Feature Channels: Speech & Language

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A new songbird study that shows memories can be implanted in the brain to teach vocalizations – without any lessons from the parent.

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Deafness in early childhood is known to lead to lasting changes in how sounds are processed in the brain, but new research published today in eLife shows that even mild-to-moderate levels of hearing loss in young children can lead to similar changes.

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Systematic variation in rhetoric and style suggest underlying communication strategies

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Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)used state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to determine how nonverbal or minimally verbal children who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) processes auditory stimuli, which could have important diagnostic and prognostic implications across the autism spectrum.

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Fine motor skills – used for eating, writing and buttoning clothing – may be a strong predictor for identifying whether children with autism are at risk for long-term language disabilities, according to a Rutgers-led study.

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One of the first studies of its kind focusing on South African children's language ability and mental health outcomes, has found clear evidence for a link between low language ability and depression in young people.

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A new study from the University of Washington finds that, based on brain activity, people who live in communities where multiple languages are spoken can identify words in yet another language better than those who live in a monolingual environment.

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A new study from a UT Dallas assistant professor affiliated with the Infant Brain Imaging Study network that included infants later diagnosed with autism suggests that all children benefit from exposure to rich speech environments from their caregivers.

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Numerous studies have noted the brain benefits that come from being bilingual – among them increased executive-level cognitive function and a four- to five-year delay in the risk of developing dementia symptoms.

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They may all be in the same classroom together, but each child in preschool may have a very different experience, a new study suggests.

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A new study suggests there may be genetic explanations for why some children with poor language also have poor mental health.

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New research shows baby babbling changes the way parents speak to their infants, suggesting that infants are shaping their own learning environments.

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Tweets believed to be written by African Americans are much more likely to be tagged as hate speech than tweets associated with whites, according to a Cornell study analyzing five collections of Twitter data marked for abusive language.

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A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and modern imagination 70,000 years ago.

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Nothing disappoints quite like a good story with a lousy finish. So researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who work in the young field of automated storytelling don't think they're getting ahead of themselves by devising better endings.

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Michigan State University was awarded a four-year, $2.5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support further development in the research and teaching of less commonly taught languages, with an emphasis on Indigenous languages. This is the second Mellon grant received by the LCTL Partnership

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Researchers examined the impact of preterm birth on language outcomes in preschoolers born preterm and full-term, using both standardized assessment and language sample analysis. They also explored semantic skills and grammatical ability, and nonlinguistic developmental skills of nonverbal intelligence, attention, and hyperactivity. Results show that language difficulties at the discourse level may still exist even when children who are born preterm appear to be developing typically when they are evaluated by standardized assessments of global language ability, cognition, and attention.

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A University of Arkansas at Little Rock faculty member is hoping to make visits to healthcare professionals easier for patients and other health workers who are deaf or hard of hearing by researching a prototype transparent surgical face mask that allows those who are deaf or hard of hearing and non-native English speakers to read lips.

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For Asian Americans who are gay or lesbian, their sexual orientation may make them seem more “American” than those who are presumed straight. A new University of Washington study, the latest in research to examine stereotypes, identity and ideas about who is “American,” focuses on how sexual orientation and race come together to influence others’ perceptions.

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Eleven-month-old infants can learn to associate the language they hear with ethnicity, recent research from the University of British Columbia suggests.

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Kevin Scannell, Ph.D., a professor of computer science, was named a 2019-2020 Fulbright Scholar. He will spend the first six months of 2020 in Ireland, doing research and developing computing resources for the Irish language.

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In 2020, NASA and European-Russian missions will look for evidence of past life on Mars.

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According to Cornell researchers, social interactions are more important than language in predicting who is going to succeed at online debating. However, the most accurate model for predicting successful debaters combines information about social interactions and language, the researchers found.

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Researchers conducted a study to determine if there are differences in speech intelligibility (a listener’s ability to recover a speaker’s message) in healthy voices compared to those who have voice disorders like hoarseness. They also wanted to know if using listener strategies such as paying close attention to the words or using other words to try to figure out the message would increase speech intelligibility. To date, no studies have investigated if listener strategies improve intelligibility scores in speakers with voice disorders.

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The different soundscapes of NICUs has recently attracted interest in how changes in what we hear in our earliest days might affect language development in the brain. One ongoing study is hoping to better understand these differences by painting a clearer picture of what kinds of sounds full-term infants are exposed to in the womb. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are conducting one of the first studies on how often full-term fetuses hear spoken language before birth. They will present their preliminary findings at the 177th ASA Meeting, May 13-17.

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Children glean all kinds of information from the people around them. In particular, children mimic and learn speech patterns from their family. Previous work has shown that infants attend selectively to their mother’s voice over another female’s voice. But new research suggests that children learn new words best from other children. Yuanyuan Wang will present research findings from a collaborative work with Amanda Seidl from Purdue University at the 177th ASA Meeting, May 13-17.

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When it comes to learning a language, the left side of the brain has traditionally been considered the hub of language processing. But new research from the University of Delaware shows the right brain plays a critical early role in helping learners identify the basic sounds associated with a language. That could help find new teaching methods to better improve student success in picking up a foreign language.

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Four West Virginia University faculty members, all in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, have received grants from the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program to conduct research abroad.

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New research by New York University Steinhardt Associate Professor Susannah Levi finds that children with poorer language skills are at a disadvantage when given tasks or being spoken to by strangers because they cannot, as easily as their peers, understand speech from people they do not know.

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Gestures and visual animations can help reveal the cognitive origins of meaning, indicating that our minds can assign a linguistic structure to new informational content “on the fly”—even if it is not linguistic in nature.

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Star Trek's Spock would not be surprised: People are "illogical." New research exploring American liberals and conservatives shows that regardless of political affiliation

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Young children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids who were never read to, a new study found.

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The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present “In Mid-Sentence,” a selection of photographs from the museum’s collection that, when seen together, showcase the camera’s ability to capture people in dialogue. Featuring more than 25 images of people in the midst of public speeches, intimate confessions, shared jokes, political confrontations and other forms of verbal exchange, the exhibition will explore the power of visual communication.

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West Virginia University professor Jenny Johnson has been named a 2019 National Endowment for Arts Creative Writing Fellow. An assistant professor in the Department of English, she is using the award to write and do research toward her second book of poems.

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Learning one's native language may seem effortless. One minute, we're babbling babies. The next we're in school reciting Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech or Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice."

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Musical training produces lasting improvements to a cognitive mechanism that helps individuals be more attentive and less likely to be distracted by irrelevant stimuli while performing demanding tasks.

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Sub-vocalization, the silent, preparatory muscle movements of the face and larynx that result when singers run a song through their heads prior to vocalizing, could be nudging them out of tune, according to University at Buffalo researchers. Their recently published study for first time presents evidence suggesting a relationship among sub-vocalization, auditory imagery and poor pitch singing.

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Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a speech therapy game for children with cleft lip or cleft palate and are now partnering with the international charity Smile Train to make the game, called SpokeIt, a resource for affected children worldwide.

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Infants as young as five months can differentiate laughter between friends and that between strangers, finds a new study. The results suggest that the ability to detect the nature of social relationships is instilled early in human infancy, possibly the result of a detection system that uses vocal cues.

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Researchers from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago present further evidence that deaf children who received cochlear implants (implanted electronic hearing device) before 12 months of age learn to more rapidly understand spoken language and are more likely to develop spoken language as their exclusive form of communication.

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How is our speech shaped by what we hear? The answer varies, depending on the make-up of our brain’s pathways, a team of neuroscientists has found.

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Cárdenas was among those honored with an Outstanding Woman of Color award by the University of Wisconsin System.

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In 1965, three Des Moines teenagers wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. Their suspension led to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision that was a turning point for students’ First Amendment rights. On Feb. 25, siblings Mary Beth Tinker and John Tinker will discuss the significance of their case at Iowa State University.

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Opportunities once distant to the hard-of-hearing community will become a reality with a breakthrough sign language translator. Engineers from Michigan State University developed and patented a technology that – unlike prior translator mechanisms – is non-invasive and as portable as a tube of Chapstick.

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A St. Mary’s College of Maryland professor has received Fulbright Scholar grant for research and teaching abroad.

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Newborn babies are born with the innate skills needed to pick out words from language, a new study published in Developmental Science reveals.

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New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) reveals how easy it is for consumers to understand the language used on personal finance websites.

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A team of researchers from McMaster University has discovered a new technique to examine how musicians intuitively coordinate with one another during a performance, silently predicting how each will express the music.