Polyglots are people who are able to speak multiple languages with a high degree of proficiency. Within the category of polyglot are people who are bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual. There even exist hyperpolyglots, people who can speak six or more languages fluently. As far as learning multiple languages, it may be easier to pick up certain languages that are structurally and stylistically similar to others. For example, French, Spanish, and Italian, are all "romance languages" and have common Latin roots. It may also be easier to learn certain languages when they have similar dialects, in the instance of the many Spanish dialects that comprise the tongues of Spain.
I personally am fortunate to be proficient in Spanish (besides being fluent in English). In the language -learning process, I believe it is important to build up gradually to a level of proficiency. To be proficient and later fluent in another language, one must be skilled in listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in that language. I think what helped me learn a second language was a combination of vocabulary/grammar drills, different speaking, reading, writing, and listening exercises, and the gradual build-up of new material.
Writing 2; Section 4: March 2012 Archives
Language is a system of communication that combines symbols, such as words or gestural signs, in rule-based ways to create meaning. Language serves several crucial functions such as the transmission of information and the ability to express our thoughts about social interactions. It is also one of the few documented cases in which children are more efficient learners than adults. We, as humans, spend much of our conversational time establishing or maintaining our relationships with others, which, in turn, creates a bond between two people
One commonly held belief is that this special "bond" enables twins to invent their own secret language that only they can understand. This phenomenon, known as cryptophasia, is natural to expect when two people have been together from the moment of conception. However, this notion is not as truthful as it may seem. Cases of cryptophasia among twins turn out to be a result of phonological impairment and other types of language delay that are more prevalent among twins. The twins are simply attempting to use their native language, but with poor articulation and significant pronunciation errors. The reason they make it look like they have their own "language" is because twin pairs tend to make similar kinds of phonological errors, making their speech more understandable to each other that to their parents or nonrelated children.
Video of two twins talking in their "own" language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY
As we know, we human has our own ways to communicate with each other, and the most important one is language. Human has lot of languages. People from different countries and different races might speak different languages. And those languages only known by themselves. So what about animals? From my point of view, different kind of animals also have different kind of ways to communicate with each other, but do they have languages? As we know, birds sing to each other to communicate with each other, some mammals like bears and lions also can communicate with each other by voice. So I do think animals have their own language. Although their brain were not smart than human beings, they can still create their own language.
Do you remember what you were doing the moment you heard that the World Trade Center had been hit on September 11, 2001? Many people do and the memory is usually very easy to remember. What is being described here is a flashbulb memory, which according to the textbook, is an emotional memory that is extremely vivid and detailed. The memories are often related to a traumatic experience as well. Like the awful day of September 11th, people have flashbulb memories of the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.
While it was often thought that these memories could last for an extremely long time and sometimes forever, psychologists are now saying that these memories do lose some details and change some of the story as time goes on. Psychology in Action published an article on their website describing an experiment that was conducted at the University of California- San Diego concerning flashbulb memories and the O.J. Simpson verdict. Three days after the verdict, students were asked to remember where they were and how they had heard about the verdict. After this they were selected to come back 15 months or 32 months later. The students then had to describe the same situation again and then the researchers evaluated the distortions in the stories. The stories in the 15-month follow-up had far fewer distortions then those in the 32-month follow-up. Equally interesting is the fact that 80 percent of the peoples' memories were flashbulb memories, but 40 percent of those memories had distortions in them. What this study showed is that flashbulb memories do exist, but they do seem to lose some detail and validity over time.
Psychology in Action Article:
http://www.psychologyinaction.org/2011/09/16/flashbulb-memories-traumatic-events-and-the-details-we-remember/
Additional Article:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200203/hot-the-trail-flashbulb-memory
Alzheimers disease is made up by a basic build-up of proteins in the brain. The build-up is caused by plagues, deposits of protein that develop in spaces between nerve cells, and tangles, deposits of protein that develop inside these cells. Scientists have yet to find out why some people tend to form this excessive build up of proteins, but have made some basic assumptions on how to help prevent it. Some factors they seem to list include staying away from serious head injury, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and diet, avoiding tobacco, and being engaged in intellectually stimulating activities.
I was very interested in how someone who has developed Alzheimer's deals with the disease in an active household? I found a very touching article posted by someone suffering from the disease (http://www.alz.org/living_with_alzheimers_10304.asp). A lady by the name of Eileen abused alcohol and other drugs by age 11. She took over 100 pills a day, and suffered from being an alcoholic. She now has a family in which she cares very much about and loves with her life. But, after noticing small amounts of memory loss she was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's in her late 40's. Eileen had to retire from her job, as she and her family suffer greatly everyday. There are days where she physically cannot get out of bed, and the others she "fights like hell" to get out even though she felt horrible. She explains how many close friends have become unrecognizable, and her speech is only going downhill. Will we ever find a cure to such a serious disease?
Once people reach the age of 65, they begin to experience memory problems, most of which is caused by Alzheimer's disease. This is a terrible disease that causes patients to loss memory, starting with recent events and slowly taking away more of their memory from longer ago. This means that AD patients have a hard time remember what they did earlier this week, but they do remember important events from years ago, until the disease progresses and starts taking away those memories.
This disease is caused by senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, which cause a loss of synapses and the death of cells in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex which are important to memory and intellectual ability. Unfortunately there are no treatments or cures that slows down or reverses Alzheirmer's effects, there are only proposed theories as to what can help, yet they have not been proved by research. One of these theories that has been studied showed that being physically fit, with a good diet and a strong social network can help decrease ones chances of Alzheimer's, but it's hard to determine the correlation in the study. Because of the difficulty to treat Alzheimer's, people who have the disease gradually lose their memories until they pass away.
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurological disease of the brain leading to the irreversible loss of neurons and the loss of intellectual abilities, including memory and reasoning. The disease is caused by a build-up of proteins in the brain. The buildup occurs in two main ways, Plaques and tangles. Plaques are deposits of the protein beta-amyloid that accumulate in the spaces between nerve cells and tangles are deposits of the protein tau that accumulate inside of nerve cells. Scientists are still studying how plaques and tangles are related to Alzheimer's disease. One theory is that they block nerve cells' ability to communicate with each other, making it difficult for the cells to survive.
A more intricate explanation about how the disease occurs can be seen in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wv9jrk-gXc
Treatment for Alzheimer's usually involves the use of Cholinesterase inhibitors. These inhibitors curb the breakdown of acetylcholine, a chemical in the brain important for memory and learning. These types of medications help increase the levels of acetylcholine in the brain, thus help with memory retention.
People with Alzheimer's experience the disease in 3 main phases. In the first phase of the disease the patient is noticeably slower with brain functions and begins having trouble with memory. The second stage is similar to the first and usually accompanied by a behavioral change. And the final stage is most noticeable as the patients abilities severely decline and a move into a nursing home may be necessary.
Alzheimer's is an unfortunate disease and can be one of the hardest for family members to deal with because their loved one simply cannot remember them.
Initially proposed independently by Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir, the idea that language influences thought may initially seem counterintuitive. Clearly language and thought are related, we formulate and communicate thoughts using language, but it may seem that language merely expresses what is already there. While thought may not be wholly dependent on language as some have proposed, there is evidence to show that language does influence it.
One experiment which demonstrates such a connection between language and thought makes use of the grammatical concept of gender present in languages such as German and Spanish. These languages require that speakers refer to objects using the grammatical constructs of a certain gender. A believer of linguistic relativity might infer from this that the grammatical gender of an object influences perception of that object. To test this, speakers of Spanish and German were asked to describe the features of certain objects. When describing a key (which is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German), German speakers more frequently used words with masculine connotations such as jagged, hard, and heavy while Spanish speakers more frequently used words such as intricate, lovely, and shiny.
Linguistic relativity is also apparent in constructed languages such as computer programming languages. One example commonly used to illustrate this is Blub, a hypothetical programming language. Based on the availability of certain functions in programming languages, one might order them in terms of so called power. Blub is considered to be of intermediate power. A Blub programmer looking down the hierarchy at less powerful languages can see the functions missing from them and understands how Blub is more powerful. Looking up the continuum however, the Blub programmer is unable to see that he is looking up. Thinking in Blub much as one would think in a natural language, he would only perceive a language with seemingly bizarre constructs. For this reason, many programmers have advocated learning to use languages such as Lisp to become better programmers by broadening the way people can think about programs.
While these examples do not support the idea that language gives rise to thought, they do show that language influences thought in more subtle ways. The inherent properties of words can influence perception and even the understanding of concepts.
