Children with brain injuries have difficulty developing story-telling skills even though other language abilities, such as vocabulary, tend to catch up with other children as they mature, research at the University of Chicago shows.
Full article: University of Chicago
Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences. The findings – which undermine the assumption that all speakers have a core ability to use grammatical cues – could have significant implications for education, communication and linguistic theory.
Full article: Northumbria University
About 1 in 4,000 infants has a brain injury known as pre- or perinatal brain lesions, mainly as a result of stroke, with risk factors involving both mothers and babies. Children with early brain lesions that affect one side of the brain often take longer to reach early language milestones; these delays normalize for many but persist for some. New research has found that children’s gesturing at 18 months can identify those children who will have these later language delays.
Full article: EurekAlert
Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones.
Full article: EurekAlert
With the help of a little singing bird, Penn State physicists are gaining insight into how the human brain functions, which may lead to a better understanding of complex vocal behavior, human speech production and ultimately, speech disorders and related diseases.
Full article: Penn State
Researchers have discovered that infants respond to the rhythm and tempo of music and find it more engaging than speech.
Full article: EurekAlert
Psychological scientists Heidi Lyn and William Hopkins from Agnes Scott College and Jamie Russell from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center examined if exposure to different human communicative environments would affect understanding of declarative signals in chimpanzees and bonobos.
Full article: EurekAlert
By looking at how the brain responds to different aspects of grammar, specifically nouns and verbs, researchers at the UT Dallas Callier Center for Communication Disorders are hoping to provide a better understanding of the nature of language disorders in children.
Full article: University of Texas at Dallas
Research into the long calls of male Orangutans in Borneo has given scientists new insight into how these solitary apes communicate through dense jungle. An acoustic analysis of the calls, published today in Ethology, reveals that the calls not only serve to attract females, but also contain information on the identity and the context of the caller.
Full text: EurekAlert
Your favourite song comes on the radio. You hum the tune; the lyrics remind you of someone you know. Is your brain processing the words and music separately or as one? It’s a hotly debated question that may finally have an answer.
Full article: New Scientist
Researchers say a cache of ostrich eggshells engraved with geometric designs demonstrates the existence of a symbolic communication system around 60,000 years ago among African hunter-gatherers.
Full article: Wired
Stuttering may be the result of a glitch in the day-to-day process by which cellular components in key regions of the brain are broken down and recycled, says a study in the Feb. 10 Online First issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, led by researchers at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health, has identified three genes as a source of stuttering in volunteers in Pakistan, the United States, and England.
Full article: e! Science News
A team of University of Oregon researchers have isolated an independent processing channel of synapses inside the brain’s auditory cortex that deals specifically with shutting off sound processing at appropriate times. Such regulation is vital for hearing and for understanding speech.
Full article: University of Oregon
Be it American Sign Language or English, language is created in the same areas of the brain, claim scientists. Karen Emmorey, a professor of speech language at San Diego State University, suggests language is universal and doesn’t depend on whether people use their voices or their hands to talk.
Full article: Sify News
Among 12- to 24-month old children who view educational baby videos, there does not appear to be evidence that overall general language learning improves or that words featured in the programming are learned.
Full article: EurekAlert
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