Why do children learn languages so easily yet adults struggle? It is an ancient question that a new brain scanning machine in Sydney, the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere, could help answer.
Read the full article at The Sydney Morning Herald
Update: Mark Liberman at Language Log has investigated the background of this story, and it - rather unsurprisingly - turns out that the news release linked to below is, using Joey’s (from the TV sitcom Friends) term, a moo point, rather than based on any real science.
“Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have confirmed.” Read the full article at BBC News
“Swearing is basically a way to relieve anger and frustration in a nonphysical way,” Timothy Jay, a dirty-word expert at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, explains. Because they’re so uniquely expressive, he says, curse words play an important—even privileged—role in our language and minds. They have a deep emotional tie—in that other words don’t have, and they persist through the final stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, long after the rest of our vocabulary is gone.
Read the full article at Psychology Today
Computer scientists in Scotland developed the program for children who need to use computerised speech aids. They team said enabling non-speaking children to use puns and other jokes would help them to develop their language and communication skills.
Read the full article at BBC News
Dolphins may have big brains, but a South African-based scientist says lab rats and even goldfish can outwit them.
Read the full article at MSNBC
Sparrows deprived of food early in life are unable to learn the songs that attract elite mates, researchers say. If the fledglings lack adequate nutrition, the part of the brain that helps them to learn, reproduce and recognise songs fails to develop properly, a new study shows.
Read the full article at New Scientist
One of the fastest-evolving pieces of DNA in the human genome is a gene linked to brain development, according to findings by an international team of researchers published in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature.
Read the full article at University of California, Davis News
When the nonprofit organization Terralingua mapped the distribution of languages against a map of the world’s biodiversity, it found that the places with the highest concentration of plants and animals, such as the Amazon Basin and the island of New Guinea, were also where people spoke the most languages.
Read the full article at LiveScience.com
University of Arizona psychologists Rebecca Gomez, Richard Bootzin, and Lynn Nadel have found that babies who get a little daytime shut-eye are more likely to exhibit an advanced level of learning, known as abstraction. The study involved 48 fifteen-month-old infants attempting to learn “phrases” from a made-up language.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Using advanced brain sensor technology developed at the University of Oregon, researchers have confirmed often-debated findings from 1992 that showed infants as young as six months know when an arithmetic solution is wrong.
Read the full article at University of Oregon
A post at Google’s research blog indicates that the company is to release a sizeable set of data that might be of use for linguists. Quoted from Google:
“We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That’s why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.”
The dataset will eventually be distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.
Read the full announcement at Google Research Blog
(Thanks go to the language log for pointing me to this news.)
Scientists have provided new insights into how the brain is organised - knowledge which could eventually inform diagnosis of and treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s Disease and autism.
Read the full article at Newcastle University
Exposure to new experiences improves memory, according to research by UCL psychologists and medical doctors that could hold major implications for the treatment of memory problems. The study, published in ‘Neuron’ on 3 August, concludes that introducing completely new facts when learning, significantly improves memory performance.
Read the full article at University College London
With 80% of Canadian teenagers using instant messaging and adopting its unique linguistic shorthand, many teachers and parents are concerned about the medium’s potential to corrupt kids’ grammar. But instant messaging doesn’t deserve its bad reputation as a spoiler of syntax, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.
Read the full article at University of Toronto Newsroom
The great apes are the smartest of all nonhuman primates, with orangutans and chimpanzees consistently besting monkeys and lemurs on a variety of intelligence tests, Duke University Medical Center researchers have found.
Read the full article at Duke University Medical Center News
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