Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Female rhesus monkeys use special vocalizations while interacting with infants, the way human adults use motherese, or “baby talk,” to engage babies’ attention, new research at the University of Chicago shows. “Motherese is a high pitched and musical form of speech, which may be biological in origin,” said Dario Maestripieri, Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development at the University. “The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations called girneys may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of human motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants.” …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Researchers Greg Bryant and Clark Barrett, at the University of California, Los Angeles, propose that the relationships between sounds and intentions are universal, and thus, should be understood by anyone regardless of the language they speak. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Saturday, August 18, 2007
New research suggests that pronouns may play a far greater role than simply replacing a proper name in a sentence. A University of South Carolina study suggests that pronouns help keep the brain’s complex circuitry and limited memory system from being overloaded. …
Read the full news article at the University of South Carolina News room
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
A searchable database of over four million modern Scottish words has gone online today. The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech was put up by Glasgow University with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The database contains a dictionary of Scottish words since 1945, proceedings from the Scottish Parliament, diaries, correspondence and audio recordings of texts. …
Read the full news story at Informatics Online
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Children in the UK with speech and language difficulties are prone to loneliness, feelings of frustration and poor self-esteem, a new Department of Health study has revealed. The study is the first scientific examination of quality of life for children with speech and language difficulties (SaLD). …
Read the full news release at the University of Portsmouth News Room
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The scientists found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. …
Read the full science news article at EurekAlert
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Lauri Karttunen, a research fellow at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., a Xerox Company), has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics, the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. In the area of computational linguistics, Karttunen was one of the first pioneers to realize and exploit the potential of finite-state transducers for linguistic applications. …
Read the full news release at Yahoo! Finance news
Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it. … Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. …
Read the full news article at Stanford School of Medicine news room
Friday, August 3, 2007
The findings indicate that the mental structures and the psychological reasoning skills allowing us predict other’s behavior are in place at a very young age and their development does not entirely rely upon the environment or associative learning mechanisms. Surian proposes that “infants who expect agents’ behavior to be guided by such internally available information thereby exhibit an ability to attribute mental content — and this is mind reading proper, however rudimentary.” …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Researchers have long known that children experience a vocabulary explosion at about 18 months of age, suddenly learning words at a much faster rate. Conventional theory offered complex explanations for the phenomenon, but new research by a University of Iowa professor suggests far simpler mechanisms may be involved: word repetition, variations in the difficulty of words, and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once. …
Read the full news release at the University of Iowa News Services
Thursday, August 2, 2007
When orang-utans want a human to hand over a tasty treat, they use a similar strategy to that used in the game ‘charades’, say researchers. They repeat signals that work, and modify those that don’t, revealing surprisingly sophisticated communication skills. …
Read the full science article at Nature
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