language.

The conclusion is reinforced by the observation that had such adaptation occurred in the human lineage, these processes would have operated independently on modern human populations as they spread throughout Africa and the rest of the world over the last 100,000 years. If this were so, genetic populations should have coevolved with their own language groups, leading to divergent and mutually incompatible language modules. Linguists have found no evidence of this, however; for example, native Australasian populations have been largely isolated for 50,000 years but learn European languages readily.

Professor Nick Chater, UCL Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, says: "Language is uniquely human. But does this uniqueness stem from biology or culture? This question is central to our understanding of what it is to be human, and has fundamental implications for the relationship between genes and culture. Our paper uncovers a paradox at the heart of theories about the evolutionary origin and genetic basis of human language – although we have appear to have a genetic predisposition towards language, human language has evolved far more quickly than our genes could keep up with, suggesting that language is shaped and driven by culture rather than biology.

"The linguistic environment is continually changing; indeed, linguistic change is vastly more rapid than genetic change. For example, the entire Indo-European language group has diverged in less than 10,000 years. Our simulations show the evolutionary impact of such rapid linguistic change: genes cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with this 'moving target'.

"Of course, co-evolution between genes and culture can occur. For example, lactose tolerance appears to have co-evolved with dairying. But dairying involves a stable change to the nutritional environment, positively selecting the gene for lactose tolerance, unlike the fast-changing linguistic environment. Our simulations show that this kind of co-evolution can only occur when language change is offset by very strong genetic pressure. Under these conditions of extreme pressure, language rapidly evolves to reflect pre-existing biases, whether the genes are subject to natural selection or not. Thus, co-evolution only occurs when the language is already almost entirely genetically encoded. We conclude that slow-changing genes can drive the structure of a fast-changing language, but not the reverse.

"But if universal grammar did not evolve by natural selection, how could it have arisen? Our findings suggest that language must be a culturally evolved system, not a product of biological adaption. This is consistent with current theories that language arose from the unique human capacity for social intelligence."

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — New research into language evolution suggests most Pacific populations originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Scientists at The University of Auckland have used sophisticated computer analyses on vocabulary from 400 Austronesian languages to uncover how the Pacific was settled.

"The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, with 1200 languages spread across the Pacific," says Professor Russell Gray of the Department of Psychology. "The settlement of the Pacific is one of the most remarkable prehistoric human population expansions. By studying the basic vocabulary from these languages, such as words for animals, simple verbs, colours and numbers, we can trace how these languages evolved. The relationships between these languages give us a detailed history of Pacific settlement."

"Our results use cutting-edge computational methods derived from evolutionary biology on a large database of language data," says Dr Alexei Drummond of the Department of Computer Science. "By combining biological methods and linguistic data we are able to investigate big-picture questions about human origins".

The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, show how the settlement of the Pacific proceeded in a series of expansion pulses and settlement pauses. The Austronesians arose in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Before entering the Philippines, they paused for around a thousand years, and then spread rapidly across the 7,000km from the Philippines to Polynesia in less than one thousand years. After settling Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, the Austronesians paused again for another thousand years, before finally spreading further into Polynesia eventually reaching as far as New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island.

"We can link these expansion pulses to the development of new technology, such as better canoes and social techniques to deal with the great distances between islands in Polynesia," says Research Fellow Simon Greenhill. "Using these new technologies the Austronesians and Polynesians were able to rapidly spread through the Pacific in one of the greatest human migrations ever. This suggests that technological advances have played a major role in the spread of people throughout the world."

The research was funded by the New Zealand Royal Society Marsden fund. The database of Austronesian basic vocabulary can be accessed at: http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/

By : Physorg
(PhysOrg.com) -- Historical collections that include everything ever written in a dozen American and British newspapers since they started are now available electronically. Donald MacQueen from Uppsala University, Sweden, has carried out the first comprehensive study that makes use of this resource in order to track changes in language usage, a method that makes it possible to attain an entirely new degree of precision in dating.

The gigantic newspaper archives contain news and feature articles as well as editorials and commercial and classified advertisements. Together they comprise tens of billions of words. In his dissertation in English linguistics, Donald MacQueen has examined the word million in English, especially how language usage shifted from the previously nearly totally dominant "five millions of inhabitants" to today's "five million inhabitants." With the help of these electronic collections of texts that only recently became available, he has succeeded in pinning down when and where the modern expression began to take over.

"When you study the occurrence of uncommon words in smaller corpora (text archives) of one or a few million words, you only get a few examples to analyze. These collections are much larger, and they have enabled me to obtain extremely reliable historical data for one year at a time. In this way I have been able to trace the shift with a precision that was not previously possible in linguistic studies," he explains.

It turns out that the modern construction took over in the American newspapers in the middle of the 1880s and in the British The Times only in the mid 1910s. What's more, it became apparent that the transitional period was shorter in The Times. These circumstances indicate that usage in American newspapers influenced and accelerated the shift in the British newspaper.

This took place at the height of the British empire, and roughly when the US economy overtook the British for the first time. Donald MacQueen tentatively sees as an impetus for the change in usage, apart from the fact that both expressions suddenly began to be used more frequently, the greater propensity for people to embrace innovations during periods of severe social crisis, in this case the American Civil War and World War I, respectively. It is also possible that these wars entailed major population movements that could have impacted usage.

"Another discovery I made, thanks to the huge amount of data, is that when the use of the two constructions began to be roughly equal in frequency, the newspapers chose quite simply to avoid using such constructions, writing numeral expressions instead. After World War II, when there was no longer any doubt which construction was the ‘right' one, the newspapers reverted to writing number-word expressions again," he says.

The dissertation also includes a comparison with languages like French and German, where the corresponding grammatical shift regarding the word million from being a noun to an ordinary number word has not yet taken place.

"But in the long perspective we can expect this change to occur in those languages as well. The shift is a universal phenomenon when it comes to number words," says Donald MacQueen.

He defended his dissertation at Uppsala University on June 8.

by: Alpha Galileo

Men show greater activation than women in the brain regions connected to language (1), according to researchers from CNRS, Université de Montpellier I and Montpellier III. This work is published in the February 2009 issue of the journal Cortex.

The researchers studied the strength of brain activation in women and men of high and low verbal fluency. For their study, they made up two groups of female and two of male subjects, chosen for their high or low verbal performance at a particular linguistic task (word generation). They then asked each subject in the four groups to mentally generate the largest possible number of words beginning with a given letter while observing them by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers observed by fMRI that brain regions are activated differently according to sex and to verbal fluency level (variation in the number of generated words).

Independent of the number of words generated, men showed greater activation than women in the classical language regions of the brain. Furthermore, regardless of the sex of the subject, participants with low verbal skills elicited greater activation in a brain zone (the anterior cingulate) whereas highly fluent subjects activated the cerebellum to a greater extent.

The researchers also showed the combined effects of sex and verbal competence in the strength of activation of particular brain regions.

- The group of men with high verbal fluency, when compared to the three other groups, showed greater activation of two brain regions (the right precuneous and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and lesser activation of another region (right inferior frontal gyrus);
- In low fluency women, the researchers noticed a greater activation of the left anterior cingulate than in women with high fluency.

By separating out the effects of sex and performance on the strength of brain activation for the first time, this study shows that there is an effect linked exclusively to the sex of the subject, another effect linked exclusively to performance, or an effect linked to both factors in different brain regions. The authors conclude that to explore neural correlates of verbal fluency with an aim to understanding the difference made by sex, it is important to take into account performance levels in order to obtain conclusive results.

The number of U.S. students studying abroad seems to be increasing significantly on an annual basis. Although there is not adequate research to understand why, the anecdotal evidence would suggest that this generation of "Millenial" students realize the primary need of understanding others that are different than themselves to achieve success in business, politics, and general global welfare.

The 2008 IIE Open Doors Report suggests that in 2006-2007, study abroad by U.S. college students increased by 8% from the previous year and an increase of close to 150% since 1996-1997. The IIE Open Doors Report has been the primary source of data for international education enrollments in the U.S. for several decades. However, it is not clear that the significant increase in study abroad participation data is not merely a result of better data collection and reporting efforts in the last decade.

The Open Doors Report 2008 also suggests that U.S. college students are participating in programs in much more diverse geographic locations, seeing reporting increases in study abroad destinations. "The number of U.S. students studying in China, Argentina, South Africa, Ecuador and India each increased by more than 20 percent over the previous year."

However, the 2008 Open Doors Report shows insignificant participation in Cyprus. Why should a U.S. college student explore Cyprus as a relevant and meaningful destination for study abroad?

So, if participation in study abroad is increasing and students are increasingly seeking out "non-traditional" locations, why do so few U.S. college students study abroad in Cyprus? Unofficial reports would suggest that prior to 2005, fewer than five (5) U.S. college students studied abroad in Cyprus every year.

We can only speculate as to why Cyprus has not previously been a common study abroad location for U.S. students. But some of the main speculations include:

1. Few Americans know much about Cyprus

2. Because the first language in Cyprus is Greek, many American students and Study Abroad Advisors might incorrectly assume that unless students are fluent in Modern Greek language, they would not be able to study at a Cypriot institution of higher education

3. There are very few colleges and universities in Cyprus

4. Cypriot institutions have not promoted themselves to the American study abroad market

5. Because Cyprus is a bi-communal society divided by a United Nations demilitarized zone, some people may think Cyprus is a dangerous location

6. Because Cyprus is so close to the "Middle East" some people may think that it is an Arab nation and/or may have security issues related to "Middle Eastern" countries

It does not require a sophisticated investigation to learn that most of these supposed obstacles to study abroad in Cyprus should not be obstacles at all.