Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Young children who stutter may be more emotionally sensitive and have greater difficulty regulating their feelings than children who don’t have the common speech problem, according to a new study by Vanderbilt University researchers. Some experts say the finding may offer new clues to treating the frustrating and sometimes disabling disorder.
Read the full article at Washington Post
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Young Scots fans of EastEnders are unwittingly adopting the cockney twang of the soap’s characters, a new study claimed.
Read the full article at icLanarkishire
Brain scans have shown that speakers of English and Chinese process language somewhat differently. Now a new study has extended this finding, showing that English and Chinese speakers also process numbers differently–even though they use the same Arabic symbols. The authors believe it is not just language but mode of language learning that makes the difference.
Read the full article at AAAS
Friday, June 23, 2006
In the first study to combine theories of working memory and numerical cognition, researchers find that every extra syllable in a product’s price decreases its chances of being remembered by 20 percent. The researchers explain this effect by the fact that our phonological loop - an important regulator of memory - can only hold 1.5 to 2 seconds of spoken information.
Read the full article at Science Daily
A recent volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences takes a closer look at how music evolved and how we respond to it. Contributors to the volume believe that animals such as birds, dolphins and whales make sounds analogous to music out of a desire to imitate each other. This ability to learn and imitate sounds is a trait necessary to acquire language and scientists feel that many of the sounds animals make may be precursors to human music.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Youngsters who can lick their lips, blow bubbles and pretend that a building block is a car are most likely to find learning language easy, according to a new study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Psychologists at Lancaster University, led by Dr Katie Alcock, found strong links between these movement, or motor and thinking, or cognitive, skills and children’s language abilities.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Researchers led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are developing robots that evolve their own language, bypassing the limits of imposing human rule-based communication. “The result is machines that evolve and develop by themselves without human intervention,” said Stefano Nolfi, the coordinator the ECAgents project. The project, financed by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative, has brought together researchers from disciplines as diverse as robotics, linguistics and biology.
Read the full article at The Engineer Online
For those who think that society is obsessed with time, the concise Oxford English dictionary added support to the theory today in announcing that the word is the most commonly used noun in the English language.
Read the full article at Zee News
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Researchers have discovered that Broca’s area in the brain–best known as the region that evolved to manage speech production–is a major “executive” center in the brain for organizing hierarchies of behaviors. Such planning ability, from cooking a meal to organizing a space mission, is considered one of the hallmarks of human intelligence.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The next time you listen to the Beatles sing ‘Michelle’ you can thank an area of your brain called the left caudate. It could be what enables you to follow the lyrics as they switch from English to French, claim researchers at University College London in the UK.
Read the full article at New Scientist
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
In his book, “The Singing Neanderthals,” Steven Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading in England, has built a strong case that our hominid ancestors had a musical culture, and a rudimentary form of communication that went with it, that has left traces deeply embedded in modern mankind.
Read the full article at MSNBC
Thursday, June 1, 2006
At the Psycholinguistic Laboratory of the University of the Basque Country (EHU-UPV), Basque-Spanish bilingualism and the relation between language and the brain have been under study. Also taking part in this research into bilingualism are researchers from Catalonia and the Canary Islands. Within this context they analysed how word order and grammar, amongst other things, are structured in the brain.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Memory tests performed with amnesiacs have enabled researchers to refute a long-held belief in an essential difference between long-and short-term memories. In the study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania determined that the hippocampus — a seahorse shaped structure in the middle of the brain - was just as important for retrieving certain types of short-term memories as it is for long-term memories.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
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