Monday, February 16, 2009
When someone speaks to you, do you see what they are saying? We tend to think of speech as being something we hear, but recent studies suggest that we use a variety of senses for speech perception – that the brain treats speech as something we hear, see and even feel. In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum describes research examining how our different senses blend together to help us perceive speech.
Full article: EurekAlert
Every day we are confronted with positive and negative statements. By combining the new, incoming information with what we already know, we are usually able to figure out if the statement is true or false. Previous research has suggested that including negative words, such as “not,” in the middle of a sentence can throw off our brains and make it more difficult to understand.
Full article: EurekAlert
The book “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” and its gender stereotypes on how the sexes communicate remains fodder for debate, but two Indiana University researchers have confirmed one thing: When men and women talk through technology, it’s the women who are more expressive.
Full article: EurekAlert
Learning their community language outside the home enhances minority ethnic children’s development, according to research led from the University of Birmingham. The research, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that attending language classes at complementary schools has a positive impact on students.
Full article: EurekAlert
The regions of our DNA that wire some people to “see” sounds have been discovered. So far, only the general regions within chromosomes have been identified, rather than specific genes, but the work could eventually lead to a genetic test to diagnose the condition before it interferes with a child’s education.
Full article: New Scientist
Sunday, February 15, 2009
If people who finish your sentences drive you crazy, it’s a safe bet that you’re probably not going to be nuts about new software that can do just that. It’s been dreamed up as a speech-recognition equivalent to the predictive text on cellphones. Mutter a half-considered thought into the microphone and the software will plunder a database to complete half-formed words or sentences – in Japanese, at least.
Full article: New Scientist
Orphaned chimpanzee infants given special ‘mothering’ by humans are more advanced than the average child at nine months of age.
Full article: University of Portsmouth
Children with a skull deformity called metopic synostosis have a high rate of speech and language impairments, but this risk is unrelated to the severity of the skull defect, reports a study in the January Journal of Craniofacial Surgery.
Full article: NewsWise
Babies who use gestures to communicate when they are 14 months-old have much larger vocabularies when they start school than those who don’t, say US researchers. They say babies with wealthier, better-educated parents tend to gesture more and this may help explain why some children from low-income families fare less well in school.
Full article: ABC Science
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