Women may be fed up with being stereotyped as the chattier sex, but the cliche turns out to be true – in female-centric monkey groups at least. The gossipy nature of female macaques also adds weight to the theory that human language evolved to forge social bonds.
Full article: New Scientist
Scientists at a Scottish university are to analyse parrots, ravens and pigeons in a bid to discover how human language evolved, it was revealed yesterday.
Full article: scotsman.com
Scientists from Maastricht University have developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said. With the help of neuroimaging and data mining techniques the researchers mapped the brain activity associated with the recognition of speech sounds and voices. In their Science article “Who” is Saying “What”? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique ‘neural fingerprint’ in the listener’s brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition.
Full article: EurekAlert
Scientists have identified the first gene that is associated with a common childhood language disorder, known as specific language impairment (SLI). The gene – CNTNAP2 – has also been recently implicated in autism, and could represent a crucial genetic link between the two disorders.
Full article: Medical News Today
A sound curiosity, in which a spoken phrase seems to morph into a song when repeated, is shedding light on the difference between speech and song.
Full article: New Scientist
It seems that our brain can correct speech errors in the same way that it controls other forms of behaviour. Niels Schiller and Lesya Ganushchak, NWO researchers in Leiden, made this discovery while studying how the brain reacts to verbal errors. This research can contribute to improvements in the treatment of people who have problems with speaking or in understanding language.
Full article: AlphaGalileo
Although babies typically start talking around 12 months of age, their brains actually begin processing certain aspects of language much earlier, so that by the time they start talking, babies actually already know hundreds of words. While studying language acquisition in infants can be a challenging endeavor, researchers have begun to make significant progress that changes previous views of what infants learn, according to a new report by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Daniel Swingley. The report, published in the October issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes an increasing emphasis among researchers in studying vocabulary development in infants.
Full article: EurekAlert
ust like human infants, baby birds also babble before mastering complex verbal communication, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the journal Science. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Herz Foundation and Friends of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Full article: Natural News
Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences.
Full article: AlphaGalileo.Org
A new University of Sussex study provides evidence that gorilla communication is linked to the left hemisphere of the brain – just as it is in humans.
Full article: Physorg
Researchers are one step closer to understanding why children can learn languages far more easily than adults, thanks to a world-first device that allows scientists to measure the magnetic fields generated by a child’s brain.
Full Article: Physorg.com
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