Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Whether humans are born with certain innate abilities to understand spatial relationships in the wider world is a question that has troubled thinkers at least as far back as Aristotle. So-called nativists argue for such an innate understanding, whereas others, notably the late Benjamin Whorf, contend that spatial understandings are directed by learned language. By comparing people of different linguistic backgrounds as well as the spatial strategies of small children with the great apes, researchers have found evidence for a middle way: humans do have an innate spatial strategy, but it can be overridden by language.
Read the full news article at Scientific American
In families with two working parents, fathers had greater impact than mothers on their children’s language development between ages 2 and 3, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute and UNC’s School of Education.
Read the full news article at EurekAlert!
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered decreased activity in the frontal lobes [with subjects ’speaking in tongues’], an area of the brain associated with being in control of one’s self. This pioneering study, involving functional imaging of the brain while subjects were speaking in tongues, is in the November issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, the official publication of the International Society for Neuroimaging in Psychiatry.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Friday, October 27, 2006
A “Tower of Babel” device that gives the illusion of being bilingual is being developed by US scientists. Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another.
Read the full article at BBC News
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) today announced the discovery of a gene that plays a significant role in memory performance in humans. The findings, reported by TGen and research colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, and Mayo Clinic Scottsdale, appear in the October 20 issue of Science. The study details how researchers associated memory performance with a gene called Kibra in over 1,000 individuals —both young and old— from Switzerland and Arizona. This study is the first to describe scanning the human genetic blueprint at over 500,000 positions to identify cognitive differences between humans.
Read the full article at BrightSurf
If you’ve ever wondered how you recognize your mother’s voice without seeing her face or how you discern your cell phone’s ring in a crowded room, researchers may have another piece of the answer. Their work indicates that once you figure out your mother’s voice is a good thing – most days–fairly significant changes occur in the sensory cortex, the part of the brain that responds to sound.
Read the full article at BrightSurf
Friday, October 20, 2006
Fathers: watch what you say. It seems dads may have more of an influence on their children’s language development than they might think.
Read the full article at New Scientist
Across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green-or-blue), say researchers in this week’s online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read the full article at the Ohio State University newsroom
Children who are verbally abused may suffer lasting negative effects in their brain’s ability to process language, researchers report. They say the new findings illustrate the seriousness of this type of abuse and should encourage greater action to combat it.
Read the full article at New Scientist
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Dartmouth researchers have found areas in the brain that indicate bilingualism. The finding sheds new light on decades of debate about how the human brain’s language centers may actually be enhanced when faced with two or more languages as opposed to only one.
Read the full article at Dartmouth News
Saturday, October 14, 2006
A novel look at the brains of adults with autism has provided new evidence that various brain regions of people with the developmental disorder may not communicate with each other as efficiently as they do in other people.
Read the full article at University of Washington news pages
Thursday, October 12, 2006
More than 12,000 hours of archive recordings in Gaelic and Scots are to be made available online.
Read the full article at BBC
The idea of a one-size-fits-all model for PhD study is simplistic, patronizing and bad for science. A recipe such as Georgia Chenevix-Trench’s, detailed in “What Makes a Good PhD Student?” is just one model for PhD success.
Read the full article at Nature
Friday, October 6, 2006
A region of the human brain that scientists believe is critical to human intellectual abilities surprisingly functions much like a digital computer, according to psychology Professor Randall O’Reilly of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The finding could help researchers better understand the functioning of human intelligence.
Read the full article at University of Colorado at Boulder newsroom
Parents who use a particular conversational style with their children–drawing them out to elicit detailed memories about past shared events and to talk about emotions–contribute to the child’s secure attachment, sense of self-worth, and eventual social competence, says a new University of Illinois study published in a September special edition of Attachment and Human Development.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
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