Can You Speak the Language of Invention?

Do you speak the language of dyspnea?

Do you speak chemistry?

I n his famous fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, British writer and Professor of English Language and Literature, J. R. R. Tolkien, invented the Ents: tree-like creatures who were some of the oldest beings in his fantasy world of Middle-earth. In Tolkien’s story, the Ents used a unique and ancient language to communicate with each other in a very deliberate way. Tolkien described this langua...

Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.

From Plato to Pinker there has been the common belief that the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words. Decades of studies have confirmed this observation. But the studies to date have focused on participants from urbanized Western societies. Cross-cultural research suggests that there may be other cultures where odors play a larger role. The Jahai of the Malay Peninsula are one s...

the underlying structure of language proficiency and the proficiency level

هدف از انجام این تخقیق بررسی رابطه احتمالی بین سطح مهارت زبان خارجی (foreign language proficiency) و ساختار مهارت زبان خارجی بود. تعداد 314 زبان آموز مونث و مذکر که عمدتا دانشجویان رشته های زبان انگلیسی در سطوح کارشناسی و کارشناسی ارشد بودند در این تحقیق شرکت کردند. از لحاظ سطح مهارت زبان خارجی شرکت کنندگان بسیار با هم متفاوت بودند، (75 نفر سطح پیشرفته، 113 نفر سطح متوسط، 126 سطح مقدماتی). کلا ...

Speak before you Think: The Role of Language in Verb Concepts

This study investigates the role of language on verb concepts in a cross-linguistic environment. The inflectional morphology of verbs in Tamil is contrasted with Mandarin, a language that does not explicitly reflect tense changes in the same manner as Tamil and English. In the baseline condition in experiment 1, participants were required to rate the similarity of object picture pairs; and in t...