does LOL ruin your English? considering diversity in language

Now, more than ever, we have the unsettling power to choose: what we read, what we watch, what we listen to, what we consume, and so on.  Surprisingly, this can actually work strongly against conventionalization.  In one study I worked on at Stanford, we found that fiction and non-fiction readers' sensitivity to various distributions of words sharply diverged.  To translate that into non-psych babble: we found that because fiction and non-fiction readers read differently, their representations of English become measurably different over time.

via scientopia.org




Filed under: Miscellany