by Michael Balter Despite recent progress toward sexual equality, it's still a man's world in many ways. But numerous studies show that when it comes to language, girls start off with better skills than boys. Now, scientists studying a gene linked to the evolution of vocalizations and language have for the first time found clear sex differences in its activity in both rodents and humans, with the gene making more of its protein in girls. But some researchers caution against drawing too many conclusions about the gene's role in human and animal communication from this study. Back in 2001, the world of language research was rocked by the discovery that a gene called FOXP2 appeared to be essential for the production of speech. Researchers cautioned that FOXP2 is probably only one of many genes involved in human communication, but later discoveries seemed to underscore its importance. For example, the human version of the protein produced by the gene differs by two amino acids from that of chimpanzees, and seems to have undergone natural selection since the human and chimp lineages split between 5 million and 7 million years ago. (Neandertals were found to have the same version as Homo sapiens, fueling speculation that our evolutionary cousins also had language). In the years since, FOXP2 has been implicated in the vocalizations of other animals, including mice, singing birds, and even bats. During this same time period, a number of studies have confirmed past research suggesting that young girls learn language faster and earlier than boys, producing their first words and sentences sooner and accumulating larger vocabularies faster. But the reasons behind such findings are highly controversial because it is difficult to separate the effects of nature versus nurture, and the differences gradually disappear as children get older. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17830 - Posted: 02.20.2013

by Virginia Morell Every bottlenose dolphin has its own whistle, a high-pitched, warbly "eeee" that tells the other dolphins that a particular individual is present. Dolphins are excellent vocal mimics, too, able to copy even quirky computer-generated sounds. So, scientists have wondered if dolphins can copy each other's signature whistles—which would be very similar to people saying each others' names. Now, an analysis of whistles recorded from hundreds of wild bottlenose dolphins confirms that they can indeed "name" each other, and suggests why they do so—a discovery that may help researchers translate more of what these brainy marine mammals are squeaking, trilling, and clicking about. "It's a wonderful study, really solid," says Peter Tyack, a marine mammal biologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who was not involved in this project. "Having the ability to learn another individual's name is … not what most animals do. Monkeys have food calls and calls that identify predators, but these are inherited, not learned sounds." The new work "opens the door to understanding the importance of naming." Scientists discovered the dolphins' namelike whistles almost 50 years ago. Since then, researchers have shown that infant dolphins learn their individual whistles from their mothers. A 1986 paper by Tyack did show that a pair of captive male dolphins imitated each others' whistles, and in 2000, Vincent Janik, who is also at St. Andrews, succeeded in recording matching calls among 10 wild dolphins "But without more animals, you couldn't draw a conclusion about what was going on," says Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Why, after all, would the dolphins need to copy another dolphin's whistle? © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17829 - Posted: 02.20.2013

By Erin Wayman BOSTON — “Birdbrain” may not be much of an insult: Humans and songbirds share genetic changes affecting parts of the brain related to singing and speaking, new research shows. The finding may help scientists better understand how human language evolved, as well as unravel the causes of speech impairments. Neurobiologist Erich Jarvis of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and colleagues discovered roughly 80 genes that turn on and off in similar ways in the brains of humans and songbirds such as zebra finches and parakeets. This gene activity, which occurs in brain regions involved in the ability to imitate sounds and to speak and sing, is not present in birds that can’t learn songs or mimic sounds. Jarvis described the work February 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Songbirds are good models for language because the birds are born not knowing the songs they will sing as adults. Like human infants learning a specific language, the birds have to observe and imitate others to pick up the tunes they croon. The ancestors of humans and songbirds split some 300 million years ago, suggesting the two groups independently acquired a similar capacity for song. With the new results and other recent research, Jarvis said, “I feel more comfortable that we can link structures in songbird brains to analogous structures in human brains due to convergent evolution.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17818 - Posted: 02.18.2013

Regina Nuzzo People with dyslexia are often taught to work through reading by ‘slowing down and sounding it out’. Results from a computerized training program, however, suggest that ‘hurrying up and getting on with it’ might be a better practice. Accelerated training could improve both reading fluency and comprehension, with lasting benefits. The training protocol speeds up reading by displaying a sentence and then systematically erasing it, letter by letter, in the direction of reading. It then asks questions to test the reader's comprehension. If the questions are answered correctly, the software moves on to the next sentence but gives the reader 2 milliseconds — the duration of an eyeblink — less reading time per letter. “We essentially tell the brain, ‘Hey, you can do better,’” says Zvia Breznitz, a psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel and lead author of the study. “We slowly break the cycle of bad reading.” After training with the programme for three 20-minute sessions per week for two months, students with dyslexia read about 25% faster than before and comprehended more, even when allowed to read at their own pace. Their test scores ended up statistically indistinguishable from those of typical readers who had not gone through training, and the gains were still apparent six months after training ended. Typical readers also benefited from the training, but their gains were neither as significant nor as long-lasting as the dyslexics'. The findings are published today in Nature Communications1. “The results are exciting,” says Guinevere Eden, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Dyslexia is thought to affect between 5 and 10% of the world’s population2, but there is no gold-standard method for treating it. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 17799 - Posted: 02.13.2013

Philip Ball In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol, and for the Melanau people of Borneo, bitén. All these words are thought to come from the same root. But what was it? An algorithm devised by researchers in Canada and California now offers an answer — in this case, bituqen. The program can reconstruct extinct ‘root’ languages from modern ones, a process that has previously been done painstakingly ‘by hand’ using rules of how linguistic sounds tend to change over time. Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-Côté of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his co-workers say that by making the reconstruction of ancestral languages much simpler, their method should facilitate the testing of hypotheses about how languages evolve. They report their technique in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Automated language reconstruction has been attempted before, but the authors say that earlier algorithms tended to be rather intractable and prescriptive. Bouchard-Côté and colleagues' method can factor in a large number of languages to improve the quality of reconstruction, and it uses rules that handle possible sound changes in flexible, probabilistic ways. The program requires researchers to input a list of words in each language, together with their meanings, and a phylogenetic ‘language tree’ showing how each language is related to the others. Linguists routinely construct such trees using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17786 - Posted: 02.12.2013

by Carrie Arnold If you want to survive as an ant, you'd better get ready to make some noise. A new study shows that even ant pupae—a stage between larvae and adult—can communicate via sound, and that this communication can be crucial to their survival. "What's very cool about this paper is that researchers have shown for the first time that pupae do, in fact, make some sort of a sound," says Phil DeVries, an entomologist at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana who was not involved in the study. "This was a very clever piece of natural history and science." Scientists have known for decades that ants use a variety of small chemicals known as pheromones to communicate. Perhaps the most classic example is the trail of pheromones the insects place as they walk. Those behind them follow this trail, leading to long lines of ants marching one by one. However, the insects also use pheromones to identify which nest an ant is from and its social status in that nest. Because this chemical communication is so prevalent and complex, researchers long believed that this was the primary way ants shared information. However, several years ago, researchers began to notice that adults in some ant genuses, such as Myrmica, which contains more than 200 diverse species found across Europe and Asia, made noise. These types of ants have a specialized spike along their abdomen that they stroke with one of their hind legs, similar to dragging the teeth of a comb along the edge of a table. Preliminary studies seemed to indicate that this noise served primarily as an emergency beacon, allowing the ants to shout for help when being threatened by a predator. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Communication; Aggression
Link ID: 17779 - Posted: 02.09.2013

The use of an advanced imaging shortly after the onset of acute stroke failed to identify a subgroup of patients who could benefit from a clot-removal procedure, a study has found. The randomized controlled trial known as Mechanical Retrieval and Recanalization of Stroke Clots Using Embolectomy (MR RESCUE) was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health, and was published online Feb. 8 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In patients with ischemic stroke (caused by a blockage in an artery), brain cells deprived of blood die within minutes to hours. Rapidly opening the artery can halt brain cell death. Intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA), a drug that dissolves clots has been shown to improve outcomes in such stroke patients. However intravenous t-PA is not effective in many patients with large clots blocking the major brain arteries that cause the most devastating strokes. MR RESCUE investigators tested an invasive clot removal strategy designed to remove clots from these large arteries. Patients in the study were enrolled at 22 centers in the United States within approximately 5.5 hours of their stroke onset. Their ability to function independently was assessed at 90 days. All MR-RESCUE patients underwent emergency computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MRI) perfusion imaging to identify regions of the brain with decreased blood flow, as well as regions that could not be salvaged.

Keyword: Stroke; Aggression
Link ID: 17778 - Posted: 02.09.2013

By Laura Hambleton, Winter often brings the flu, coughs, ski injuries and shoveling strains. Add to these ailments a more deadly one: heart attacks. A recent study has found that more fatal heart attacks and strokes occur during the winter than at other times of the year. And it doesn’t seem to matter if the winter is occurring in the warmer climes of Southern California or the frostier ones of Boston. After sifting through about 1.7 million death certificates filed between 2005 and 2008, cardiologists Bryan Schwartz of the University of New Mexico and Robert A. Kloner of the Heart Institute at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles found a 26 to 36 percent greater death rate for heart attacks in winter than summer “despite different locations and climates,” Kloner says. The worst months are December, January, February and the beginning of March. The doctors analyzed the cause of death for people in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Los Angeles, Washington state, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Of those who died of heart disease, the winter weather pattern was clear. In Los Angeles, for example, there were about 70 deaths per day from cardiac disease, Schwartz said. “In the summer, L.A. had an average circulatory death rate of about . . . 55 deaths per day.” The research uncovered patterns in cardiac deaths from “seven different climate patterns,” according to the study, and “death rates at all sites clustered closely together and no one site was statistically different from any other site.” An abstract of the study was published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Aggression
Link ID: 17763 - Posted: 02.05.2013

By Tia Ghose The identity of a mysterious patient who helped scientists pinpoint the brain region responsible for language has been discovered, researchers report. The finding, detailed in the January issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, identifies the patient as Louis Leborgne, a French craftsman who battled epilepsy his entire life. In 1840, a wordless patient was admitted to the Bicetre Hospital outside Paris for aphasia, or an inability to speak. He was essentially just kept there, slowly deteriorating. It wasn’t until 1861 that the man, who was known only as “Monsieur Leborgne” and who was nicknamed “Tan” for the only word he could say, came to physician Paul Broca’s ward at the hospital. Leborgne died shortly after the meeting, and Broca performed his autopsy, during which Broca found a lesion in a region of the brain tucked back and up behind the eyes. After doing a detailed examination, Broca concluded that Tan’s aphasia was caused by damage to this region and that the particular brain region controlled speech. That part of the brain was later renamed Broca’s area. At the time, scientists were debating whether different areas of the brain performed separate functions or whether it was an undifferentiated lump that did one task, like the liver, said Marjorie Lorch, a neurolinguist in London who was not involved in the study. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17756 - Posted: 02.05.2013

By JUDY BATTISTA NEW ORLEANS — The N.F.L., faced with increasing concern about the toll of concussions and confronted with litigation involving thousands of former players, is planning to form a partnership with General Electric to jump-start development of imaging technology that would detect concussions and encourage the creation of materials to better protect the brain. The four-year initiative, which is expected to begin in March with at least $50 million from the league and G.E., is the result of a late October conversation between Commissioner Roger Goodell and G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, a former offensive tackle at Dartmouth. When Goodell explained his idea of getting leading companies in innovation to join the N.F.L. to accelerate research, Immelt said he wanted to help. After years of insisting there was no link between head injuries sustained on the field and long-term cognitive impairment, the N.F.L. has altered rules, fined and suspended players who hit opponents in the head and contributed millions of dollars for the study of head injuries. “Is this their way of defending themselves with this cloud over the sport? I’d be lying if I told you it had nothing to do with it,” Kevin Guskiewicz, the founding director of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina, said of the initiative. Guskiewicz is a member of the league’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee and the chairman of a subcommittee focused on safety equipment and playing rules. He will work with the N.F.L. and G.E. to identify areas of focus. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Aggression
Link ID: 17750 - Posted: 02.04.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker. The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes. What they found was reassuring. To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull. Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk. Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17739 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By BENJAMIN HOFFMAN NEW ORLEANS — It has become a staple of Super Bowl week, as much a part of the pregame to the N.F.L.’s biggest event as the annual media day: a discussion of how football is being affected by head injuries and the mounting evidence that long-term brain damage can be linked to injuries sustained on the field. Years ago, players rarely spoke about the issue and league officials dismissed suggestions that on-field injuries could lead to life-altering health problems. Now, however, the league is facing lawsuits from thousands of former players, rules are being instituted in an attempt to diminish injuries on the field and even President Obama has said that the way football is played will have to change. This week, Bernard Pollard, a hard-hitting safety for the Baltimore Ravens, created a stir by saying that the N.F.L. would not exist in 30 years because of the rules changes designed with safety in mind, but that he also believed there would be a death on the field at some point. At media day Tuesday, players reacted to the comments made by Pollard and Obama, with some agreeing with Pollard that recent rules changes would change the sport to such an extent that it would be less entertaining and lead to a loss of popularity. Pollard stood by his comments. He added, however, that while he was comfortable with the physical risk he was taking by playing football, he was not sure he would want future generations, including his 4-year-old son, to follow his example. “My whole stance right now is that I don’t want him to play football,” Pollard said. “Football has been good to me. It has been my outlet. God has blessed me with a tremendous talent to be able to play this game. But we want our kids to have things better than us.” He said he did not want his son to go through the aches and pains caused by the physicality of the game. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17738 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Lisa Flam A New Hampshire toddler who suffered a nightmarish injury when a pencil impaled her eye and became lodged in her head was saved by a remarkable turn of good fortune: The pencil that penetrated deep into her brain took a near-perfect path that left her virtually unscathed. The girl, 20-month-old Olivia Smith, survived not only the pencil’s pushing through her brain, but also its painstaking and dangerous, yet flawless removal at Boston Children’s Hospital, where the pencil was slowly pulled out by hand earlier this month. “It’s beyond belief how lucky she was,” said one of her doctors, Dr. Darren Orbach. “Her prognosis is great. I would expect her to be a normal kid at this point.” Olivia’s improbable tale began on Jan. 6, when she was coloring at home in New Boston, N.H., lost her balance and fell onto the pencil, said Orbach, chief of interventional and neurointerventional radiology at Children’s. When her mother picked her up to comfort her, she saw a small piece of the orange colored pencil sticking out from her right eye. “I thought the pencil had broken or something,” Olivia’s mother, Susie Smith, told NBC affiliate WHDH. “I thought there was no way that whole pencil was through her head.” © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Aggression
Link ID: 17726 - Posted: 01.29.2013

By BRETT MICHAEL DYKES JEFFERSON, La. — “He liked to hit people,” Carlene Dempsey said flatly. “He didn’t care if he got his bell rung.” She was referring to her Falstaffian husband, Tom Dempsey, the former N.F.L. kicker born without toes on his right foot who in November 1970 — after a long night of drinking and debauchery in the French Quarter of New Orleans — set the league record for the longest field goal in a regular-season game. The 63-yard kick lifted the New Orleans Saints to a 19-17 victory over the Detroit Lions, and in the process helped transform Dempsey into a folk hero in the city hosting the Super Bowl on Sunday, the rare Saints player to hold a prominent N.F.L. record before the Sean Payton era. Now 66, Dempsey sat recently with his wife at the dining room table in the modest 1,500-square-foot home they share with their daughter, Ashley, and their grandson, Dylan, in this New Orleans suburb. It quickly became apparent that when reflecting upon his football career, Dempsey seemed to take more delight discussing the hits he had delivered than the kicks he had made. He wistfully recalled how, in high school and college, if his coaches wanted someone on the opposing team knocked out, they usually called on him to deliver a teeth-rattling hit. And his eyes twinkled with glee when he talked about how the coaches he played for over the course of his 10-year N.F.L. career with the Saints, the Eagles, the Rams, the Oilers and the Bills would sometimes call on him to be the wedge buster — football’s version of a kamikaze pilot — on kickoffs. “I would hit anybody,” Dempsey boasted, echoing the sentiment of Carlene, his wife of more than 40 years. “I didn’t care.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17721 - Posted: 01.28.2013

by Tracy Staedter In this sweet video, a wild bottlenose dolphin slowly approaches a diver, who is with a group that’s watching manta rays near Kona, Hawaii. The dolphin rolls to one side, apparently showing the diver, named Keller Laros, that it’s tangled in fishing net and has a hook stuck in its fin. According to Yahoo News, the dolphin surfaced once for a breath air during the procedure and then returned to the diver, who finished the job of cutting away the net and removing the hook. Once the dolphin was free, it swam away. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Animal Communication; Aggression
Link ID: 17713 - Posted: 01.26.2013

By Stephen Ornes New babies eat, sleep, cry, poop — and listen. But their eavesdropping begins before birth and may include language lessons, says a new study. Scientists believe such early learning may help babies quickly understand their parents. Christine Moon is a psychologist at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. She led the new study, to be published in February. “It seems that there is some prenatal learning of speech sounds, but we do not yet know how much,” she told Science News. A prenatal event happens before birth. Scientists have known that about 10 weeks before birth, a fetus can hear sounds outside the womb. Those sounds include the volume and rhythm of a person’s voice. But Moon found evidence that fetuses may also be starting to learn language itself. Moon and her coworkers tested whether newborns could detect differences in vowel sounds. These sounds are the loudest in human speech. Her team reports that newborns responded one way when they heard sounds like those from their parents’ language. And the newborns responded another way when they heard sounds like those from a foreign language. This was true among U.S. and Swedish babies who listened to sounds similar to English vowels and Swedish vowels. These responses show that shortly after birth, babies can group together familiar speech sounds, Moon told Science News. © 2013 Copyright Science News for Kids

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17710 - Posted: 01.26.2013

Some animals are more eloquent than previously thought and have a communication structure similar to the vowel and consonant system of humans, according to new research. Studying the abbreviated call of the mongoose, researchers at the University of Zurich have found they are the first animals to communicate with sound units that are even smaller than syllables and yet still contain information about who is calling and why. Usually, animals can only produce a limited number of distinguishable sounds and calls due to their anatomy. While whale and bird songs are a little more complex than most animal sounds — in that they are repeatedly combined with new arrangements — they don’t pattern themselves after human syllables with their combination of vowels and consonants. Studying wild banded mongooses in Uganda, behavioural biologists discovered that the calls of the animals are structured and contain different information — a sound structure that has some similarities to the vowel and consonant system of human speech. Banded mongooses live in the savannah regions of the Sahara. They are small predators that live in groups of around 20 and are related to the meerkat. The scientists recorded calls of the mongoose and made acoustic analyses of them. The calls, which last between 50 and 150 milliseconds, could be compared to one "syllable," the researchers found. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17672 - Posted: 01.12.2013

By MARY PILON and KEN BELSON The former N.F.L. linebacker Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma when he committed suicide in the spring, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday. The findings were consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease widely connected to athletes who have absorbed frequent blows to the head, the N.I.H. said in a statement. Seau is the latest and most prominent player to be associated with the disease, which has bedeviled football in recent years as a proliferation of studies has exposed the possible long-term cognitive impact of head injuries sustained on the field. “The type of findings seen in Mr. Seau’s brain have been recently reported in autopsies of individuals with exposure to repetitive head injury,” the N.I.H. said, “including professional and amateur athletes who played contact sports, individuals with multiple concussions, and veterans exposed to blast injury and other trauma.” Since C.T.E. was diagnosed in the brain of the former Eagles defensive back Andre Waters after his suicide in 2006, the disease has been found in nearly every former player whose brain was examined posthumously. (C.T.E. can be diagnosed only posthumously.) Researchers at Boston University, who pioneered the study of C.T.E., have found it in 33 of the 34 brains of former N.F.L. players they have examined. The N.I.H. began its examination of Seau’s brain tissue in July. In addition to being reviewed by two federal neuropathologists, Seau’s brain was reviewed by three outside neuropathology experts who did not have knowledge of the source of the tissue. Upon initial examination “the brain looked normal,” according to the N.I.H. It was not until doctors looked under the microscope and used staining techniques that the C.T.E. abnormalities were seen. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17668 - Posted: 01.12.2013

By Bruce Bower Babies may start to learn their mother tongues even before seeing their mothers’ faces. Newborns react differently to native and foreign vowel sounds, suggesting that language learning begins in the womb, researchers say. Infants tested seven to 75 hours after birth treated spoken variants of a vowel sound in their home language as similar, evidence that newborns regard these sounds as members of a common category, say psychologist Christine Moon of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and her colleagues. Newborns deemed different versions of a foreign vowel sound to be dissimilar and unfamiliar, the scientists report in an upcoming Acta Paediatrica. “It seems that there is some prenatal learning of speech sounds, but we do not yet know how much,” Moon says. Fetuses can hear outside sounds by about 10 weeks before birth. Until now, evidence suggested that prenatal learning was restricted to the melody, rhythm and loudness of voices (SN: 12/5/09, p. 14). Earlier investigations established that 6-month-olds group native but not foreign vowel sounds into categories. Moon and colleagues propose that, in the last couple months of gestation, babies monitor at least some vowels — the loudest and most expressive speech sounds — uttered by their mothers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17662 - Posted: 01.08.2013

By Breanna Draxler Infants are known for their impressive ability to learn language, which most scientists say kicks in somewhere around the six-month mark. But a new study indicates that language recognition may begin even earlier, while the baby is still in the womb. Using a creative means of measurement, researchers found that babies could already recognize their mother tongue by the time they left their mothers’ bodies. The researchers tested American and Swedish newborns between seven hours and three days old. Each baby was given a pacifier hooked up to a computer. When the baby sucked on the pacifier, it triggered the computer to produce a vowel sound—sometimes in English and sometimes in Swedish. The vowel sound was repeated until the baby stopped sucking. When the baby resumed sucking, a new vowel sound would start. The sucking was used as a metric to determine the babies’ interest in each vowel sound. More interest meant more sucks, according to the study soon to be published in Acta Paediatrica. In both countries, babies sucked on the pacifier longer when they heard foreign vowel sounds as compared to those of their mom’s native language. The researchers suggest that this is because the babies already recognize the vowels from their mothers and were keen to learn new ones. Hearing develops in a baby’s brain at around the 30th week of pregnancy, which leaves the last 10 weeks of gestation for babies to put that newfound ability to work. Baby brains are quick to learn, so a better understanding of these mechanisms may help researchers figure out how to improve the learning process for the rest of us.

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 17648 - Posted: 01.05.2013