New research by a Rice University psychologist clearly identifies the parts of the brain involved in the process of choosing appropriate words during speech.
Full article: Rice University
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
The old adage that we can only learn how to do something by trying it ourselves may have to be revised in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience. It turns out that humans, primates, some birds, and possibly other higher animals have mirror neurons that fire in the same pattern whether performing or just observing a task. These mirror neurons clearly play an important role in learning motor tasks involving hand eye coordination, and possibly also acquisition of language skills, as well as being required for social skills, but the exact processes involved are only just being discovered. In particular the relationship between mirror neural networks and social cognitive tasks has been unclear, and greater knowledge of it could shed light on problems such as autism that may arise when this process goes wrong.
Full article: European Science Foundation
Up to a third of the children adopted to Norway from abroad are having problems with language proficiency.
Full article: AlphaGalileo
Babies are born with a strong motivation to communicate with us, to understand and to be understood, a new study from researchers at the University of Dundee has shown.
Full article: University of Dundee
In a paper published this month in Primates, an international journal of primatology that provides a forum on all aspects of primates in relation to humans and other animals, Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Serge Wich and his colleagues provide the first-ever documentation of a primate mimicking a sound from another species without being specifically trained to do so. Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., began whistling – a sound that is in a human’s, but not an orangutan’s, repertoire – after hearing an animal caretaker make the sound.
Full article: EurekAlert
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