The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates.
Full article: Scientific American
A study of Spanish- and English- learning infants provides evidence that our perceptual abilities do not improve as we get older, and that younger infants may actually be better at integrating facial speech gestures and vocalizations than older infants. The developmental decline in this ability may be due to increasing specialization for native-language phonology as infants learn their own speech and language.
Full article: Newswise
How blind and deaf people approach a cognitive test regarded as a milestone in human development has provided clues to how we deduce what others are thinking.
Full article: New Scientist
If you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear, say scientists. Italian researchers found people were better at processing information when requests were made on that side in three separate tests.
Full article: BBC News
In a new study, young children and their adult caregivers uttered fewer vocalizations, used fewer words and engaged in fewer conversations when in the presence of audible television.
Full article: EurekAlert
Mice carrying a “humanized version” of a gene believed to influence speech and language may not actually talk, but they nonetheless do have a lot to say about our evolutionary past, according to a report in the May 29th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.
Full article: EurekAlert
If I was reading this sentence aloud, your brain would be able to interpret whether I was speaking in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. That’s because emotions in speech leave distinct “signatures” in the brain of the listener. Now, for the first time, brain scans have now characterised those patterns. The finding could help determine where in the brain deficits in emotion processing occur in people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.
Full article: New Scientist
Neuroscientists feel they are much closer to an accepted unified theory about how the brain processes speech and language, according to a scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center who first laid the concepts a decade ago and who has now published a review article confirming the theory.
Full article: EurekAlert
A rare and mysterious syndrome that causes people to sound foreign has become even more baffling. Until now, the condition has been linked with damage in certain brain areas, but researchers have found two people with no trace of brain damage who have nevertheless sounded foreign since childhood.
Full article: New Scientist
We are all capable of “hearing” shapes and sizes and perhaps even “tasting” sounds, according to researchers.
Full article: BBC News
Neuroscience textbooks typically portray the five senses as separate entities, but in the real world the senses frequently interact, as anyone who has tried to enjoy dinner with a stuffy nose can attest. Hearing and vision seem similarly connected, the most famous example being the “McGurk effect,” where visual cues, such as moving lips, affect how people hear speech. And now new research shows that touch can influence speech perception, too.
Full article: Scientific American
Mice can’t talk, but a transgenic rodent could shed light on the evolution of language. A team of German researchers has created mice with a human gene implicated in speech problems and thought to play a role in the evolution of language.
Full article: New Scientist
If I was reading this sentence aloud, your brain would be able to interpret whether I was speaking in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. That’s because emotions in speech leave distinct “signatures” in the brain of the listener.
Now, for the first time, brain scans have now characterised those patterns. The finding could help determine where in the brain deficits in emotion processing occur in people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.
Full article: New Scientist
A study by scientists from CSHL and CCNY performed among a species of songbirds called zebra finches provides new insights into how genetic background, learning abilities and environmental variation might influence how birds evolve “song culture” — and provides some pointers to how human languages may evolve.
Full article: EurekAlert
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found that an area known to be important for reading in the left visual cortex contains neurons that are specialized to process written words as whole word units. Although some theories of reading as well as neuropsychological and experimental data have argued for the existence of a neural representation for whole written real words (an “orthographic lexicon”), evidence for this has been elusive.
Full article: EurekAlert
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