Baby blues – in 100 words

Beyond "baby blues": Recognizing postpartum psychosis.

After childbirth, some women experience postpartum depression, and in most instances it subsides without treatment. In rare cases, however, women experience the sudden onset of psychotic symptoms following childbirth, a dangerous medical condition known as postpartum psychosis (PP). This article explores how to identify patients at risk for PP, what signs and symptoms to assess for, and how to ...

A BUGLER OF WORDS: Ellison’s musicality and the Jazz/blues Tradition in Invisible Man

Do baby-talk words reflect biomechanical constraints on speech production?

Baby-talk words are conventionalized lexical items used in infant-directed speech. According to the Frame/Content theory, the structure of baby-talk words reflects biomechanical constraints on speech production associated with the origin of speech, a hypothesis that yields three predictions — compared to adult vocabulary, baby-talk words should exhibit (1) more canonical CV syllables, (2) more ...

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination.

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues ("goluboy") and darker blues ("siniy"). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned t...