oceany: Cittarium pica

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Cittarium pica, common name the West Indian top shell or magpie shell, is a species of large edible sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Tegulidae. This species has a large black and white shell. This snail is known as "wilk" or "wilks" (or sometimes as "whelks") in the English-speaking Caribbean islands of the West Indies, where this is a popular food item. The word "wilk" or "wilks" can be used both as a singular form and a plural. This species is however not at all closely related to the species that are known as whelks in the U.S. and in Europe. In some Spanish-speaking parts of the Caribbean, when used as a food source Cittarium pica is known as bulgao, or simply as cara…

Evidence: 69 • authority: 72

Dual (abbreviated du) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages. The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European and persisted in many of its descendants, such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, which have dual forms across nouns, verbs, and adjectives; Gothic, which used dual forms in pronouns and verbs; and Old English (Anglo-Saxon), which used dual forms in its pronouns. It can still be found i…

Evidence: 59 • authority: 92

Children's expressive and receptive knowledge of the English regular plural.. We investigate how children form early grammatical generalizations using the test case of the English regular plural. While some previous studies demonstrate that children apply abstract grammatical rules to produce novel plurals before 24 months, other studies have revealed that children use plural forms inconsistently with familiar and novel nouns and demonstrate limited or variable receptive plural knowledge through 36 months. This is at odds with typical trajectories in language development, where receptive knowledge precedes expressive knowledge. However, previous studies tested receptive and expressive knowl…

Evidence: 59 • authority: 88

Evidence: 49 • authority: 72

The Dagaaba people (singular Dagao, and, in northern dialects, Dagara for both plural and singular) are an ethnic group inhabitating north of the convergence of Ghana, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. They primarily rely on small-scale agricultural farming plots and speak the Dagaare language, which consists of several dialects. There are over a million Dagaaba people across West Africa.

Evidence: 49 • authority: 92

First-person pronouns as linguistic markers of depression among Brazilian youths.. Objective Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability among youth, yet identifying this condition remains challenging. Naturalistic communication offers a promising approach to enhance depression detection. Increased use of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., ''I'') has been linked to MDD, but its applicability to younger, non-English-speaking populations remains unclear. Methods This study examined first-person pronoun use in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking adolescents with and without MDD and its relationship to self-reported and clinician-rated depressive symptoms. Fifty-two adolescent…

Evidence: 49 • authority: 92

Fan Engagement on Social Media: Behavioural and Linguistic Insights From Sina Weibo Communities.. This study investigates how fans with different levels of community engagement behave and use language in Sina Weibo's Super Topic Communities, integrating psycholinguistic analysis with machine learning. Analysing data from 9248 users, we compared high-level and low-level fans across behavioural indicators, simplified Chinese linguistic inquiry and word count categories, and fine-grained sentiment dimensions. Results show that highly engaged fans disclose more personal information, maintain substantially larger social networks, and produce richer content, suggesting stronger identification wit…