How Does the Brain Form Sentences?
Forming a grammatically correct sentence may seem to require advanced cognitive skills, but it turns out that our creative language capacity might rely on a less sophisticated system than is commonly thought. A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from procedural memory—the same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command.
Full article: Scientific American
Our cognitive system processes vowels and consonants at a different speed
Through a study carried out at the Universities of La Laguna and Valencia, it has been verified that the brain distinguishes between vowels and consonants. Neuronal mechanisms change when they are processed and, when it comes to lexical access; both have a different status in our mind, thus contributing differently to this basic process of visual word recognition.
Full article: AlphaGalileo
Visual learners convert words to pictures in the brain and vice versa, says Penn psychology study
A University of Pennsylvania psychology study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brain, reveals that people who consider themselves visual learners, as opposed to verbal learners, have a tendency to convert linguistically presented information into a visual mental representation. The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the visual cortex when reading words.
Full article: EurekAlert
Music tuition can help children improve reading skills
Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published today in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE.
Full article: EurekAlert
The brain maintains language skills in spite of alcohol damage by drawing from other regions
Researchers know that alcoholism can damage the brain’s frontal lobes and cerebellum, regions involved in language processing. Nonetheless, alcoholics’ language skills appear to be relatively spared from alcohol’s damaging effects. New findings suggest the brain maintains language skills by drawing upon other systems that would normally be used to perform other tasks simultaneously.
Full article: EurekAlert
Language of music really is universal, study finds
Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said.
Full article: Eureka! Science News
Scientists discover oldest words in the English language and predict which ones are likely to disappear in the future
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ‘1′, ‘2′ and ‘3′ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What’s more, words like ’squeeze’, ‘guts’, ’stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others.
Full article: University of Reading
Differences in language-related brain activity affected by sex?
Men show greater activation than women in the brain regions connected to language, according to researchers from CNRS, Université de Montpellier I and Montpellier III. This work is published in the February 2009 issue of the journal Cortex.
Full article: Alpha Galileo
How we think before we speak: Making sense of sentences
In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands describes recent experiments using brain waves to understand how we are able to make sense of sentences.
Full article: Science Mode
Deaf children use hands to invent own way of communicating
Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language, research at the University of Chicago shows.
Full article: EurekAlert
Read my lips: Using multiple senses in speech perception
When someone speaks to you, do you see what they are saying? We tend to think of speech as being something we hear, but recent studies suggest that we use a variety of senses for speech perception - that the brain treats speech as something we hear, see and even feel. In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum describes research examining how our different senses blend together to help us perceive speech.
Full article: EurekAlert
True or false? How our brain processes negative statements
Every day we are confronted with positive and negative statements. By combining the new, incoming information with what we already know, we are usually able to figure out if the statement is true or false. Previous research has suggested that including negative words, such as “not,” in the middle of a sentence can throw off our brains and make it more difficult to understand.
Full article: EurekAlert
When texting, eligible women express themselves better
The book “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” and its gender stereotypes on how the sexes communicate remains fodder for debate, but two Indiana University researchers have confirmed one thing: When men and women talk through technology, it’s the women who are more expressive.
Full article: EurekAlert
Multilingualism brings communities closer together
Learning their community language outside the home enhances minority ethnic children’s development, according to research led from the University of Birmingham. The research, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that attending language classes at complementary schools has a positive impact on students.
Full article: EurekAlert
Genetic roots of synaesthesia unearthed
The regions of our DNA that wire some people to “see” sounds have been discovered. So far, only the general regions within chromosomes have been identified, rather than specific genes, but the work could eventually lead to a genetic test to diagnose the condition before it interferes with a child’s education.
Full article: New Scientist
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