Linguistics

A collaborative study examined the spontaneous looking patterns of 7-month-old babies when presented with mosaic-like sequences with a symmetrical and asymmetrical structure. The results show that these babies quickly detect whether a mosaic has a symmetrical structure, suggesting a robust, automatic ability to extract structure from complex images.

Our brain works a bit like the autocomplete function on your phone -- it is constantly trying to guess the next word when we are listening to a book, reading or conducting a conversation. Contrary to speech recognition computers, our brains are constantly making predictions at different levels, from meaning and grammar to specific speech sounds.

New research finds that specific parts of the brain recognize complex cues in human vocal sounds that do not involve speech, such as crying, coughing or gasping. Insights into the organization of the brain voice-recognition system will enable researchers to better understand neurological disorders where voice perception is altered or missing and even help create better voice assistant devices.

Children demonstrate early in life social skills and a strong desire to interact with their peers. They engage in social interactions more often than our closest relatives, the great apes, a new study finds. This social and natural predisposition of humans for interaction appears to be a key element in understanding the evolution of language.

The implications of new AI voice research go beyond user experience to making AI more efficient, which could change the industry and significantly reduce carbon footprints.

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study, researchers report that the brain encodes the structure of sentences ('the vase is red') and phrases ('the red vase') into different neural firing patterns.

When words fail, gestures can help to get the message across -- especially for people who have a language disorder. An international research team has now shown that listeners attend the gestures of people with aphasia more often and for much longer than previously thought. This has implications for the use of gestures in speech therapy.

Being able to recognize our own voice is a critical factor for our sense of control over our speech, according to a new study. If people think they hear someone else's voice when they speak, they do not strongly feel that they caused the sound. This could be a clue to understanding the experience of people who live with auditory hallucinations and could help to improve online communication and virtual reality experiences.

Neuroscientists have gained new insight into how our brain evolved into a language-ready brain. Compared to chimpanzee brains, the pattern of connections of language areas in our brain has expanded more than previously thought.

Scholars have created a new global repository of linguistic data. The project is designed to facilitate new insights into the evolution of words and sounds of the languages spoken across the world today. The Lexibank database contains standardized lexical data for more than 2000 languages. It is the most extensive publicly available collection compiled so far.

In the workplace, even subtle differences in language choice can influence the perception of gender, for better or worse. These choices fall into two main categories: minimizing the role of gender by using gender-neutral terms or emphasizing an individual's gender through 'gender marking.' Behavioral scientists argue that by using these two approaches thoughtfully, one can promote gender equality.

Children who move while learning sounds of letters significantly improve their ability to recognize individual letter sounds.

Psychology researchers provide a fresh perspective on how infants connect names with objects, a critical skill for language development.

A new study shows that American Sign Language (ASL) is more linguistically complex than previously understood. In particular, new research documents the emergence of the copula --- a word meaning to be (e.g. is, was, are, were) --- in ASL, something that has been overlooked in previous linguistic analyses.

Typically, infants with hearing loss are first treated with hearing aids, and if these fail to help them develop early language and speech skills, they then become eligible for cochlear implants at 12 months or older. Cochlear implants -- considered the gold standard of treatment -- are small, electronic devices surgically placed under the skin that stimulate nerve endings in the ear to provide a sense of sound. A new study demonstrates the need for early cochlear implant use for deaf children, regardless of developmental impairments.

Evidence of structured vocal sequences in wild chimpanzee communication provides insights into human language evolution.

The effect of variability on learning is recognized in many fields: learning is harder when input is variable, but variability leads to better generalization of the knowledge we learned. In this review, researchers bring together over 150 studies on variability across domains, including language acquisition, motor learning, visual perception, face recognition and education, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms behind variability.

Neuroscientists found that higher levels of the alpha-synuclein protein in the brain can lead to changes in vocal production.

Neurobiologists give new meaning to the term 'motor mouth'. By carefully mapping neural networks in marmoset and macaque monkeys, they determined that multiple areas in the brain's frontal lobe control the muscles of vocalization and could provide a foundation for complex speech.

New research shows that children's willingness to study subjects like French, German or Spanish is shaped far more by the attitudes of their parents, than by their teachers or friends. The study's authors argue that efforts to reverse the steady decline in language-learning in the UK should target families rather than just children, because of the important role parents' beliefs play in shaping children's views of themselves as language-learners.

Our understanding of the prehistory of the Finnish language is becoming clearer: Shifts in climate and periods of drought may have been the original reasons for which the community, which originated in western Siberia, spread first from east to west and later from south to north.

A new study finds that children can develop key reading skills in a virtual classroom with other students.

American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are challenging to perceive -- those that are rare or have uncommon handshapes -- are made closer to the signer's face, where people often look during sign perception. By contrast, common ones, and those with more routine handshapes, are made further away from the face, in the perceiver's peripheral vision. The findings suggest that ASL has evolved to be easier for people to recognize signs.

Across languages and cultures, words that help direct caregivers' attention are likely to be among the first children learn and use frequently, according to a new study of early vocabulary development in an Indigenous language.

Researchers report that two seemingly opposing theories of language processing are both correct. The study shows that greater left-brain asymmetry can predict both better performance and average performance on a foundational measure of reading ability, depending on whether analysis is conducted over the whole brain or in specific regions.

Babies and toddlers who need a tracheostomy -- a tube surgically inserted into their windpipe to help relieve breathing problems -- are at a high risk of accumulating fluid behind their eardrum when on a ventilator. That's the conclusion of a new study by head and neck surgeons. This buildup of fluid, called a middle ear effusion, can put them at risk for ear infections, hearing loss, and delays in speech and language development.

The concept of a 'person' or 'people' is, despite its definition, not gender-neutral when it comes to how we use these terms. In fact, we tend to prioritize men when referring to people in general, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers.

Linguistic convergence refers to temporary (and often subtle) shifts in speech to sound more similar to those around us. A new study shows that even our expectations about how other people might speak (rather than the speech itself) is enough to shape our own speech patterns.

A new study from cognitive scientists offers an answer to why legal documents such as contracts or deeds are often so impenetrable.

To understand how hearing loss impacts people, researchers study people's ability to recognize speech, and hearing aid algorithms are often used to improve human speech recognition. Researchers explore a human speech recognition model based on machine learning and deep neural networks. They calculated how many words per sentence a listener understands using automatic speech recognition. The study consisted of eight normal-hearing and 20 hearing-impaired listeners who were exposed to a variety of complex noises that mask the speech.