A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second language—even one learned in adolescence—affects how people read in their native tongue.
Full article: Scientific American
Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song. Their research lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people whose auditory nerves are damaged and who must learn to speak without the benefit of hearing their own voices.
Full article: Medical News Today
Your ability to make sense of Groucho’s words and Harpo’s pantomimes in an old Marx Brothers movie takes place in the same regions of your brain, says new research funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.
Full article: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reports a significant breakthrough in explaining gaps in scientists’ understanding of human brain function. The study – which provides a picture of language processing in the brain with unprecedented clarity – is published in the October 16 issue of the journal Science.
Full article: Medical News Today
For a considerable time already there has been discussion within scientific circles about whether knowing and using multiple languages could possibly have positive effects on the human brain and thinking. There have been a number of international studies on the subject, which indicate that the ability to use more than one language brings an individual a considerable advantage. The report of the research team appointed by the European Commission, ”The Contribution of Multilingualism to Creativity”, presents the first known macro analysis based on the available evidence, which has been conducted by searching through several studies and giving particular attention on recent research on the brain.
Full article: Alpha Galileo
Is it better to treat someone with kid gloves or to treat them carefully? Researchers in Italy have investigated how the brain recognises that the first phrase means the same as the second. Publishing in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience, the researchers suggest that we use both hemispheres to understand idioms.
Full article: e! Science News
Our vocabulary continues to grow and expand even in adulthood. Just ten years ago, the word ‘blog’ did not yet exist – and now we no longer remember when we heard this word for the first time or when we learned its meaning. At some stage new words become just as familiar to us as words we have learned earlier. One of the areas of interest in the Academy of Finland’s Neuroscience Research Programme (NEURO) is how the process of learning new words is reflected in the function of the brain.
Full article: Academy of Finland
People who struggle to distinguish musical notes have fewer brain connections in an area involved in language and speech.
Full article: New Scientist
According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it appears humans are not actually capable of “turning off” another language entirely. Psychologists Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Robert Hartsuiker and Kevin Diependaele from Ghent University found that knowledge of a second language actually has a continuous impact on native-language reading.
Full article: EurekAlert
Language networks are small-world and scale-free, although they are built based on different principles. Similar global statistical properties shown by language networks are independent of linguistic structure and typology. So, do linguistic structures really influence the statistical properties of a language network? More concretely, does semantic or conceptual network have the same properties as a syntactic one?
Full article: EurekAlert
Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have succeeded for the first time in devising a model that describes and identifies a basic cellular mechanism that enables networks of neurons to efficiently decode speech in changing conditions.
Full article: EurekAlert
The study of the neural basis of language has largely focused on regions in the cortex – the outer brain layers thought by many researchers to have expanded during human evolution. Research at Brown University’s Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, reported in the September Issue of Cortex adds to evidence that deeper, subcortical regions are also critical by pinpointing when Parkinson’s disease patients have difficulty while processing grammatically complex sentences. In Parkinson’s disease, degeneration of subcortical dopamine-secreting neurons leads not only to motor symptoms but often also to cognitive deficits.
Full article: EurekAlert
A child’s brain has to work overtime in a noisy classroom to do its typical but very important job of distinguishing sounds whose subtle differences are key to success with language and reading. But that simply is too much to ask of the nervous system of a subset of poor readers whose hearing is fine, but whose brains have trouble differentiating the “ba,” “da” and “ga” sounds in a noisy environment, according to a new Northwestern University study.
Full article: EurekAlert
A new study carried out at the University of Haifa sheds light on how first and second languages are represented in the brain of a bilingual person
Full article: EurekAlert
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