The verb forms the heart of a sentence. Although a lot of research has been done into the role that verbs play during the transfer of information, less is known about exactly how and when the listener or reader uses this information. Dutch researcher Dieuwke de Goede delved into this subject and investigated how the functioning of the verb is expressed when sentences are listened to. …
For decades, a debate has simmered in the educational community over the best way to teach children how to read. Proponents of phonics, the “whole language and meaning” approach and other teaching methods long have battled for dominance, each insisting that theirs is the superior strategy. Now, a Florida State University researcher has entered the fray with a paper in the prestigious journal Science that says there is no one “best” method for teaching children to read.
Read the full news article at EurekAlert!
A 10-minute screening test to identify pre-school children who might be dyslexic has been developed by language experts at University College London. …
Read the full news article at BBC News
For the first time, a grey parrot has demonstrated that he can imitate what he sees and hears — demonstrating a more complex understanding of his environment than that needed for mimicry — according to a study in the current issue of Language Sciences. The bird, Alex, can also create new word labels for objects by combining words he already knows. For example, he called a juicy red apple that appear to have brought to mind bananas and cherries a “banerry.” …
Read the full article at Discovery Channel
A Cambodian girl who disappeared aged eight has been found after living wild in the jungle for 19 years, police say. … Local police said the woman was “half-human and half-animal” and could not speak any intelligible language.
Read the full article at BBC News
Each year, about 40,000 children are adopted across national lines, primarily by families from North America and Western Europe. These joyful occasions mark the growth of new families and also provide the framework for a natural experiment in language development. Although most are infants and toddlers, thousands of older children are also adopted. Typically, these older children loose their birth language rapidly and become fluent speakers of their new language. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Traveling abroad presents an ideal opportunity to master a foreign language. While the immersion process facilitates communication in a diverse world, people are often surprised to find they have difficulty returning to their native language. This phenomenon is referred to as first-language attrition and has University of Oregon psychologist Benjamin Levy wondering how it is possible to forget, even momentarily, words used fluently throughout one’s life. …
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Many people think they can safely drive while talking on their cell phones. Vanderbilt neuroscientists Paul E. Dux and René Marois have found that when it comes to handling two things at once, your brain, while fast, isn’t that fast. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
Two studies in the January 18, 2007, issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press, shed significant light on how the brain processes numerical information–both abstract quantities and their concrete representations as symbols. The researches said their findings will contribute to understanding how the brain processes quantitative information as well as lead to studies of how numerical representation in the brain develops in children. … In one paper, Manuela Piazza and colleagues showed that regions of the parietal lobe activate in response to numbers, either when they are presented as patterns of dots or as Arabic numerals. … In the other paper in Neuron, Roi Cohen Kadosh and colleagues conducted experiments demonstrating that the two hemispheres of the parietal lobe function differently in processing numbers. While the left lobe harbors abstract numerical representations, the right shows a dependence on the notation used for a number, they found. The researchers concluded that “results challenge the commonly held belief that numbers are represented solely in an abstract way in the human brain.” The authors also concluded that their results “advocate the existence of distinct neuronal populations for numbers, which are notation dependent in the right parietal lobe.” …
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Northwestern University researchers have discovered a genetic cause of a mysterious neurological disease in which people have trouble recalling and using words. The illness, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), differs from Alzheimer’s Disease in which a person’s memory becomes impaired. In PPA, a little known form of dementia, people lose the ability to express themselves and understand speech. …
Read the full article at Northwestern University news room
People who are fully bilingual and speak both languages every day for most of their lives can delay the onset of dementia by up to four years compared with those who only know one language, Canadian scientists said on Friday. …
Read the full article at New Scientist
The human brain underwent explosive growth after we split from our chimp cousins, but the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has since slowed, says a new study in PLOS Biology. The researchers involved speculate that the higher complexity of the biochemical network in the brain places strong constraints on the ability of most brain-related genes to change. …
Read the full article at Science A Gogo
Since not much is happening news-wise at the moment, let me offer you a link to Lake Superior State University’s 2007 edition of the (in)famous banished words list.
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