Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Syntactic persistence is the tendency for speakers to produce sentences using similar grammatical patterns and rules of language as those they have used before. Although the way this occurs is not well understood, previous research has indicated that this effect may involve a specific aspect of memory function. Memory is made up of two components: declarative and procedural. Declarative memory is used in remembering events and facts. Procedural memory helps us to remember how to perform tasks, such as playing the piano or riding a bike. A recent study suggests that the common phrase, “it’s so easy, it’s like riding a bike” should perhaps be replaced with “it’s so easy, it’s like forming a sentence.” …
Full article: EurekAlert
After several years of detective work, philologists at the University of Stavanger in Norway have collected a unique collection of texts online. Now they’re about to start the most comprehensive analysis of middle English ever. …
Full article: AlphaGalileo.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
The Internet got smarter this week with the release of a semantic map that teaches computers the meanings behind words — and gives the machines a vocabulary far larger than that of a typical US college graduate. …
Full article: PhysOrg
Children learn to talk by listening to others speak, but what happens when that line of communication is severed? Surprisingly, people who go deaf as adults can chat intelligibly for years afterward. Now, thanks to a robot that tweaks jaw movements, scientists may have figured out why. …
Full article: AAAS
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Scientists on Sunday said intelligible speech is learnt in part through nerve signals from the vocal tract, a discovery that could open up an ambitious avenue of therapy for the deaf. …
Full article: Physorg
The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousands of years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain?
A recent study in Nature Neuroscience yields critical new information, uncovering what could constitute the “missing link” between the brain of vocalizing nonhuman species and the human brain: evidence that a cerebral region specialized for processing voice, known to exist in the human brain, has a counterpart in the brain of rhesus macaques. …
Full article: Scientific American
Scientists at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that our brains automatically consider many possible words and their meanings before we’ve even heard the final sound of the word. …
Full article: EurekAlert
Human brains appear to come in at least two flavours: male and female. Now variations in the density of the synapses that connect neurons may help to explain differences in how men and women think. …
Full article: New Scientist
Children who are bilingual before the age of 5 are significantly more likely to stutter and to find it harder to lose their impediment, than children who speak only one language before this age, suggests research published ahead of print in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The researchers base their findings on 317 children, who were referred for stutter when aged between 8 and 10. ..
Full article: EurekAlert
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Being an athlete or merely a fan improves language skills when it comes to discussing their sport because parts of the brain usually involved in playing sports are instead used to understand sport language, new research at the University of Chicago shows. …
Full article: EurekAlert
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