http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com News for linguists Thu, 08 May 2008 11:25:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/08/professor-studies-what-cars-can-learn-from-drivers-words/ 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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/08/tel-aviv-university-finds-connection-between-mental-fitness-and-multi-lingualism/ 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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/02/intuitive-grammar-develops-by-age-six-say-researchers/ 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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/02/like-babies-learning-to-talk-birds-babble-before-they-sing/ 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/02/decoding-the-dictionary-study-suggests-lexicon-evolved-to-fit-in-the-brain/ “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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/02/instant-messaging-a-new-language/ 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, ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/26/study-captures-brains-activity-processing-speech/ 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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/26/surprising-language-abilities-in-children-with-autism/ 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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/23/infant-language-and-the-imperfect-human-mind/ 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/18/babelfish-to-translate-alien-tongues-could-be-built/ 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/18/impairments-in-language-development-can-be-detected-in-infants-as-young-as-3-months/ 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/18/language-and-color-perception-linked-in-human-brain/ 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 http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/18/neanderthals-speak-out-after-30000-years/ 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/03/30/running-words-together-the-science-behind-cross-linguistic-psychology/ 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 ... http://lingformant.vertebratesilence.com/2008/03/30/yerkes-researchers-identify-language-feature-unique-to-human-brain/