Lingformant

Professor studies what cars can learn from drivers’ words

Vili Maunula — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:25:19 +0000

Years ago, Stanford communication and sociology researcher Clifford Nass wondered why some people treated their computers as humans, instead of machines, a question that led him down a path of interesting research. Now he wonders about drivers willing to have personal conversations with the artificial voice in their cars—and what will become of the secrets the humans share with their four-wheeled friends. …

Full article: Physorg

Tel Aviv University finds connection between mental fitness and multi-lingualism

Vili Maunula — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:23:43 +0000

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

Intuitive Grammar Develops By Age Six, Say Researchers

Vili Maunula — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:38:26 +0000

Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults. …

Full article: Science Daily

Like babies learning to talk, birds babble before they sing

Vili Maunula — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:36:59 +0000

The happy babbling that entertains parents as their babies try to mimic speech turns out to have a parallel in the animal world. Baby birds babble away before mastering their adult song, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. …

Read the full article at AOL News

Decoding the dictionary: Study suggests lexicon evolved to fit in the brain

Vili Maunula — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:35:07 +0000

The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary boasts 22,000 pages of definitions. While that may seem far from succinct, new research suggests the reference manual is meticulously organized to be as concise as possible — a format that mirrors the way our brains make sense of and categorize the countless words in our vast vocabulary. …

Read the rest of the article at EurekAlert

Instant messaging — a new language?

Vili Maunula — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:31:37 +0000

“Instant messaging, or IM, is not just bad grammar or a bunch of mistakes,” says Dr. Pamela Takayoshi, Kent State University associate professor of English. “IM is a separate language form from formal English and has a common set of language features and standards.” …

Read the full article at EurekAlert

Study Captures Brain’s Activity Processing Speech

Vili Maunula — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:37:20 +0000

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

Surprising Language Abilities In Children With Autism

Vili Maunula — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:33:52 +0000

What began as an informal presentation by a clinical linguist to a group of philosophers, has led to some surprising discoveries about the communicative language abilities of people with autism. …

Read the news release at Science Daily

Infant Language and the Imperfect Human Mind

Vili Maunula — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:58:22 +0000

Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gary F. Marcus, New York University psychologist and head of the Infant Language Learning Center, about how computing, genetic biology and psychology together can help probe the wonders of human language development.

Read the article at Scientific American

‘Babelfish’ to translate alien tongues could be built

Vili Maunula — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:45:50 +0000

If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US. Such a “babelfish”, which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

Read the full news article at New Scientist Space

Impairments in language development can be detected in infants as young as 3 months

Vili Maunula — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:29:45 +0000

New studies conducted by Professor of Neuroscience April Benasich and her Infancy Studies Laboratory at Rutgers University in Newark are revealing new and exciting clues about how infant brains begin to acquire language and paving the way for correcting language difficulties at a time when the brain is most able to change.

Read the full news article at EurekAlert

Language And Color Perception Linked In Human Brain

Vili Maunula — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:28:39 +0000

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

Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years

Vili Maunula — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:26:05 +0000

Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech.

Read the full story from New Scientist

Running words together: The science behind cross-linguistic psychology

Vili Maunula — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:05:01 +0000

In a study examining the contrast in cross-cultural languages, known as cross-linguistics, researchers from CNRS and Université de Provence, and Harvard and Trento Universities found direct evidence to support word-order constraints during language production. Specifically, the way in which participants pronounced a set of words was dependent upon the preceding word as it varied across languages. …

Read the full news article at EurekAlert

Yerkes researchers identify language feature unique to human brain

Vili Maunula — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:00:06 +0000

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