chinese is as difficult as you imagine
chinese is the future of the net
chinese is rare??
chinese is a book about chinese people
chinese is often described as a tonal language
chinese is too much for a chinese girl
chinese is too much for a chinese
chinese is spoken
chinese is tainted by a defection
chinese is for everyone
chinese is grand
chinese is just
chinese is a nation in which people respect their elder
chinese is "shen"
chinese is difficult for foreigners
chinese is the future of the net by kieren mccarthy posted
chinese is not difficult anymore with learning chinese is fun cd
chinese is the future of the net posted by
chinese is
chinese is variable
chinese is better than english
chinese is looser than that of english
chinese is set out in sections that are easy to read and understand each one of which is followed by a what to do tip
chinese is fun vol
chinese is a tone language
chinese is spoken by the largest population in the world
chinese is not yet an academic major
chinese is a monosyllabic language
chinese is linger
chinese is written with characters known as hanzi
chinese is no exception
chinese is greatly influenced by the philosophies and religions of confucianism
chinese is looking for
chinese is intense
chinese is an extremely ancient system of writing
chinese is taught at ut?
chinese is mandarin
chinese is easy
chinese is fun
chinese is a tonal language
chinese is difficult or not?
chinese is not that difficult
chinese is only useful when dealing with chinese people
chinese is the official language of over 1
chinese is grand by josh werner entertainment staff grand china
chinese is especially complex with more than 5 recognized dialect groups
chinese is one of the daily languages of the people who live in mainland china
chinese is "ten one"
chinese is gone in textarea
chinese is the second largest language program at monash university
chinese is better
chinese is just binary babble
chinese is avalible now
chinese is the language spoken by the largest population in the world
chinese is that there are no verb conjugations
chinese is taught at st
chinese is also called mandarin and traditional chinese
chinese is kuai
chinese is extremely concise
chinese is the latest model introduced by sabian to its hhx series
chinese is not tested
chinese is applied to many different forms of communication
chinese is the best self
chinese is required
chinese is applicable in a variety of settings in the united states and abroad
chinese is difficult and there is no use? some children say that it's hard to learn chinese
chinese is available in both internal and external modes in the school of languages
chinese is much more complicated
chinese is straathandelaars en menige van hulle is besig met die lonende misdaadbedryf wat in ons land floreer
chinese is the world抯 most popular language
chinese is the newest addition to yahoo
chinese is a language with clearly distinguished syllables
chinese is spoken by more people than any other language in the world
chinese is big5 encode
chinese is over
chinese is supposed to be very easy on any windows 2000 language version
chinese is offered for students who have a substantial interest in chinese language and culture
chinese is used in mainland china and singapore
chinese is the official language and for years it was forbidden to speak taiwanese in school
chinese is an interesting language
chinese is literally a simplified version of traditional chinese
chinese is to suggest that if that person were born anywhere else
chinese is easier to learn

游戏请见：http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=Chinese&type=2 
我看重的是它能给出多样的英文检索信息。

]]> 5367768@http://language.bokee.com/ 上古汉语 2006-07-10T17:43:49Z http://language.bokee.com/5041488.html 闲话少说，一看就知：

大/小： http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E5%A4%A7%2C%E5%B0%8F

长/短：http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E9%95%BF%2C%E7%9F%AD&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

高/矮：http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E9%AB%98%2C%E7%9F%AE&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

美/丑：http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E7%BE%8E%2C%E4%B8%91&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

再看一下“三个代表”，知新词的发展趋势：

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E4%B8%89%E4%B8%AA%E4%BB%A3%E8%A1%A8&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Noam Chomsky's work on 'generative grammar' led to the concept of a set of rules that can generate a natural language with a hierarchical grammar, and the idea that this represents a uniquely human ability. In a series of experiments with European starlings, in which several types of 'warble' and 'rattle' took the place of words in a human language, the birds learnt to classify phrase structure grammars in a way that met the same criteria. Their performance can be said to be almost human on this yardstick. So if there are language processing capabilities that are uniquely human, they may be more context-free or at a higher level in the Chomsky hierarchy. Or perhaps there is no single property or processing capacity that differentiates human language from non-human communication systems.

News and Views: Language: Startling starlings

Recursion, once thought to be the unique province of human language, now seems to be within the ken of a common songbird — perhaps providing insight into the origins of language.

Gary F. Marcus   doi:10.1038/4401117a

Full Text | PDF (285K)

来源：http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7088/edsumm/e060427-15.html

人民网的英文消息也是很快的：

Starlings can recognize grammar（八哥能识别语法）:   

另，参：

There's a recent paper in Nature ( here), in which the authors claim that starlings show evidence of understanding recursion, the putative "core mechanism" of human language on Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch's account (by no means consensus). I don't have university access, but there are plenty of good reviews: lay-directed ones at LiveScience and John Hawks, and somewhat technical ones at Tensor and LanguageLog.

Recursion in syntax is when a category X can be composed of another representative of the same category X, plus perhaps other stuff. For example: the rule "S --> S and S" says that a sentence (S) may-consist-of some sentence, the word "and," and another sentence, in that order. This result can feed into another application of the rule, like so: "I study linguistics and Razib studies biochem," "I study linguistics and Razib studies biochem and Darth studies psychometrics," ad infinitum, making sentences out of sentences. This is what allows human language to be so flexible -- in Wilhelm von Humboldt's classic phrase, it allows the "infinite use of finite means." [1]

…………

Why can we be creative one moment, and dull as a fencepost the next? Scientists have sought the answers to questions like those for centuries, because human creativity is as mysterious as it is important.

But a few answers have trickled in, along with a lot more questions, and experts are beginning to get a grasp on what it is that makes us creative. They're even trying to figure out if there is anything we can do to enhance it.

The latest research shows that "aha" moments come more easily to the mind that is prepared to be creative, even before presented with a problem.

Cognitive scientists at Drexel and Northwestern Universities have been studying creativity for years now, trying to sort out why we are sometimes creative, reaching a conclusion in a flash of light, and why we are sometimes methodical, plodding along until we finally put all the pieces together.

Putting aside the fact that some people are obviously more creative than others, we all approach problems two ways — sometimes analytically and sometimes waiting for that "aha" moment.

So John Kounios of Drexel, and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern, along with a team of researchers have been looking inside the noggins of volunteers to see if there's any difference in how their brains are working just before an "aha" moment, and just before a bit of plodding. And the results suggest there certainly is a difference.

"If you are going to solve a problem with insight (creativity), there's a characteristic pattern of brain activity even before the problem is presented," says Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel. "When it's going to be solved by a more methodical, analytical approach, there's a separate characteristic of brain activity that is different.

"That suggests that a person's brain state, or frame of mind, determines which strategy he or she is going to use to solve a problem when it finally does appear."

The researchers, who are publishing their latest findings in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, have used two brain-scanning techniques — electroencephalograms (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging — to study the brains of people who were presented with a series of problems.

Some of the problems were best solved methodically, but some were more suited to insightful, creative solutions. Some, of course, could go either way.

The problems included puzzles consisting of three words — such as tank, hill, secret — and each participant was asked to think of a single word that could form a compound or common phrase with each of the three words.

Some came up with the right word in a flash — a true "aha" moment. Others tried many words as they searched methodically for the right one, which is top (tank top, hilltop, top secret).

The brain scans revealed that insightful thinking was marked by increased brain activity in temporal lobe areas associated with conceptual processing, and with frontal lobe areas associated with cognitive control. The methodical approach involved increased activity in the visual cortex at the back of the brain.

Can You Make Yourself More Creative?

Since those conditions showed up before the problem was even presented, the researchers concluded that it is likely that the human brain may be pre-programmed to be either creative or analytical at any given moment.

But if that's so, is there anything we can do to make our brains more creative, or more methodical?

Kounios says their research doesn't completely answer that, but "we have some good reason to believe that some of these aspects are under a person's control."

The work "suggests," he adds, that such things as cognitive exercises, like yoga, might help make a person more creative, since they direct the attention inward, which appears to be tightly linked to creativity. But much more research is necessary to fully answer that, he says.

But how much tinkering do we want to do with the human brain? Kounios points out that some problems are better solved with methodical, analytical reasoning, and some lend themselves better to waiting for the "aha" moment.

"If you are balancing your checkbook, you don't want to be creative," he says. "You want to be methodical and analytical."

So sometimes, it isn't desirable to be creative.

"You don't want a surgeon who improvises," Kounios says. "You want a surgeon who operates according to established procedures that are known to work."

Creativity can sometimes be a bit of a drag, he points out, because "people who tend to be creative tend not to be very focused on their day-to-day business. Their attention seems to be more diffused, spread out. And they tend to be easily distracted.

"People who are more analytical seem to have more focused attention," he says.

But those "aha" moments can be a blast, even if they come rarely.

One of the first characters to recognize that was Archimedes, who is said to have shouted "Eureka" just as he stepped into his bath. Not because the water was too cold, but because he had suddenly solved a problem that he really needed to solve.

Archimedes had been ordered to find out if his king's crown was really pure gold. As he stepped into the tub, so the legend goes, he noticed the water rising as it was displaced by his foot. "Aha," he undoubtedly thought, water displacement could be used to calculate density.

Thus in a flash he solved a problem that more methodical types might not have been able to resolve.

By the way, neither the creative types, nor the methodical types, scored better in the Drexel-Northwestern project.

"For certain types of problems it's likely that using an insight strategy may give you an advantage," Kounios says. "For other types of problems, using an analytical method may be beneficial."

So Archimedes, if you're reading this, don't feel too smug.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1831398&page=1

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