Biological Psychology Links

by David Robson You think more words than you speak – perhaps because language really does shape the way we navigate the world THERE I go again, talking to myself. Wherever I am, and whatever I'm doing, words bounce around my head in an incessant chatter. I am not alone in my internal babbling. Measuring the contents of people's minds is difficult, but it seems that up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal. Indeed, the extent of our interior monologue may vastly exceed the number of words we speak out loud. "On average, 70 per cent of our total verbal experience is in our head," estimates Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University in California. The sheer volume of unspoken words would suggest that language is more than just a tool for communicating with others. But what else could it be for? One answer to that question is emerging: language helps us to think and perceive the world. Boroditsky and other researchers are finding that words bring a smorgasbord of benefits to human cognition, from abstract thinking to sensory perception. These effects may even explain why language evolved in the first place. The idea that language guides human thinking and shapes perception has a long and turbulent history. Philosophers have toyed with it for centuries, but its reputation became tarnished before modern psychologists could begin putting flesh on its bones. This fall from grace can be traced to the demise of a controversial hypothesis known as "linguistic relativity", put forward in the first half of the last century by Edward Sapir at Yale University and his student Benjamin Whorf. They suggested that if language really is fundamental to the way we think, then speakers of different languages should experience the world in very different ways. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

By GUY DEUTSCHER Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew. Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By Rachel Ehrenberg Not so long ago, Mozart mania swept the nation. A small study found that students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata performed better on a paper-folding task than their peers, and suddenly a flourishing industry sprouted. Mozart’s music sang from CDs and videos marketed for children, babies and moms-to-be. The craze reached a crescendo when Georgia’s governor Zell Miller included $105,000 in his state budget to send every child born in a Georgia hospital home with a classical music tape or CD. “No one questions that listening to music at a very early age affects the spatial, temporal reasoning that underlies math and engineering and even chess,” Miller said. Actually, a lot of researchers questioned the link between listening to music and smarts. In the original study, the “Mozart effect” was minor and lasted only minutes. Follow-up studies found the effect specific neither to the composer nor to music. Students listening to Mozart were just more stimulated than those listening to a relaxation tape or silence. And while arousal can improve learning, research suggests, the effects can be fleeting and aren’t limited to music. Assessments of the original report now tend to be dirges: In the May-June issue of Intelligence, researchers from the University of Vienna published a paper titled “Mozart effect–Shmozart effect.” “It’s a short-lived effect and it spawned a huge industry of baby Einstein, baby Mozart CDs, all sorts of stuff,” says Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “But the science behind it is pretty thin.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

by Michael Balter Why does human conversation come so easily? A new study chalks it up to a sort of "mind meld" between participants. Researchers have found that the brains of speakers and listeners become synchronized as they converse and that this "neural coupling" is key to effective communication. Scientists have traditionally considered talking and listening to be two independent processes. The idea is that speech is produced in some parts of the brain, including a region known as Broca's area, and understood in others, including a region known as Wernicke's area. But recent studies suggest that there's actually much more overlap. For example, partners in a conversation will unconsciously begin imitating each other, adopting similar grammatical structures, speaking rates, and even bodily postures. This overlap helps people establish a "common ground" during conversation and may even help them predict what the other is going to say next, argue psychologist Martin Pickering of the University of Edinburgh and psychologist Simon Garrod of the University of Glasgow, both in the United Kingdom. Some researchers think that so-called mirror neurons, which fire when one individual observes the actions of another, might be involved in these interactions. To test some of these hypotheses, a team led by Princeton University psychologist Uri Hasson used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brain activation patterns of speakers and listeners. Graduate student Lauren Silbert placed her head in an MRI machine and related a 15-minute, unrehearsed story about various adventures she had while in high school, which included two boys fighting over who was going to take her to the prom and an encounter with a police officer after a car accident. The team recorded Silbert's story, using a specially designed microphone that filtered out the loud noise of the MRI machine, and then played it back to 11 subjects while their brains were also scanned. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Janelle Weaver A tool that automatically assesses young children's vocalizations should enable faster and more objective measures of language learning in natural environments than current methods allow. And its developers claim that the new tool may also help the early detection of autism by detecting speech abnormalities associated with it. The new method will allow scientists to assess more quickly how children develop speech and language in response to the talk they hear around them, says Kim Oller of the University of Memphis in Tennessee, whose team published its work today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Because past investigations of language development in natural settings have been hindered by the time-consuming transcription of audio recordings, "their approach could change the field of language development research," says Dorothy Bishop, an expert in developmental language disorders at the University of Oxford, UK. The objective measure of vocal quality could also help to detect speech abnormalities and autism in children, the authors suggest. Previous research has shown that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder have unusual articulation and prosody (patterns of rhythm and sound), but standard diagnostic tests do not cite specific vocal deficiencies. Quantifying vocal abnormalities in autistic children and translating them into a diagnostic procedure has been challenging, says Gordon Ramsay, a speech scientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "One of the great goals for years now has been to find objective measures of characteristics or behaviours that can be used to diagnose autism," he says. "This study is the first application of objective measures to detect autism based on speech." © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

by Kate Douglas "What are you laughing at?" Ignoring any aggressive intent, the answer is obvious: I am laughing because something you said amused me. Right? Wrong. According to a classic study of laughter by Robert Provine of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his colleagues, laughter is an unexpectedly serious business. Observing the human animal in its natural habitat - the shopping mall - they documented 1200 instances of laughter, and found that only 10 to 20 per cent of them were responses to anything remotely resembling a joke. Most laughter was in fact either triggered by a banal comment or used to punctuate everyday speech. Furthermore, says Provine in his book Laughter: A scientific investigation, we are 50 per cent more likely to laugh when speaking than when listening, and 30 times gigglier in a social setting than when alone without a social surrogate such as a television. Provine's conclusion was that the essential ingredient for laughter is not a joke but another person. Laughter is far more general than just a response to humour: it is a social glue that we use in all sorts of ways to bind ourselves together. As such, it comes in many guises. Our first laughs occur at between 2 and 6 months of age - even in deaf babies. They are triggered by surprise in a safe situation (think peek-a-boo), and don't just endear babies to their parents. Since laughter is associated with activity in the brain's dopamine reward circuitry, it encourages babies to explore the world by making them feel happy and safe. When infants begin to engage in rough-and-tumble play, laughter signals that the intentions are not serious, allowing children to test physical and social boundaries without serious jeopardy. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

by Linda Geddes, Amsterdam When children learn to read and write, they often get things back to front: confusing the letters "b" and "d", and sometimes even writing their entire names in the mirror image. This strange phenomenon might be a consequence of children "recycling" an area of the brain that recognises shapes and patterns as they learn to read, says Stanislas Dehaene of INSERM, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Saclay, France. Previous studies in macaques have shown that individual neurons in an area of the brain's left hemisphere fire in response to pictures and patterns. We also know that animals and human infants alike find it hard to distinguish between mirror images of the same picture. Still other studies have established that this brain region, called the visual word form area (VWFA), is activated as people learn to read. To investigate what happens in the VWFA when humans look at words and pictures and their mirror images, Dehaene used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record the brain activity of adults when they were shown pictures, written words and letters both in the normal and the reverse orientation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

UCLA scientists report parallels between human speech and the song of a bird, findings that may contain clues to human speech disorders. The research by a team led by Stephanie White, UCLA assistant professor of physiological science, supports the theory that two genes shared by humans and songbirds, FoxP1 and FoxP2, may play a critical role in human speech, and speech disorders. The study is published March 31 in the Journal of Neuroscience. "We examined the expression of FoxP1 and FoxP2 in embryonic human brains and found a striking correspondence between bird and human expression," said White, a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute. "The similar expression patterns suggest that songbirds can be studied to investigate neural mechanisms for vocal learning that may be parallel to those used by the human brain. "Our findings make it more likely that FoxP2 plays a critical role for learning speech and vocalization in both humans and the songbird," she said. "Understanding how FoxP1 and FoxP2 function in the songbird may reveal significant insights into human vocal learning and speech disorders."

By WILLIAM GRIMES All branches of science search for origins. Biologists want to know how life on earth began. Astronomers want to know how the universe got started. Even in mathematics, questions about how different numerical systems came to be constitute a legitimate line of inquiry. Linguists are different. In the middle of the 19th century, the main professional bodies governing linguistic research formally banned any investigation into the origins of language, regarding it as pointless. The topic remained disreputable for more than a century, but in the last decade or so, language evolution has eased toward the front burner, attracting the attention of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists. Their search is the subject of “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally’s lucid survey of this expanding field, dedicated to solving what she calls “the hardest problem in science today.” One nut to crack is the nature of language itself, and here Ms. Kenneally introduces the unignorable presence in virtually every linguistic debate, Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky and his many adherents regard language as a uniquely human endowment, centered in a specific area of the brain. It gives every living person the ability, unsought, to generate infinite strings of sentences in infinite combinations. Animals, in this view, do not have language, nor do they think. The reasons that humans speak, or how language might have made its way to the human brain, do not matter. It may simply be that in a linguistic version of the big bang, a language mutation suddenly appeared, and that was that. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By Carolyn Y. Johnson To dog owners, their pet’s “arf, arf, arf’’ means “let’s play!’’ To neighbors, it can be annoying noise. But to scientists, barks are an evolutionary puzzle. Why, they wonder, do dogs bark, and bark, and bark, sometimes seemingly for no reason? Researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College have offered a new explanation for the bark: The rigors of modern canine life trigger a primordial behavior that once helped dogs’ ancestors fend off predators. Animals - including dogs, deer, monkeys, and birds - bark when they feel a conflict, the researchers believe. For example, should an animal run away or defend her young? In the wild, that bark draws the attention - and the barks - of other members of the group, which could scare away the predator. But in domesticated dogs - confined to crates, yards, and houses and beset by passing cars, unfamiliar dogs, and mailmen - such internal conflicts go into overdrive, and so does the barking. The research, published in the journal Behavioural Processes last month, is the latest volley in an ongoing scientific investigation of barking. One question researchers are trying to answer is whether dogs are actually saying something, and, if so, what. The reasons for barking might seem like a frivolous research topic. But to scientists, barking should not be overlooked, considering that it is one of the most conspicuous behaviors displayed by an animal that lives in 40 percent of US households and is often treated like a member of the family. © 2009 NY Times Co.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New research from Purdue University shows that even when people who stutter are not speaking, their brains process language differently. "Traditionally, stuttering is thought of as a problem with how someone speaks, and little attention has been given to the complex interactions between neurological systems that underlie speaking," says Christine Weber-Fox, an assistant professor of speech sciences who is interested in the brain's involvement in language processing. "We have found differences in adults who stutter, compared to those who don't, in how the brain processes information when people are thinking about language but not speaking. For example, there was a significant delay in response time when subjects were given a complex language task. We also found that in people who stutter, certain areas of the brain are more active when processing some language tasks." Weber-Fox, a cognitive neuroscientist, teamed with Anne Smith, a professor of speech science who studies the neurophysiological bases of speech production, to study language and speech production systems. A series of studies were conducted to measure semantic (word meaning in sentence processing), grammatical and phonological (sounds of the language, such as rhyming) aspects of language.

By Celia Hall, Medical Editor After decades of inconclusive research, doctors believe they may have found out why people stammer. Research from Germany shows that persistent developmental stammering, which develops in childhood, can result from an abnormality in the left side of the brain. Dr Martin Somner and colleagues of the universities of Hamburg and Göttingen say in The Lancet that this results in a disconnection of the speech-related area of the cortex. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — What do dog barks have in common with bird tweets and human baby cries? All appear to communicate basic emotions, such as fear, aggression and submission, in somewhat the same acoustic way, according to a new Applied Animal Behavior Science study that suggests a primitive communication system may unite virtually all mammals. The theory could help explain why previous research has found that many mammals, including humans, understand the vocalizations of different species. For example, a Language Communication study determined young children can identify simple emotions conveyed in macaque calls. Another study, published in Primate Cognition, indicated that an African grey parrot could communicate with a bonobo. For the recent research, P�ter Pongr�cz and colleagues studied how well people with varying dog experience could describe the emotional content of several artificially assembled bark sequences. The barks, which were based on sounds made by a Mudi (a Hungarian herding dog), covered five emotional states: aggressiveness, fear, despair, playfulness and happiness. Pongr�cz, a professor of ethology at Eötvös Lor�nd University in Budapest, Hungary, and his team found that even people with little prior dog experience could correctly match the bark sequences with the previously determined emotional intent of the original barks. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

By Virginia Morell A few years ago, researchers discovered that the babies of at least one species of bat make babbling sounds, much like human infants. Now, it turns out those babbling baby bats aren't just mindlessly cooing--they're imitating the songs of the big guys in their colonies: adult males with territories and harems. Such vocal imitation is rare in the animal kingdom, and it has never been found in nonhuman primates. The discovery should open a new window on the evolution of speech and language, scientists say. Scientists define complex vocal imitation as the ability to learn a call or song from a tutor--and they regard this talent as a key innovation in the evolution of speech. The rarified list of complex vocal imitators includes birds, elephants, cetaceans, seals, and humans. Researchers had long predicted that bats might also be capable of such imitation because of their extraordinary vocal flexibility; they use echolocation calls to navigate the physical world, for example, and social calls to communicate with their fellow bats. As behavioral ecologist Mirjam Knörnschild of the University of Ulm in Germany listened to sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata), she thought she heard complicated vocal imitation. These insectivorous Costa Rican bats live in harems of one male and as many as eight females, each of which can have one pup annually. The males defend small territories in their day-roosts with unique multiple-syllabic songs. Adult females don't sing, but their pups (males and females) do plenty of babbling. During such "babbling bouts," the pups often sing nearly complete renditions of the territorial songs, Knörnschild says, albeit shakier renditions. But were the pups simply combining fragments or actually listening and imitating their complete songs? © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science

by Ewen Callaway The canine phrase book has collected its first entries. Dogs understand the meaning of different growls, from a rumble that says "back off" to playful snarls made in a tug-of-war game. Proving that animal vocalisations have specific meanings – and what they could be – is challenging. In 2008, P�ter Pongr�cz, a behavioural biologist at Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, monitored dogs' heart rates to show that they seem to notice a difference between barks aimed at strangers and those directed at nothing in particular. Now he has gone a step further and shown that dogs respond differently to different vocalisations. Pongr�cz's team recorded growls from 20 pet dogs in three different situations: a tug-of-war game with their owner, competing with another dog for a bone and growling at an approaching stranger. Growls may convey more meaning than barks, says Pongr�cz: wolves rarely bark, and he says dogs may have learned to bark to get human attention. The team played the recordings to 36 other dogs that had each been left to gnaw on a bone. Only those that heard the food-guarding growls tended to back off from the bone and stay away. "It seems dogs can understand something about the context," Pongr�cz says. Back to the bone © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Similar sounds help the tongue-tied DAVID ADAM What is the name of the proud race of half-men, half-horses from Greek mythology? How about the writing material favoured by the ancient Egyptians? If the words ‘seldom' and ‘nocturnal' help you remember that the first is ‘centaurs' and the clues ‘pagoda' and ‘amorous' trigger ‘papyrus' for the second then, according to new research, the words were ‘on the tip of your tongue. Actually, for this simple test to match accurately the new results announced by researchers at this week's American Psychological Association meeting in Washington DC, the clue words should be read aloud to you. And hearing them even before the question is posed should also help. 1.James, L. E. & Burke, D. M. Tip of the tongue, phonological priming and aging. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 26, 1378-1391 (2000). Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2000 - NATURE NEWS SERVICE Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Reg. No. 785998 England.

In the old days, preschoolers had no more pressing business than to learn how to play. New research shows that they benefit from instruction in words and sounds By Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert NEWSWEEK When you walk through the brightly colored door of the Roseville Cooperative Preschool in northern California, you’re entering a magical, pint-size world where 3- and 4-year-olds are masters of the universe. At the science table, they use magnifying glasses to explore piles of flowers, cacti and shells. In the smock-optional art area, budding da Vincis often smear blotches of red, blue and yellow directly on the table. (It’s wiped off with a damp cloth when the next artist steps up.) There are ropes for climbing and two loft areas: one carpeted and filled with books and a dollhouse, and the other with a clear Plexiglas floor, perfect for keeping an eye on the activities below. There are no letters or numbers on the walls to distract from this focused play. The only rule, says director and founder Bev Bos, is that the kids are in control. “I tell other teachers, ‘Forget about kindergarten, first grade, second grade’,” she says. “We should be focusing on where children are right now.” SOUNDS LIKE AN IDYLLIC preschool learning environment, right? Wrong, according to a growing number of early-education researchers. Until quite recently, Bev Bos’s philosophy was the standard at preschools around the country, and there are still lots of teachers who passionately defend the idea that they should be helping kids feel secure and learn to play well with others, not learn the three Rs. But researchers now say the old approach ignores mounting evidence that many preschoolers need explicit instruction in the basics of literacy—the stuff most of us started to learn in first grade, how words fall on a page and the specific sounds and letters that make up words. New brain research shows that reading is part of a complex continuum that begins with baby talk and scribbles, and culminates in a child with a rich vocabulary and knowledge of the world. While some children acquire the literacy skills they need by osmosis, through their everyday experiences, many don’t. Most at risk are children of poverty, who are twice as likely to have serious trouble reading. But studies have also shown that at least 20 percent of middle-class children have reading disabilities and that early intervention could save many of them from a lifetime of playing catch-up. � MSNBC Terms, Conditions and Privacy © 2002

Roxanne Khamsi Birdsongs are so distinctive they are often used by ornithologists to identify individual birds. Now a novel study shows that birds are not "pre-programmed" to sing their song – rather, birds listen closely to their tune to keep their songs note perfect. The same mechanism may operate in humans, perhaps shedding light on speech disorders, the researchers say. Songbirds do not start out life as virtuosos: they often begin by ‘babbling’ random pitches and then advance to sing sophisticated tunes with the help of a tutor. Once they develop their own particular melody, they use it to announce territorial claims or to attract a mate. The slight variations in the song identify one bird from another, so birds take great pains to preserve their unique tune throughout life. To establish how birds keep tabs on their singing, scientists have conducted experiments that involved disabling the birds’ ability to hear by removing a collection of sensory cells known as the cochlea. Over time, each animal produced songs that diverged further and further from its particular identifying tune. But an operation that leaves birds deaf could have other unintended cognitive effects that affect song production, argues Jon Sakata at the University of California in San Francisco, US. He and his colleague, Michael Brainard, set up an experiment that disrupted the hearing of the birds without an invasive procedure. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By NATALIE ANGIER BOMBAY HOOK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Del. — You can learn a lot by bird-watching with an ornithologist, and not just about birds. As Russell Greenberg, head of the migratory bird center at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, gazed through powerful binoculars at a nondescript fence, a raspy chack-chack-chack sound like that of a cheap wind-up toy clattered off to the left. Dr. Greenberg, 54, a tall, bearded, wryly reserved man with a lifelong passion for birds, instantly identified the caller as a clapper rail, and though the bird remained stubbornly out of view, Dr. Greenberg seized the opportunity to share the surprising back story for a beloved clich�. “You know the old saying that so-and-so is ‘as thin as a rail?’ ” he asked. “Well, that comes from a reference to the bird.” The body of a rail, he explained, is “laterally compressed,” and looks from some angles to be almost two-dimensional. And you know the saying, “This place is for the birds,’’ as in, “What a dump”? We spent the day whizzing past dappled lakes and lush grasses in the refuge here in Smyrna, Del., stopping instead at the bleakest, barest, beige-brownest scratchpads of land we could find. As Dr. Greenberg had predicted, it was around drying mudholes and plowed-up sod farms that we would see a rich variety of migratory shorebirds: plovers with slick, licorice-jelly-bean bellies; greater yellowlegs sandpipers tottering daintily on their cracked-pencil limbs; avocets with their dusky rouge heads and their absurdly elongated, upcurling bills; and killdeer, named for the sound of their call and famed for the way they can fake a broken wing to lure would-be predators away from their nests. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Matt Kaplan Birds that sing in harmonious duets with one another have always been considered monogamous partners, with the singing thought to help in building faithful relationships. Now, research has shown at least that one such species sleeps around. Lauryn Benedict of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, studied duetting California towhees (Pipilo crissalis ). She found that although female birds sang with the same male every day, more than one-quarter of their chicks were not fathered by her ‘husband’. “I’ve never caught a female in the act of cheating, they’re very secretive about their trysts,” says Benedict. But the duetting pairs copulate regularly together, she says. Ornithologists "perceived the beautiful harmonies of these birds as creating a sense of fidelity, but I suspected we were missing something”, says Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor in Ontario. It’s uncertain whether the males in the pairs are also cheating, or how they would react if they caught their partner sneaking around. In the reed bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus ) and a few other bird species, the male feeds the young less often if it suspects the female of cheating, presumably because he knows the kids might not be his, says Benedict. © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

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