Saturday, December 22, 2007
A new study of twins indicates that the genetic foundation for the brain’s ability to recognize faces and places is much stronger than for other objects, such as words. The results, which appear in the December 19 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, are some of the first evidence demonstrating the role of genetics in assigning these functions to specific regions of the brain. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
Friday, December 21, 2007
In conversation, humans recognize words primarily from the sounds they hear. However, scientists have long known that what humans perceive goes beyond the sounds and even the sights of speech. The brain actually constructs its own unique interpretation, factoring in both the sights and sounds of speech. …
Read the full news release at the University of Chicago Medical Center
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
A mathematical competition between two rhesus macaques and fourteen undergraduates has revealed a new similarity between monkeys and college students: their ability to handle basic addition. …
Read the full news article at Nature News
A pair of researcher from the University of Alabama has shown that gerbils can be trained to recognise human vowel sounds. Joan Sinnott and Kelly Mosteller have found that gerbils can easily distinguish between vowels like an ‘oo’ (as in ‘you’) and an ‘ee’ (as in ‘me’). …
Read the full science news article at Yahoo! News India
Children learn by imitating adults—so much so that they will rethink how an object works if they observe an adult taking unnecessary steps when using that object, according to a Yale study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read the full news article at Yale University news room
Dr. Michael Beißwenger from the Dortmund Institute for German Language and Literature has presented a study about communicative characteristics of chatting in the internet. The book with the title “Sprachhandlungskoordination in der Chat-Kommunikation” has just been released by the science publishing company de Gruyer. In his study, for which he got his PhD with honors from Culture Studies in March 2007, Beißwenger examines the differences between chats and oral conversations and the effects they have on the manner in which chatters organize their linguistic exchange. …
Read the full science news release at AlphaGalileo
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
A popular urban legend suggests that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. As a culture that faces frigid temperatures year-round, it is important to differentiate between things like snow on the ground (“aput”) and falling snow (“qana”). Psychologists are taking note of this phenomenon and are beginning to examine if learning different names for things helps to tell them apart. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
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