Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Young children can crudely add and subtract numbers before they have learned the rules of arithmetic, a new study finds. Researchers presented five- and six-year-old children with problems such as, “Sarah has 15 candies and she gets 19 more; John has 51 candies. Who has more?” To answer correctly, researchers say, the children must be harnessing an intuitive sense of how large different numbers are, which could help ease the pain of learning arithmetic. …
Read the full article at Scientific American
All babies can grow up speaking any language, but now researchers have uncovered evidence that genes may in fact play a part in learning so-called “tonal languages”, such as Chinese. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
Brain cells generated during adulthood may play a greater role in memory formation than previously thought. While the overall number of brain cells decreases as you get older, new cells are generated in at least two areas of the brain throughout adulthood. Researchers had speculated that these cells could be involved in the formation of new memories, but until recently there was little evidence to support this. …
Read the full article at New Scientist
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Young babies can discriminate between different languages just by looking at an adult’s face, even if they do not hear a single spoken word. And babies who grow up bilingual can do this for longer than monolingual infants. The work suggests that visual information helps to tell languages apart. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
If they were Scousers they’d be “made up”; from the Black Country they’d be “bostin”. But researchers from the University of Leeds are naturally “well chuffed” to receive a £460,000 grant to examine and catalogue the dialects and diversities of the English language.
Read the full article at Alpha Galileo
The steady formation of new brain cells in adults may represent more than merely a patching up of aging brains, a new study has shown. The new adult brain cells may serve to give the adult brain the same kind of learning ability that young brains have while still allowing the existing, mature circuitry to maintain stability.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
A University of Arizona scientist who has specialized in studying how fireflies and other creatures communicate has won a million-dollar grant to conduct a pioneering 5-year study on the roles that attention and memory play when the human brain hears and processes spoken language. …
Read the full news article at Medical News Today
A new study suggests that names tend to be associated with certain facial features — Bobs have rounder faces than Tims, for example — and that it is easier to learn a person’s name if his or her face matches it.
Read the full news article at Live Science
It is more difficult for doctors to diagnose complex sources of pain in women than in men and the reasons for this are rooted in language use. This finding, which is of major importance for both doctors and patients, is revealed by a now completed project by the FWF Austrian Science Fund. The results of this research into how the two genders typically describe pain are to be presented at the 2nd International Congress of Gender Medicine on 2nd and 3rd June in Vienna. …
Read the full news article at Medical News Today
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought. …
Read the full news article at BBC News
Friday, May 18, 2007
THEY may not understand English like TV character Flipper, but dolphins living in Cardigan Bay are communicating with each other in a “Welsh” dialect. Scientists comparing resident dolphins there found the friendly mammals had developed a unique series of whistles, different to those found in other parts of the Irish Sea. …
Read the full news article at icWales
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Free will and true spontaneity exist … in fruit flies. This is what scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
A University of Arizona scientist who has specialized in studying how fireflies and other creatures communicate has won a million-dollar grant to conduct a pioneering 5-year study on the roles that attention and memory play when the human brain hears and processes spoken language. …
Read the full news article at the University of Arizona news room
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Children whose mother tongue is Russian and who acquired literacy in their home language before entering first grade received higher grades on reading skills tests than their peers who speak only Hebrew or those who speak Russian but have not learned how to read it. This was revealed in a study recently completed at the University of Haifa. The researcher, Dr. Mila Schwartz, pointed out that because of the linguistic complexity of the Russian language, it can be deduced that knowing how to read and write Russian will give children an advantage when learning to read other languages. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Friday, May 4, 2007
New research indicates that young children with autism have a difficult time recognizing ordinary words and more of their brains are occupied with this kind of task compared to typically developing youngsters. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert
No Comments - Add a comment