Tuesday, February 28, 2006
If the history of life were to play out again from the beginning, it would have a similar plot and outcomes, although with a different cast and timing, argues UC Davis paleontologist Geerat Vermeij in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vermeij argues that some innovations, such as photosynthesis, plant seeds, mineralized bones and even human language are just such good ideas that they would reappear, although at different times and in somewhat different forms.
Read the full article at University of California
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that the brain can actually get into the ‘right frame of mind’ to store new information and that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Friday, February 24, 2006
Rice University study focuses on merged vowel sounds in different dialects.
Read the full article at Rice University
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
The evidence is mounting that great apes are a cultured lot, researchers heard at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in St. Louis this week.
Read the full article at Nature
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the human brain. According to Dr. Stephen Cunnane it was a rich and secure shore-based diet that fuelled and provided the essential nutrients to make our brains what they are today. Controversially, according to Dr. Cunnane our initial brain boost didn’t happen by adaptation, but by exaptation, or chance.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Do human newborns develop their preference for speech through in-utero eavesdropping, or is their penchant for speech innate? It’s a bedevilling question to test, but one that’s central to understanding the origins and dynamics of humans unique propensity for speech. Now a McGill University psychologist believes she’s separated out the complicating effects of the uterine sound barrier. And the results, says Dr. Athena Vouloumanos, point to a genetic predilection for listening in on speech above other similar sounds.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have discovered that two areas in the human brain are responsible for different types of language processing requirements. They found that simple language structures are processed in an area that is phylogenetically older, and which apes also possess. Complicated structures, by contrast, activate processes in a comparatively younger area which only exists in a more highly evolved species: humans. These results are fundamental to furthering our understanding of the human language faculty.
Read the full article at Max Planck Society
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and, apparently, syntaxes. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that core elements of grammar-subjects, objects and verbs-are integral parts of human cognition and are present in every language, even those developed in isolation.
Read the full article at Seed
Humans and chimps share most of their genes, yet they differ dramatically in many ways—their walk, the sizes of their brains and their capacities for speech and language, for example. Scientists would like to know how and when such differences arose, and new research from the University of Michigan shows how one process—gene loss—may have figured in.
Read the full article at Newswise
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that babies have an abstract numerical sense, as demonstrated by their ability to match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they expect to see. This numerical perception across senses demonstrates that babies have a truly abstract sense of numerical concepts — and not just one that is a function of a particular sense — even before they learn to speak.
Read the full article at Duke University
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Brain images of children with dyslexia taken before they received spelling instruction show that they have different patterns of neural activity than do good spellers when doing language tasks related to spelling. But after specialized treatment emphasizing the letters in words, they showed similar patterns of brain activity. These findings are important because they show the human brain can change and normalize in response to spelling instruction, even in dyslexia, the most common learning disability.
Read the full article at University of Washington
Monday, February 6, 2006
In a study aimed at identifying how and when a person’s brain reaches adulthood, scientists have learned that, anatomically, significant changes in brain structure continue after age 18.
Read the full article at Dartmouth College
Researchers have long wondered why certain fundamental characteristics of grammar are present in all languages, and now a team of scientists at the University of Rochester has found evidence that these properties are built into the way our brains work. The report, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines deaf individuals who have been isolated from conventional sign, spoken, and written language their entire lives, and yet still developed a unique form of gesture communication.
Read the full article at University of Rochester
Pet birds can not only imitate sounds, they can distinguish between languages, potentially offering new clues on how the brain recognises speech, Japanese researchers say.
Read the full article at Aljazeera
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