Linguistics

The era of artificial-intelligence chatbots that seem to understand and use language the way we humans do has begun. Under the hood, these chatbots use large language models, a particular kind of neural network. But a new study shows that large language models remain vulnerable to mistaking nonsense for natural language. To a team of researchers, it's a flaw that might point toward ways to improve chatbot performance and help reveal how humans process language.

Researchers have developed a non-invasive method for mapping the human auditory pathway, which could potentially be used as a tool to help clinicians decide the best surgical strategy for patients with profound hearing loss.

Nineteen-month-old toddlers already use natural logical thinking, even before they learn to speak, to deal with uncertainties about the world. This natural logic contributes to their learning process, both in terms of language and in other fields of knowledge, according to a new study.

Researchers have succeeded in transforming brain signals into audible speech. By decoding signals from the brain through a combination of implants and AI, they were able to predict the words people wanted to say with an accuracy of 92 to 100%.

An understanding of how words can be broken down into smaller units of meaning plays a key role when deaf and hard of hearing children learn to read, analysis shows.

Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) that has enabled a woman with severe paralysis from a brainstem stroke to speak through a digital avatar.

Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, they found that speech community size and the proportion of second-language speakers were not associated with simpler grammars.

For those with neurological or developmental disorders compromising speech, brain machine interfaces could help them communicate. But today's interfaces are slow and, from electrodes placed on the scalp, can detect letters only. The speech generated is robotic and affectless. Neuroscientists have now shown that they can reconstruct the song a person is hearing from brain recordings alone, holding out the possibility of reconstructing not only words but the musicality of speech, which also conveys meaning.

Unlike previously thought, it turns out that speech production and singing are supported by the same circuitry in the brain. Observations in a new study can help develop increasingly effective rehabilitation methods for patients with aphasia.

New research has found that humans were only able to detect artificially generated speech 73% of the time, with the same accuracy in both English and Mandarin.

The artificial intelligence language model GPT-3 performed as well as college students in solving certain logic problems like those that appear on standardized tests. The researchers who conducted the experiment write that the results prompt the question of whether the technology is mimicking human reasoning or using a new type of cognitive process. Solving that question would require access to the software that underpins GPT-3 and other AI software.

Researchers delve into the bilingual experience and its impact on children's context-sensitive perception of trust, offering insights into how language diversity can enrich and benefit children's social-cognitive development.

Neuroscientists say the brain's auditory lexicon, a catalog of verbal language, is actually located in the front of the primary auditory cortex, not in back of it -- a finding that upends a century-long understanding of this area of the brain. The new understanding matters because it may impact recovery and rehabilitation following a brain injury such as a stroke.

A new study suggests young children are more vocal when interacting with toys and household items, highlighting their importance for developing language skills.

New research shines light on how parents who talk more to their infants improve their children's brain development. Scientists used imaging and audio recordings to link early language skills to caregiver speech, delivering an affirming message that parents can greatly influence their child's linguistic growth in ways that are trackable in brain scans.

Young babies make many squeals, vowel-like sounds, growls, and short word-like sounds such as 'ba' or 'aga.' Those precursors to speech or 'protophones' are later replaced with early words and, eventually, whole phrases and sentences. While some infants are naturally more 'talkative' than others, a new study confirms that there are differences between males and females in the number of those sounds.

New research offers insights into how researchers can use their platforms to help end the use of stigmatizing language.

Similar to humans, chimpanzees combine vocalizations into larger communicatively meaningful structures. UZH researchers suggest that this ability might be evolutionarily more ancient than previously thought.

Scientists studied guinea pigs' communication to understand how the brain recognizes communication sounds regardless of accents and surrounding noise.

A new AI-based system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity -- while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story -- into a continuous stream of text. Unlike other thought decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive.

Your native language could impact your musical ability. A global study that compared the melodic and rhythmic abilities of almost half a million people speaking 54 different languages found that tonal speakers are better able to discern between subtly different melodies, while non-tonal speakers are better able to tell whether a rhythm is beating in time with the music.

What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages.

A new study investigates where toddlers look when they learn new words. It finds that children with larger vocabularies looked quickly towards objects when learning new words. Meanwhile, children who knew fewer words looked back and forth between objects and took more time. The research team say that their findings could help identify children with delays in language development at an earlier stage. Importantly, it means these children could be given earlier support to build their best vocabulary before starting school.

When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a new study.

Research with a unique, perhaps one-of-a-kind individual, shows that you can comprehend and use tactile language and metaphors without relying on previous sensory experiences. These findings challenge notions of embodied cognition that insist that language comprehension and abstract thought require direct memory of such sensations.

A linguistic bias in the English language that leads us to 'improve' things by adding to them, rather than taking away, is so common that it is even ingrained in AI chatbots, a new study reveals.

Researchers explore how anatomical variations in a speaker's vocal tract affect speech production. Using MRI, the team recorded the shape of the vocal tract for 41 speakers as the subjects produced a series of representative speech sounds. They averaged these shapes to establish a sound-independent model of the vocal tract. Then they used statistical analysis to extract the main variations between speakers. A handful of factors explained nearly 90% of the differences between speakers.

Research in languages other than English is critically important for biodiversity conservation and is shockingly under-utilized internationally, according to an international research team.

Word lists are the basis of so much research in so many fields. Researchers have now developed an algorithm that can be applied to different languages and can expand word lists significantly better than others.

The thousands of languages spoken throughout the world draw on many of the same fundamental linguistic abilities and reflect universal aspects of how humans categorize events. Some aspects of language may also be universal to people who create their own sign languages, according to new research.