Speech pathologists at Nationwide Children’s Hospital report an increasing number of patients diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech, a motor speech disorder in which children have difficulty saying basic sounds and words. As a result, they are urging parents and pediatricians to be on the lookout for symptoms of the condition. …
Read the full news release at Nationwide Children’s Hospital
You may not want a monkey to balance your chequebook, but you still have to give them credit – new research supports the idea that not only can monkeys understand written numbers, but that individual brain cells may become dedicated to specific numbers. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
Or read the original research article: Semantic Associations between Signs and Numerical Categories in the Prefrontal Cortex
Bats are the most vocal mammals other than humans, and understanding how they communicate during their nocturnal outings could lead to better treatments for human speech disorders, say researchers at Texas A&M University. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
German researchers have discovered Neandertals apparently had the human variant of a gene that is linked to speech and language. A team of scientists, primarily from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the discovery during efforts to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct hominid. …
Read the full news article at Scientific American
A paper by four faculty members and three graduate students from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois published today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is reporting on the successful application of a fast optical imaging technique to language processing, giving researchers a powerful new tool for understanding how language is processed by the brain. …
Read the full news article at Innovations Report
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.” …
Read the full news release at Havard University news room
An extraordinary advance in human origins research reveals evidence of the emergence of the upright human body plan over 15 million years earlier than most experts have believed. More dramatically, the study confirms preliminary evidence that many early hominoid apes were most likely upright bipedal walkers sharing the basic body form of modern humans. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
Most babies can detect the difference between sounds like “bih” and “dih” by the age of 17 months. Not so children raised in bilingual households, it seems. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change. This tendency was long suspected, but has now been proven rigorously for the first time by two new studies. The results show that the tools of evolutionary biology can be applied to study the evolution of cultural artefacts like language. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
This is just a quick note to apologise for the recent lack of news updates, which was caused by me simply being too busy to work on “hobby projects” such as Lingformant, as well as some server side problems. Over the next couple of days I’ll be adding the news that I have missed, bringing the site up-to-date.
The Ig Nobel Award in linguistics has been given to “A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards”, according to BBC News.
Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning. They also ignore sounds that don’t play a significant role in speaking their native tongue, according to a study by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. …
Read the full news release at the University of Pennsylvania News Room
Frank and his colleagues found links to learning behaviors in three separate genes associated with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical in the brain that is often associated with pleasure, learning and other behaviors. Several neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, are also linked to abnormal levels of dopamine. …
Read the full news release at The University of Arizona News Room
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