Children who speak a second or third language may have an unexpected advantage later in life, a new Tel Aviv University study has found. Knowing and speaking many languages may protect the brain against the effects of aging. …
Full article: EurekAlert
One in 20 children in kindergarten has difficulties understanding speech that are not related to hearing or problems with their ears. The reason is that speech discrimination is a problem solved in the brain, not in the ear. How does the brain process speech sounds? Very little was known, until now. …
Read the full article at Physorg
Does the language people speak influence their perception of the world? Recent findings by a research team at the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of The University of Hong Kong (HKU) suggest that it may well. For the first time, the team has found patterns of brain activation that signal a positive relationship between language and colour perception.
Read the full article at Science Daily
Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the human brain that is shedding light on how human language evolved. The study marks the first use of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a non-invasive imaging technique, to compare human brain structures to those of chimpanzees, our closest living relative. The study will be published in the online version of Nature Neuroscience. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Why do some people hold on to their accents all their lives while others drop them overnight? Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist from University College London, has spent 16 years researching speech: how we formulate words, how we come by our accents and how we decode what is being said to us. …
Read the full article at Times Online
Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys, until now no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences. For the first time — and in unambiguous findings — researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. …
Read the full new release at EurekAlert
Scientists led by Holger Schulze at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, and the Universities of Ulm, Newcastle and Erlangen have found a neuronal mechanism in the auditory system that is able to solve the so-called cocktail-party task based on the analysis of the temporal fine structure of the acoustic scene. The findings, published in this week’s PLoS ONE, show that different speakers have different temporal fine structure in their voiced speech and that such signals are represented in different areas of the auditory cortex according to this different time structure. …
Read the full news article at Alpha Galileo
More of the brain is busy processing pitch from language and other sounds than previously thought, according to a researcher in neurophonetics at Purdue University. …
Read the full news release at Purdue University news room
Using tools from the branch of mathematics known as graph theory to human memory to understand how words are stored may explain why many patients recover language skills after brain trauma such as stroke. Research suggests that the brain organizes words by sound, by word meaning or by a combination of sound and meaning. The connections throughout the brain though are varied creating shortcuts. …
Read the full news article at Newswise
Individuals with a neurodegenerative condition affecting language appear more likely to have had a history of learning disabilities than those with other types of dementia or with no cognitive problems, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. …
Read the full news release at EurekAlert
Recognising people, objects or animals by the sound they make is an important survival skill and something most of us take for granted. But very similar objects can physically make very dissimilar sounds and we are able to pick up subtle clues about the identity and source of the sound. Scientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are working out how the human ear and the brain come together to help us understand our acoustic environment. They have found that the part of the brain that deals with sound, the auditory cortex, is adapted in each individual and tuned to the world around us. We learn throughout our lives how to localise and identify different sounds. It means that if you could hear the world through someone else’s ears it would sound very different to what you are used to. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
A new study of twins indicates that the genetic foundation for the brain’s ability to recognize faces and places is much stronger than for other objects, such as words. The results, which appear in the December 19 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, are some of the first evidence demonstrating the role of genetics in assigning these functions to specific regions of the brain. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
In conversation, humans recognize words primarily from the sounds they hear. However, scientists have long known that what humans perceive goes beyond the sounds and even the sights of speech. The brain actually constructs its own unique interpretation, factoring in both the sights and sounds of speech. …
Read the full news release at the University of Chicago Medical Center
A popular urban legend suggests that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. As a culture that faces frigid temperatures year-round, it is important to differentiate between things like snow on the ground (“aput”) and falling snow (“qana”). Psychologists are taking note of this phenomenon and are beginning to examine if learning different names for things helps to tell them apart. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Researchers have added a new piece to the puzzle of how the brain selectively amplifies those distinctions that matter most from the continuous cascade of sights, sounds, and other sensory input. Whether recognizing a glowering face among smiling ones or the unmistakable sound of a spouse calling one’s name, such “categorical perception” is central to sensory function. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
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