All articles tagged with #language
Merriam-Webster added 1,400 new definitions to its online dictionary (with about 1,395 more slated for online and print editions). Among the new terms are cuffing season, shishito, glow-up, chili crisp, and shapewear, underscoring the dictionary’s role as a living reflection of how people actually use language.
Merriam-Webster has expanded its lexicon with 1,400 new words, reflecting current usage—from slang like glow-up, looksmaxxing, and trash panda to terms such as cuffing season, Mandela effect, and California sober, plus culinary words like bao and superfood.
The Hackaday piece explains that people often anthropomorphize LLMs, and suggests safer terminology such as 'automatic transcription' instead of 'speech recognition,' and 'input'/'output' instead of 'prompt'/'response.' It emphasizes that LLMs are software, not persons, and notes that adopting these neutral terms can shape how we think about AI; it also references the AI for Skeptics series as a resource.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says a U.S.–Canada trade deal is possible only if Washington stops theatrics and respects Canadian sovereignty, including protections for French-language media; talks have stalled since Carney walked away over streaming-language rules and Canada’s freedom to strike agreements with others. U.S. officials say there’s no better deal available, while tariffs and counter-tariffs threaten escalation, with provinces limiting U.S. access and Canada preparing further measures. Carney urged the U.S. to approach negotiations seriously, warning the dispute is far from resolved.
Canada’s French-language protections—bilingual labeling, Canadian-content requirements for streaming, and Quebec’s strict language laws—have become a flashpoint in a stalled Canada–U.S. trade dispute. Washington argues some measures act as trade barriers, while Ottawa defends bilingual rights as central to national identity. With U.S. tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods looming, Trudeau/Carney (per the piece) say they won’t concede on French protections, and Quebec’s politics heighten the stakes as debates over Bill 96, the Online Streaming Act, and Bill 109 illustrate how language policy intersects with trade and digital regulation.
Anthropic plans to watermark Claude's outputs by subtly adjusting word choice using a secret key, so the text is detectable as AI-generated without any visible changes. The company claims this won't affect quality, but the article argues the move shows a broader disregard for the craft of writing, treating words as fungible. It cites Google’s SynthID research and critics, and frames watermarking as a regulatory response that raises questions about AI’s role in mimicking human writing.
MIT analyzed fMRI data from 772 participants and found language processing engages a broader, yet compact, network beyond classic language centers, identifying 17 additional regions across the cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, medial frontal cortex, and temporal lobe (five in the cerebellum) that connect memory, emotion, and coordination to language, totaling about 5% of the brain’s volume—hinting at a distributed system that could reshape how we understand language disorders and learning.
Being multilingual may delay dementia diagnoses and slow brain aging, suggesting that learning a new language can help keep the brain sharper and healthier as we grow older.
Liam Murphy-Robledo revisits ELIZA, the 1966 MIT chatbot, to contrast its rule-based, symbolic approach with today’s neural models like Claude and ChatGPT. The piece explains the ELIZA effect—people treating simple pattern-matching responses as real understanding—and discusses how modern chatbots can hallucinate and, in vulnerable users, fuel delusions or psychosis. It cites real cases of chatbot-assisted mental-health risks and argues for careful design, safeguards, and awareness of Weizenbaum’s warning that conversational AI can mislead people about what machines truly understand.
A Washington Post Style piece celebrates Minionese—the Minions’ playful gibberish language—tracing its rise from Despicable Me to the latest film and examining why audiences love it, plus how it fueled TikTok virality and enduring pop-culture appeal.
Researchers recorded neurons in the hippocampus of patients under general anesthesia and found that the unconscious brain can process language—distinguishing nouns, verbs, and adjectives—and even predict upcoming words while listening to stories. This suggests core cognitive tasks can occur without conscious awareness and prompts a rethink of consciousness, with implications for brain–computer interfaces and speech prosthetics. The findings stem from a single anesthesia type and a limited brain region, so more work is needed before broader generalization.
Recordings from 579 neurons across the human frontotemporal cortex during natural speech show individual cells encode fine-grained linguistic features: some respond to parts of speech, others to sentence constituents or dependency depth, and some track combinatorial feature sets. The neuron population also encodes sentence context, with language encoding being left-lateralized and varying by region. Large language models’ contextual embeddings better predict neural activity than syntax/semantics alone, revealing distributed cellular building blocks and a micro-to-macro map of how language is represented in the brain.
A Nature study used temporarily implanted brain electrodes in epilepsy patients to observe real-time single-neuron activity in the frontotemporal cortex as people spoke. It found specialized neurons that encode parts of speech and semantics or syntax, with many neurons firing just before specific components (e.g., nouns) are spoken. The left hemisphere showed greater involvement, and the researchers noted that both brain activity and large-language models track the sentence context up to about five preceding words to shape the next word—supporting a modular view of language built from neuronal building blocks.
New NYU MEG study shows bilinguals rely on a single, shared neural grammar engine for English and Spanish—even when transforming pseudowords—demonstrating grammar as a universal, reusable computation rather than separate language-specific rulebooks and reshaping how we understand language learning and brain organization.
Researchers recorded hippocampal neurons in seven epilepsy patients under propofol anesthesia and found real-time processing of sounds and language, including predicting upcoming words. The findings suggest certain cognitive tasks can occur without conscious wakefulness and raise questions about consciousness as well as potential future brain-computer interfaces or speech prosthetics.