Sunday, March 30, 2008
In a study examining the contrast in cross-cultural languages, known as cross-linguistics, researchers from CNRS and Université de Provence, and Harvard and Trento Universities found direct evidence to support word-order constraints during language production. Specifically, the way in which participants pronounced a set of words was dependent upon the preceding word as it varied across languages. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the human brain that is shedding light on how human language evolved. The study marks the first use of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a non-invasive imaging technique, to compare human brain structures to those of chimpanzees, our closest living relative. The study will be published in the online version of Nature Neuroscience. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert
A fast-dying language in remote central Siberia shares a mother tongue with dozens of Native American languages spoken thousands of miles away, new research confirms. The finding may allow linguists to weigh in on how the Americas were first settled, according to Edward Vajda, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham. …
Read the full article at National Geographic
Monday, March 17, 2008
When Deb Roy and his wife have guests over to see their two-and-a-half-year-old son—the couple is withholding his name to protect his privacy—the first thing they do is ask their visitors to fill out a consent form. Unusual, for sure, but the couple is merely trying to make people aware that their actions and voices may be captured by the 11 fish-eye cameras and 14 microphones hidden around their Cambridge, Mass., home listening in on nearly every sound their son has ever uttered. The short-term goal is to understand how children acquire language; the long-term goal is to use the intelligence gleaned to teach robots to talk, too. …
Read the full news article at Scientific American
Friday, March 14, 2008
A new study may have been for (and about) the birds, but it also hints at how humans may have developed the ability to speak, potentially paving the way to one day to identifying the causes of speech deficiencies. …
Read the full news article at Scientific American
Thursday, March 13, 2008
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice. …
Read the full news at New Scientist Tech
Why do some people hold on to their accents all their lives while others drop them overnight? Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist from University College London, has spent 16 years researching speech: how we formulate words, how we come by our accents and how we decode what is being said to us. …
Read the full article at Times Online
Researchers at UCL (University College London) have discovered that a system in the brain for processing grammar is impaired in some children with specific language impairment (SLI), but that these children compensate with a different brain area. The findings offer new hope for sufferers of SLI, which affects seven per cent of children and is a major cause of many not reaching their educational potential. To date, it has not been clear whether these children generally struggle to process language, or whether they have specific problems with grammar. The UCL findings reveal the latter for a sub-group (G-SLI), and suggest that educational methods that enhance these compensatory mechanisms may help such children overcome their difficulties. …
Read the full news article at University College London news room
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Researchers have found that monkeys combine calls to make them meaningful in the same way that humans do. It is hoped the St Andrews University study will provide fresh insights into the evolution of human language. …
Read the full news article at BBC News
Though they perch far apart on the avian family tree, birds with the ability to learn songs use similar brain structures to sing their tunes. Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center now have an explanation for this puzzling likeness. …
Read the full news article at Medical News Today
An area of the brain involved in the planning and production of spoken and signed language in humans plays a similar role in chimpanzee communication, researchers report. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys, until now no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences. For the first time — and in unambiguous findings — researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. …
Read the full new release at EurekAlert
Scientists led by Holger Schulze at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, and the Universities of Ulm, Newcastle and Erlangen have found a neuronal mechanism in the auditory system that is able to solve the so-called cocktail-party task based on the analysis of the temporal fine structure of the acoustic scene. The findings, published in this week’s PLoS ONE, show that different speakers have different temporal fine structure in their voiced speech and that such signals are represented in different areas of the auditory cortex according to this different time structure. …
Read the full news article at Alpha Galileo
iCub, a one metre-high baby robot which will be used to study how a robot could quickly pick up language skills, will be available next year. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
A research team drawn from the Department of Systems and Automation Engineering of the Polytechnic University School and from the Faculty of Informatics at the Donostia-San Sebastián campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and led by lecturer Miren Karmele Lopez de Ipiña, is developing systems that process and understand spoken language and automatically obtain information particularly from Basque radio and television. …
Read the full news article at Eurekalert
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