UC Riverside researchers have made a major leap forward in understanding how the brain programs innate behavior. The discovery could have future applications in engineering new behaviors in animals and intelligent robots.
Read the full article at University of California Riverside Newsroom
Babbling bouts of barks by baby bats. It’s not a tongue-twister; it’s the first example of infant vocalisation in non-primate mammals.
Read the full New Scientist article
For more than 100 years the standard view among traditional language theorists was that, with the exception of onomatopoeia like “fizz” and “beep,” the sound of a word tells us nothing about how it is used. This seemingly arbitrary relationship between words and their meaning in human language is hailed as singular to our species. A new Cornell study takes that view to task.
Read the full article at Cornell University Chronicle
A high-tech machine that monitors infants’ brain cells as they listen to speech reveals a key element in how babies go from hearing sounds to speaking them.
Read the full article at NPR.org
When contemplating the coos and screams of a fellow member of its species, the rhesus monkey, or macaque, makes use of brain regions that correspond to the two principal language centers in the human brain, according to research conducted by scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), two of the National Institutes of Health.
Read the full article at National Institutes of Health News
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in collaboration with 454 Life Sciences Corporation, in Branford, Connecticut, today announce a plan to have a first draft of the Homo neanderthalensis genome within two years. Comparing the result to modern human and other primate genomes should help to clarify the evolutionary relationship between humans and Neanderthals. It may also illuminate the genetic changes that enabled humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world around 100,000 years ago.
Read the full article at Nature.com
University of Chicago scientists have determined that people spontaneously use a system of communicating when they speak that either reinforces their message or provides additional information that is not conveyed by words alone. Dubbed “analog acoustic expression,” this previously uninvestigated form of communication is described as a sort of verbal gesturing.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
We can thank our verbal nature, along with our fingers, for the ability to develop complex number systems, a new study suggests. The authors theorise that language and maths co-evolved in humans, with language probably emerging just ahead of basic mathematical concepts.
Read the full article at Discovery News
Differences in the way men and women perform verbal and visuospatial tasks have been well documented in scientific literature, but findings have been inconsistent as to whether men and women actually use different parts of their brains. This inconsistency has been attributed to many factors, including variability in the tasks used in studies and failure to match study participants on performance equivalency. But a new study published in the journal Brain and Language, which accounted for and corrected these methodological factors, confirmed that men and women do indeed use different parts of their brains when processing both language and visuospatial information.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Scientists know that children of women who smoke during pregnancy can develop hearing-related cognitive deficits. For the first time, researchers believe they have evidence that not only implicates nicotine as the culprit, but also shows what the substance does to the brain to cause these deficits.
Read the full University of California, Irvine press release here
A new study by University of Alaska Fairbanks Professor Judith Kleinfeld indicates that boys, regardless of their socioeconomic status, lag behind their female peers in language arts.
Read the full article at University of Alaska Fairbanks newsroom
On July 24th 2006, Lingformant will be one year of age. Its babbling stage is almost over by now, and the acquired vocabulary ought to be roughly around 50 lexical entries. We are all eagerly waiting for it to utter its first word any moment now.
As the father of Lingformant, I am very proud of my creation.
During this one year Lingformant has gone through one name change (from LanguageNews), one domain name change, two server switches, as well one design modification. It also went from no advertising to a lot of advertising to a little advertising to no advertising again. I made a grand total of four dollars fifty-three cents from six months of ads.
The only part that actually remained from the first incarnation was the original engine that powered Lingformant. And now I have decided to change that, as well. (Actually, what I really ought to be doing is writing my master’s dissertation.) To bring Lingformant more in line with my other web projects such as my general blog, my literary awards news service and my Akira Kurosawa news and information website, I have now converted Lingformant into a WordPress powered website. It also seemed like a good opportunity to mess around with the site design while I was at it.
I have tried to make the switch as smooth as possible. The old RSS Feed URL still works (or at least it should), but you may want to update it to one of the new ones found at the “RSS Feeds” section. Those of you who are receiving the news entries via e-mail, you have been taken off the old Mailman list and put onto the new state-of-the-art list powered by a WordPress plugin. Unfortunately, sending batched digests is no more a possibility, so from now on you will be receiving each news mail separately. I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
The biggest change, however, must be the ability for users to leave comments on the news entries. I have no idea whether there is any real interest in such a feature, but as it is included in WordPress, it felt like a good idea to leave it on. So, if you feel like leaving a response to any of the news posted here, now you can. (Note that your first post will be moderated to prevent spamming.)
During this one year, I have also learnt a good deal. One is that there are perhaps less people out there interested in a service like this than I originally thought (my estimations are that reader numbers are currently at around 100, and have been there for the last half a year or so). Perhaps I am just not as good a self-promoter as I thought I was.
I have also learnt that linguistics is not extremely well handled by the media, with relevant news stories generally belonging to one of the following two categories:
1) Discoveries about language made by and reported by non-linguists, and with very little actual understanding of what our current understanding is about how language works. Often involving chimps, dolphins, whales, dogs or birds.
2) Reports about new discoveries and theories about how the brain functions, again from and by non-linguists.
In addition to these two, there is of course a continual flood of articles about the status of a language in one country or another, reports about how English (or some other language) is deteriorating, changing its spelling, or acquiring its millionth or billionth word. Most of these I do not include here for obvious reasons.
That the number of articles actually written or even peer-reviewed by linguists is so low has been something of a surprise to me. In fact, it is alarmingly low. (But Mark Liberman’s recent post at Language Log perhaps offers something of an explanation.)
All in all, I have enjoyed seeing Lingformant grow and evolve into what it is now. I hope that you have found it useful as well and that the toddler’s next year will be as good as the first one was.
Thank you for reading!
English-speaking mothers who begin reading to their children at a very early age have toddlers with greater language comprehension, larger, more expressive vocabularies and higher cognitive scores by the age of 2. Meanwhile, Spanish-speaking mothers who read to their children every day have 3-year-olds with greater language and cognitive development than those who aren’t read to.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
In people with autism, the brain areas that perform complex analysis appear less likely to work together during problem solving tasks than in people who do not have the disorder, report researchers working in a network funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found that communications between these higher-order centers in the brains of people with autism appear to be directly related to the thickness of the anatomical connections between them. In a separate report, the same research team found that, in people with autism, brain areas normally associated with visual tasks also appear to be active during language-related tasks, providing evidence to explain a bias towards visual thinking common in autism.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
The aim is to build a computer which mimics how nerve cells in the brain interact in a bid to engineer more ‘fault tolerant’ electronics. The computer will be the first of its kind and will be used to try and understand how, for example, the details of complex visual scenes are encoded by the brain.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
No Comments - Add a comment