Kirk Hazen, a linguistics professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, wants everyone to learn how language works. His new book, “An Introduction to Language,” provides readers who have no background in linguistics a tour of English and how language works in their lives.
When a right-wing Italian politician named Umberto Bossi suffered a severe stroke in 2004, his speech became permanently impaired. Strangely, this change impacted Bossi’s perception among his party’s followers -- from appearing authoritarian to benevolent. Now researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles think they know why.
Is it possible that hearing loss in one infant from a pair of twins can affect the mother’s speech to both infants? A new acoustics study zeroes in on this question and suggests that not only is this alteration of speech entirely possible, but that mothers speak to both infants as if they are hearing impaired.
Using ultrasound technology to visualize the tongue’s shape and movement can help children with difficulty pronouncing “r” sounds, according to a small study by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Montclair State University.
Intonation is an integral part of communication for all speakers. But can sign languages have intonation? A new study at the University of Haifa shows that signers use their faces to create intonational ‘melodies’ just as speakers use their voices, and that the melodies of the face can differ from one sign language to another.
Familiar voices can improve spoken language processing among school-age children, according to a study by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. However, the advantage of hearing a familiar voice only helps children to process and understand words they already know well, not new words that aren’t in their vocabularies.
Children's future writing difficulties can be identified before they even learn how to begin writing, according to a new study by Professor Phaedra Royle and Postdoctoral fellow Alexandra Marquis of the University of Montreal’s School of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology.
In the first months of life, when babies begin to distinguish sounds that make up language from all the other sounds in the world, they can be trained to more effectively recognize which sounds “might” be language, accelerating the development of the brain maps which are critical to language acquisition and processing, according to new by April Benasich and colleagues of Rutgers University-Newark -- published in the October 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Experiencing diverse communities by hearing different languages at the park, on a bus or in the grocery store may make babies more open-minded in their social learning, a new study finds.
Parents who try to understand their baby's babbling let their infants know they can communicate, which leads to children forming complex sounds and using language more quickly. That’s according to a new study by the University of Iowa and Indiana University.
Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report.
The sounds of a 7,000-year-old language now echo through the halls of the University of Kentucky. Professors and students work together to reconstruct a spoken version of PIE (Proto-Indo-European).
The latest work from a Kansas State University philosopher appears in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which is a rarity for philosophy research.
A study of 473 sets of twins followed since birth found twins have twice the rate of language delay as do single-born children. Moreover, identical twins have greater rates of language delay than do non-identical twins, strengthening the case for the heritability of language.
A UCLA-led study has found that the communication skills of minimally verbal children with autism can be greatly improved through personalized interventions that are combined with the use of computer tablets.
A new study that was conducted by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa suggests a number of new discoveries relating to the unique linguistic features of text that has been translated by a person that can significantly improve the capabilities of computerized translation programs
University of Washington research in 7- and 11-month-old infants shows that speech sounds stimulate areas of the brain that coordinate and plan motor movements for speech. The study suggests that baby brains start laying down the groundwork of how to form words long before they actually begin to speak.
Examining factors such as how much children gesture at an early age may make it possible to identify and intervene with very young children at risk for delays in speech and cognitive development, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Chicago.
Like key players in social networks, University of Kansas scientists have found evidence that there are keywords in word networks that hold together groups of words in our memory. The existence of keywords opens up many possible real-life applications such as helping individuals with word finding after stroke. Conversely, removing a keyword through psycholinguistic tasks, could actually disrupt language processing - fracturing our word network.
A smartphone app that monitors subtle qualities of a person’s voice during everyday phone conversations shows promise for detecting early signs of mood changes in people with bipolar disorder. While the app still needs much testing before widespread use, early results from a small group of patients show its potential to monitor moods while protecting privacy.
When loved ones lose their hearing, audiologists often counsel spouses and family members to speak clearly so they are better understood. But hearing loss professionals say that this well-meaning advice can backfire: clear speech can make you sound angry. A new study, to be presented at the 167th Meeting of the ASA, supports the idea that clear speech can carry negative overtones even when the phrase itself is emotionally neutral.
If you've ever heard the boisterous courtship sounds being made at night by male frogs gathered around a pond or "watering hole" to attract mates, you may have noticed some communication similarities to those of humans enjoying a loud night out at a cocktail party or bar—that familiar cacophony with everyone essentially shouting over each other to be heard. At the 167th meeting of the ASA, researchers will describe how studying how frogs communicate is addressing some long-standing basic questions about how evolutionary processes shape the diversity of communication systems.
Would you sacrifice one person to save five? Such moral choices could depend on whether you are using a foreign language or your native tongue. A new study from psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona finds that people using a foreign language take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas, making decisions based on assessments of what’s best for the common good.
A new University of Toronto study has found that by two years of age, children are remarkably good at comprehending speakers who talk with accents the toddlers have never heard before.
Growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Nishat Jabin’s first language was Bengali. But one of her great pleasures was watching English-language cartoons. She ranks “Tom and Jerry,” “Hey Arnold!” and “Scooby-Doo” among her childhood favorites.
Hooking up people using similar phrases, according to one Texas Tech University researcher.
On his way to creating a digital accordion, SUNY Buffalo State assistant music professor J. Tomás Henriques stumbled upon a device with unique therapeutic applications that he envisions using to treat speech and hearing disorders and memory loss, among other things.
We use both sides of our brain for speech, a finding by researchers at New York University and NYU Langone Medical Center that alters previous conceptions about neurological activity. The results also offer insights into addressing speech-related inhibitions caused by stroke or injury and lay the groundwork for better rehabilitation methods.
Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear the faster their vocabulary grows. Now new findings show that what spurs early language development isn't so much the quantity of words as the style of speech and social context in which speech occurs.
You might think that beatboxing, with its harsh, high-energy percussive sounds, would be harder on the voice than the sweet song of a soprano. But according to new research by voice expert Dr. H. Steven Sims of the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System, beatboxing may actually be gentler on the injury-prone vocal cords. His findings were published Dec. 23 online in the Journal of Voice.
A new study by a University of Iowa researcher finds that stocks post better returns when they’re based in states where the governor strikes an upbeat tone in his or her state of the state address to the legislature.
The American English speech variant known as uptalk, or "Valley Girl speak" – marked by a rise in pitch at the ends of sentences – is typically associated with young southern Californian females. New research shows uptalk is expanding to other demographic groups, including males.
Tongue twisters are not just fun to say; it turns out that these sound-related slip-ups can also open windows into the brain’s speech-planning processes. A team from MIT will report new insights gleaned from a comparison of two types of tongue twisters at the 166th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held Dec. 2-6, 2013, in San Francisco, Calif.
Grammar and syntax have been thought for decades to be automatic and untouchable by other brain processes and that everything else — the sex of the speaker, their dialect, etc. — is stripped away as our brains process the sound signal of a word and store it as an abstract form. A University of Kansas study suggests that even higher-level processes – in this case – grammar - are affected by information about the speaker.
Language acquisition has traditionally been considered a social, interactive process, however new research from Boston University College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College reveals that toddlers are able to acquire the meanings of words even in “socially impoverished contexts” where social or visual information is absent.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery for adults, but for babies it's their foremost tool for learning. Now researchers from the University of Washington and Temple University have found the first evidence revealing a key aspect of the brain processing that occurs in babies to allow this learning by observation.
In the first molecular genetic study of families with a history of both language impairment and autism, scientists may have uncovered a shared origin for the two conditions, an important step toward explaining why some cases of autism are accompanied by language difficulties and others are not. The study indicates that a disorder called specific language impairment—one of the most common developmental delays in children—may be caused by the same genetic variants that lead to language difficulties in some children with autism.
The language a child speaks affects the rate at which they learn number words, and hearing number words in natural conversation – not just in counting routines – is a critical part of learning the meaning of numbers.
Many companies are increasingly confused and upset about how to deal with negative online consumer reviews, says Zoey Chen of Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. One way to overcome consumers’ over-reliance on negative word of mouth would be to encourage satisfied customers to include language indicating that they wrote their reviews soon after product/service consumption, according to Chen’s research.
Mayo Clinic researchers have found a surprising occupational hazard for teachers: progressive speech and language disorders. The research, recently published in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease & Other Dementias, found that people with speech and language disorders are about 3.5 times more likely to be teachers than patients with Alzheimer’s dementia.
A recent critical literature review conducted by Ana Inés Ansaldo and Ladan Ghazi Saidi -Ph.D student- points to three interventional avenues to promote cross-linguistic effects of language therapy (the natural transfer effects that relearning one language has on the other language).
For the first time, Cameroon’s traditional oral Fun’da poetry performed by women has been translated into English and appears in print in a new volume of essays on the changing field of ethnic studies, Defying the Global Language (Teneo Press), edited by Cheryl Toman from Case Western Reserve University
University of Utah bioengineers discovered our understanding of language may depend more heavily on vision than previously thought: under the right conditions, what you see can override what you hear.
It is natural to imagine that the sense of sight takes in the world as it is — simply passing on what the eyes collect from light reflected by the objects around us. But the eyes do not work alone. What we see is a function not only of incoming visual information, but also how that information is interpreted in light of other visual experiences, and may even be influenced by language.
University of Texas at Austin linguistics researcher is developing new methods for helping computers 'learn' natural language.
Typical combinations of anti-HIV medications do not appear to cause language delays in children who where exposed to HIV in the womb and whose mothers took the antiretroviral drugs during pregnancy.
It's been a long-held belief by many that singing in a foreign language can help you learn that language. A new study provides the first scientific evidence to affirm that claim. The finding is particularly relevant as internationalization increases and the importance and necessity of learning a second language grows.
Ithaca College faculty member Skott Freedman has discovered insights that indicate children can learn two native languages as easily as they can learn one.
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