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Urdu“Holiday” or “vacation”, “to start” or “to begin”, “my friend’s cat” or “the cat of my friend” – in our language, there are different ways of expressing the same things and concepts. But can the choice of a particular variant determine whether we prefer to cooperate with certain people rather than with others?
Tag: Department of English and American Studies
How our brain influences language change
Our language is changing constantly. Researchers of the University of Vienna found that, over centuries, frequently occurring speech sound patterns get even more frequent. The reason for this development is that our brain can perceive, process and learn frequent, and thus prototypical sound patterns more easily than less frequent ones. The results of the study were published in the journal Cognitive Linguistics.