Boys and girls tend to use different parts of their brains to process some basic aspects of grammar, according to the first study of its kind, suggesting that sex is an important factor in the acquisition and use of language. …
Read the full article at Georgetown University Medical Center Newsroom
Could the end of sign language for deaf children be in sight? A spate of new studies has shown that profoundly deaf babies who receive cochlear implants in their first year of life develop language and speech skills remarkably close to those of hearing children. Many of the children even learn to sing passably well and function almost flawlessly in the hearing world. …
Read the full article at New Scientist
Language lives as much in our gestures as in our words, a new study shows. Certain languages are richer in gesture, and such unspoken communication is so strong that bilingual individuals often use the fluent gestures from one language, even when speaking the words of another. …
Read the full article at New Scientist
It may not be language as we know it, but whales have no shortage of ways to make themselves understood. So broad is their vocal repertoire, in fact, that whales can call to their young, woo potential mates and even express emotions, according to researchers who have identified 622 social sounds in humpback whales.
Read the full article at Discovery News
What are the genetic changes that set us apart from our Neanderthal cousins? Although the ancient race is long extinct, we may soon know the answers. More than one million base pairs of fossilised Neanderthal DNA have now been sequenced – the most of any extinct organism – thanks to a new high-throughput sequencing technique well-suited to handling old, degraded DNA.
Read the full article at New Scientist Tech
Specific language impairment (SLI) is a condition in which a child’s language development is deficient despite showing normal development in all other areas. New research, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, attempts to identify the cause behind this affliction.
Read the full news article at EurekAlert!
New Zealand’s high school students will be able to use “text-speak” — the mobile phone text message [notation] beloved of teenagers — in national exams this year, officials said.
Read the full news article at Yahoo! News
Google has built an English translation tool for Chinese and Arabic texts — using a team that speaks neither of the two languages. The system, which last week topped an international exercise to find the best Chinese and Arabic translation technology, is symbolic of a shift in approach to computer translation.
Read the full article at Nature
Micro-RNA, snippets of RNA that control gene expression, could be what makes the difference between us and chimps. Variation between individuals, in traits ranging from pigment to behaviour, is the raw material of evolution. The difference can be down to very subtle changes: the genes involved may code for exactly the same proteins but make them at other places and times. So could micro-RNA be the determining factor?
Read the full news article at New Scientist
The stickiness of human neurons may have been a key factor in why the human brain evolved beyond the brains of our primate relatives. In a study comparing the genomes of humans, chimpanzees, mice and other vertebrates, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Joint Genome Institute (JGI) found a strikingly high degree of genetic differences in DNA sequences that appear to regulate genes involved in nerve cell adhesion molecules.
Read the full news article at BrightSurf.com
A new wiki has been set up with computational linguistics in mind. Mark Joseph writes at Linguistlist:
“The purpose of this wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. Wikipedia contains some excellent articles on Computational Linguistics, but the mandate of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia. This means that Wikipedia articles must be written for a general audience, not for specialists. It also means that content such as job ads and course outlines is not suitable for Wikipedia. Therefore this new wiki was created to fill a role that Wikipedia cannot fill.”
You can access it here.
I have, actually, for a long time thought that there should be a wiki for linguistics in general. One could take the linguistics articles available at Wikipedia as a starting point (there are, after all, a good number of them), and perhaps see if something like the Utrecht University’s Lexicon of Linguistics (which does not seem to be updated) could also be incorporated into it. And then, of course, one would need a lot of volunteers to populate the wiki.
And now that I am mentioning that, I might just as well mention another idea for a website that could turn out to be useful: a database of native speakers willing to help linguists in their research. It would be marvellous if one could, with just a few clicks of the mouse, contact native speakers of language X for information about one thing or another. At least I could do with such a feature in my own research.
The idea that Neanderthals and early humans living in Europe may have interbred has been strengthened by a re-analysis of bones unearthed in a Romanian cave more than 50 years ago. The bones show a mixture of modern human and Neanderthal features, leading researchers to suggest that the two groups could have intermixed and produced offspring.
Read the full news article at Nature
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