By Erin Blakemore Consuming more than eight alcoholic drinks a week is associated with brain injuries linked to Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, a recent study in the journal Neurology suggests. The analysis looked for links between heavy drinking and brain health. Researchers used autopsy data from the Biobank for Aging Studies at the University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil collected between 2004 and 2024. The team analyzed data from 1,781 people ages 50 or older at death. The average age at death was 74.9. With the help of surveys of the deceased’s next of kin, researchers gathered information about the deceased’s cognitive function and alcohol consumption in the three months before their death. Among participants, 965 never drank, 319 drank up to seven drinks per week (moderate drinking), and 129 had eight or more drinks per week (heavy drinking). Another 368 were former heavy drinkers who had stopped drinking before their last three months of life. The analysis showed that heavy drinkers and former heavy drinkers, respectively, had 41 percent and 31 percent higher odds of neurofibrillary tangles — clumps of the protein tau that accumulate inside brain neurons and have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Moderate, heavy and former heavy drinkers also had a higher risk of hyaline arteriolosclerosis, which thickens the walls of small blood vessels in the brain, impeding blood flow and causing brain damage over time. Though 40 percent of those who never drank had vascular brain lesions, they were more common in moderate (44.6 percent), heavy (44.1 percent) and former heavy drinkers (50.2 percent), the study found.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 29749 - Posted: 04.19.2025

By Carl Zimmer After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings. The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others. Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, said that the study helped place the roots of language even further back in time, to millions of years before the emergence of our species. “Differences between humans and other primates, including in communication, are far less distinct and well-defined than we have long assumed,” Dr. Amici said. But other researchers said that the study, which had been conducted on bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, had little to reveal about how we use words. “The present findings don’t tell us anything about the evolution of language,” said Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Many species can communicate with sounds. But when an animal makes a sound, it typically means just one thing. Monkeys, for instance, can make one warning call in reference to a leopard and a different one for an incoming eagle flying. In contrast, we humans can string words together in ways that combine their individual meanings into something new. Suppose I say, “I am a bad dancer.” When I combine the words “bad” and “dancer,” I no longer mean them independently; I’m not saying, “I am a bad person who also happens to dance.” Instead, I mean that I don’t dance well. Linguists call this compositionality, and have long considered it an essential ingredient of language. “It’s the force behind language’s creativity and productivity,” said Simon Townsend, a comparative psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Theoretically, you can come up with any phrase that has never been uttered before.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29730 - Posted: 04.05.2025

Miryam Naddaf A brain-reading implant that translates neural signals into audible speech has allowed a woman with paralysis to hear what she intends to say nearly instantly. Researchers enhanced the device — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that decoded sentences as the woman thought of them, and then spoke them out loud using a synthetic voice. Unlike previous efforts, which could produce sounds only after users finished an entire sentence, the current approach can simultaneously detect words and turn them into speech within 3 seconds. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on 31 March1, represent a big step towards BCIs that are of practical use. Older speech-generating BCIs are similar to “a WhatsApp conversation”, says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, who was not involved with the work. “I write a sentence, you write a sentence and you need some time to write a sentence again,” he says. “It just doesn’t flow like a normal conversation.” BCIs that stream speech in real time are “the next level” in research because they allow users to convey the tone and emphasis that are characteristic of natural speech, he adds. The study participant, Ann, lost her ability to speak after a stroke in her brainstem in 2005. Some 18 years later, she underwent a surgery to place a paper-thin rectangle containing 253 electrodes on the surface of her brain cortex. The implant can record the combined activity of thousands of neurons at the same time. Researchers personalized the synthetic voice to sound like Ann’s own voice from before her injury, by training AI algorithms on recordings from her wedding video. During the latest study, Ann silently mouthed 100 sentences from a set of 1,024 words and 50 phrases that appeared on a screen. The BCI device captured her neural signals every 80 milliseconds, starting 500 milliseconds before Ann started to silently say the sentences. It produced between 47 and 90 words per minute (natural conversation happens at around 160 words per minute).

Keyword: Language; Robotics
Link ID: 29726 - Posted: 04.02.2025

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Which songs birds sing can – as with human music – be influenced by age, social interactions and migration, researchers have found. Not all birds learn songs, but among those that do, individuals, neighbourhoods and populations can produce different collections of tunes, akin to different music albums. Now researchers have found that changes in the makeup of a group of birds can influence factors including which songs they learn, how similar those songs are to each other and how quickly songs are replaced. Dr Nilo Merino Recalde, the first author of the study, from the University of Oxford, said: “This is very interesting, I think, partly because it shows that there are all these kind of common elements at play when it comes to shaping learned traits, [similar to] what happens with human languages and human music.” But he said the parallels had their limits. “The function and the role of human music and language is very, very different to the function of birdsong,” he said. “Birdsong is used to repel rivals, to protect territories, to entice mates, this kind of thing. And that also shapes songs.” Writing in the journal Current Biology, Recalde and colleagues describe how they used physical tracking as well as artificial intelligence to match recorded songs to individual male great tits living in Wytham Woods in Oxford. In total, the study encompassed 20,000 hours of sound recordings and more than 100,000 songs, captured over three years. The researchers used their AI models to analyse the repertoires of individual birds, those within neighbourhoods and across the entire population to explore how similar the various songs were. As a result, the team were able to unpick how population turnover, immigration and age structure influenced the songs. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 29695 - Posted: 03.08.2025

Aaron Priester Traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of death and disability in the world. Blunt force trauma to the brain, often from a bad fall or traffic accident, accounts for the deaths of over 61,000 Americans each year. Over 80,000 will develop some long-term disability. While much of the physical brain damage occurs instantly – called the primary stage of injury – additional brain damage can result from the destructive chemical processes that arise in the body minutes to days to weeks following initial impact. Unlike the primary stage of injury, this secondary stage could potentially be prevented by targeting the molecules driving damage. I am a materials science engineer, and my colleagues and I are working to design treatments to neutralize the harm of secondary traumatic brain injury and reduce neurodegeneration. We designed a new material that could target and neutralize brain-damaging molecules in mice, improving their cognitive recovery and offering a potential new treatment for people. The primary stage of traumatic brain injury can severely damage and even destroy the blood-brain barrier – an interface protecting the brain by limiting what can enter it. Disruption of this barrier triggers damaged neurons or the immune system to release certain chemicals that result in destructive biochemical processes. One process called excitotoxicity occurs when too many calcium ions are allowed into neurons, activating enzymes that fragment DNA and damage cells, causing death. Another process, neuroinflammation, results from the activation of cells called microglia that can trigger inflammation in damaged areas of the brain. © 2010–2025, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 29680 - Posted: 02.22.2025

Nell Greenfieldboyce Putting the uniquely human version of a certain gene into mice changed the way that those animals vocalized to each other, suggesting that this gene may play a role in speech and language. Mice make a lot of calls in the ultrasonic range that humans can't hear, and the high-frequency vocalizations made by the genetically altered mice were more complex and showed more variation than those made by normal mice, according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications. The fact that the genetic change produced differences in vocal behavior was "really exciting," says Erich Jarvis, a scientist at Rockefeller University in New York who worked on this research. Still, he cautioned, "I don't think that one gene is going to be responsible — poof! — and you've got spoken language." For years, scientists have been trying to find the different genes that may have been involved in the evolution of speech, as language is one of the key features that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. "There are other genes implicated in language that have not been human-specific," says Robert Darnell, a neuroscientist and physician at Rockefeller University, noting that one gene called FOXP2 has been linked to speech disorders. He was interested in a different gene called NOVA1, which he has studied for over two decades. NOVA1 is active in the brain, where it produces a protein that can affect the activity of other genes. NOVA1 is found in living creatures from mammals to birds, but humans have a unique variant. Yoko Tajima, a postdoctoral associate in Darnell's lab, led an effort to put this variant into mice, to see what effect it would have. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29678 - Posted: 02.19.2025

By Max Kozlov A sliver of human brain in a small vial starts to melt as lye is added to it. Over the next few days, the caustic chemical will break down the neurons and blood vessels within, leaving behind a grisly slurry containing thousands of tiny plastic particles. Toxicologist Matthew Campen has been using this method to isolate and track the microplastics — and their smaller counterparts, nanoplastics — found in human kidneys, livers and especially brains. Campen, who is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, estimates that he can isolate about 10 grams of plastics from a donated human brain; that’s about the weight of an unused crayon. Microplastics have been found just about everywhere that scientists have looked: on remote islands, in fresh snow in Antarctica, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, in food, in water and in the air that we breathe. And scientists such as Campen are finding them spread throughout the human body. Detection is only the first step, however. Determining precisely what these plastics are doing inside people and whether they’re harmful has been much harder. That’s because there’s no one ‘microplastic’. They come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes and chemical compositions, each of which could affect cells and tissues differently. This is where Campen’s beige sludge comes into play. Despite microplastics’ ubiquity, it’s difficult to determine which microplastics people are exposed to, how they’re exposed and which particles make their way into the nooks and crannies of the body. The samples that Campen collects from cadavers can, in turn, be used to test how living tissues respond to the kinds of plastic that people carry around with them. “Morbidly speaking, the best source I can think of to get good, relevant microplastics is to take an entire human brain and digest it,” says Campen. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Robotics
Link ID: 29669 - Posted: 02.12.2025

By Emily Anthes The English language is full of wonderful words, from “anemone” and “aurora” to “zenith” and “zodiac.” But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which in English is “the,” is used about twice as frequently as the second most common word (“of,” in English), three times as frequently as the third most common word (“and”), continuing in that pattern. Now, an international, interdisciplinary team of scientists has found that the intricate songs of humpback whales, which can spread rapidly from one population to another, follow the same rule, which is known as Zipf’s law. The scientists are careful to note that whale song is not equivalent to human language. But the findings, they argue, suggest that forms of vocal communication that are complex and culturally transmitted may have shared structural properties. “We expect them to evolve to be easy to learn,” said Simon Kirby, an expert on language evolution at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study. The results were published on Thursday in the journal Science. “We think of language as this culturally evolving system that has to essentially be passed on by its hosts, which are humans,” Dr. Kirby added. “What’s so gratifying for me is to see that same logic seems to also potentially apply to whale song.” Zipf’s law, which was named for the linguist George Kingsley Zipf, holds that in any given language the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. There is still considerable debate over why this pattern exists and how meaningful it is. But some research suggests that this kind of skewed word distribution can make language easier to learn. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29662 - Posted: 02.08.2025

By Avery Schuyler Nunn Migratory songbirds may talk to one another more than we thought as they wing through the night. Each fall, hundreds of millions of birds from dozens of species co-migrate, some of them making dangerous journeys across continents. Come spring, they return home. Scientists have long believed that these songbirds rely on instinct and experience alone to make the trek. But new research from a team of ornithologists at the University of Illinois suggests they may help one another out—even across species—through their nocturnal calls. “They broadcast vocal pings into the sky, potentially sharing information about who they are and what lies ahead,” says ornithologist Benjamin Van Doren of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a co-author of the study, published in Current Biology. Using ground-based microphones across 26 sites in eastern North America, Van Doren and his team recorded over 18,300 hours of nocturnal flight calls from 27 different species of birds—brief, high-pitched vocalizations that some warblers, thrushes, and sparrows emit while flying. To process the enormous dataset of calls, they used machine-learning tools, including a customized version of Merlin, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s bird-call identification app. The analysis revealed that birds of different species were flying in close proximity and calling to one another in repeated patterns that suggested a kind of code. Flight proximity was closest between migrating songbirds species that made similar calls in pitch and rhythm, traveled at similar speeds, and had similar wing shapes. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29661 - Posted: 02.08.2025

By Matt Richtel Cursing is coursing through society. Words once too blue to publicly utter have become increasingly commonplace. “Language is just part of the whole shift to a more casual lifestyle,” said Timothy Jay, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Mass. Dr. Jay has spent a career studying the use of profanity, from what motivates it to the ways in which it satisfies, signals meaning and offends. Although officially retired, he has continued to edit studies on profanity and he recently offered an expert opinion in an ongoing legal dispute in Michigan over whether the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” (a euphemism used to denigrate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.) should be reasonably interpreted as “profane.” (It should not, Dr. Jay opined.) Dr. Jay posits that the increasingly casual nature of the spoken word derives in part from the way people communicate on social media. One study, published in 2014 by other researchers in the field, found that curse words on Twitter, now known as X, appeared in 7.7 percent of posts, with profanity representing about 1 in every 10 words on the platform. That compared to a swearing rate of 0.5 to 0.7 percent in spoken language, the study found. If that data troubles you, Dr. Jay has some thoughts on how to dial back the profanity. F*@%-free February, anyone? Tis interview has been condensed and edited for clarity, and scrubbed of some of the vernacular that Dr. Jay conceded he regularly uses on the golf course. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Language
Link ID: 29660 - Posted: 02.08.2025

By Katharine Gammon Today more than 55 million people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which ravage the minds of those who suffer from them and have devastating impacts on their family members. In spite of decades of research, the precise origins of these diseases continue to elude scientists, though numerous factors have been found to be associated with higher risk, including genetics and various lifestyle and environmental factors. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The quest has recently taken a turn to a newer model for studying the brain: brain organoids. These three-dimensional clumps of neuronal tissue derived from human stem cells have been used to study everything from epilepsy to the origins of consciousness. And now, researchers in Massachusetts are slamming them with miniature metal pistons to test out whether they can lend credence to a controversial hypothesis: that concussions might reactivate a common virus in the brain, increasing dementia risk. A decade of research suggests traumatic brain injury, whether from accidents or high-contact sports, is a standout risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other forms of neurodegenerative decline. Some estimates suggest that up to 10 percent of cases could be attributed to at least one prior head injury, but why is not fully understood. Separately, a growing body of research proposes that viral infection, including a common virus known as herpes simplex one, can also increase susceptibility to these diseases. But all three things—head trauma, viral infection, and dementia—have not been directly connected in experimental research, until now. One of the challenges in getting to the roots of dementia is that humans lead complex, messy lives. In the soup of risk factors—from high blood pressure to loneliness to genetic inheritance—it can be hard to filter out the most impactful forces that have contributed to the onset of any one dementia case. There are no ethical ways to test these questions on humans, of course, while using lab animals presents its own ethical and cost challenges. Animals are never a perfect match for humans anyway, and dementia-related findings in animals have so far not translated well to human patients. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 29646 - Posted: 01.29.2025

By Smriti Mallapaty For the first time, scientists have tracked microplastics moving through the bodies of mice in real time1. The tiny plastic particles are gobbled up by immune cells, travel through the bloodstream and eventually become lodged in blood vessels in the brain. It’s not clear whether such obstructions occur in people, say researchers, but they did seem to affect the mice’s movement. Microplastics are specks of plastic, less than 5 millimetres long, that can be found everywhere, from the deep ocean to Antarctic ice. They are in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. They can even enter our bloodstreams directly through plastic medical devices. Studies show that microplastics, and smaller nanoplastics, have made their way into humans’ brains, livers and kidneys, but researchers are just beginning to understand what happens to these plastic intruders and their effect on human health. One study last year, for example, found that people with micro- and nano-plastics in fatty deposits in their main artery were more likely to experience a heart attack, stroke or death2. In the latest study, published in Science Advances today, Haipeng Huang, a biomedical researcher at Peking University in Beijing, and his colleagues wanted to better understand how microplastics affect the brain. They used a fluorescence imaging technique called miniature two-photon microscopy to observe what was happening in mouse brains through a transparent window surgically implanted into the animal’s skull. The imaging technique can trace microplastics as they move through the bloodstream, says Eliane El Hayek, an environmental-health researcher at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “It’s very interesting, and very helpful.” © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Stroke
Link ID: 29641 - Posted: 01.25.2025

By Emily McLaughlin Three days after our baby was born, my husband and I brought our newborn daughter home to our house in Tarrytown, New York. I was 32, fit and healthy, and had had an uneventful pregnancy. But on the second afternoon back home, while nursing, a thunderclap headache struck. The pounding in my temple literally brought me to my knees. I tried to tough it out, but it didn’t go away. That evening, I called my doctor. Since I was low-risk with normal blood pressure, she suggested rest and hydration. Then in the middle of that night, while I was still in debilitating pain, dark spots started to float across my vision. As my husband rushed me to the hospital, he asked me a few simple questions as he drove: Did you page the doctor? How’s your nausea? My answers came out in slow motion at first, then turned into a stutter, before they finally stopped. At the hospital, an emergency brain scan showed an intracerebral hemorrhage in the right frontal lobe — the site of executive functioning, creativity and emotion. The next thing I remember is waking in the Neuro-ICU of a nearby hospital — paralyzed on the left side, unable to smile, process time or even read the sign telling nurses I wasn’t allowed to swallow in case the muscles in my mouth were affected and I choked. I couldn’t get the words out to ask if I’d be trapped in my head for good. Ten days later, on blood pressure and antiseizure meds, I was finally allowed to go home to my newborn. It felt like I needed more care than she did. With only one strong, normally working arm, I couldn’t cradle my baby. A constant headache made it impossible to stand. Doctors said the headaches might last a year, until the blood in my brain reabsorbed. My left leg worked, but poor balance made even walking around the house difficult. The left half of my face couldn’t move, and my speech came out weak and slowly. I could not connect emotion to the rhythm of my words. I delivered questions as flat, imperative statements.

Keyword: Stroke; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 29604 - Posted: 12.21.2024

By Annie Liontas In 2016, Marchell Taylor lay in his windowless, six-by-eight cell in the Denver County Jail. Only 36 days after being released after serving time for drug and robbery convictions, he robbed a Papa John’s and assaulted an employee. Because of his record, Mr. Taylor faced 300 years of imprisonment. He asked himself: Why am I back here? Answering his question may require looking back to 1978, when he was 9 years old and his family’s car slammed into a wall. He woke up to blood on his face. The brain injury he sustained went untreated. Shortly after that, his behavior changed, and he became, in his words, “snappy and violent.” By age 10, he was regularly turning to marijuana and alcohol. At 13, he was breaking into houses. At 14, he robbed a 7-Eleven. In 1993 he was picked up for aggravated robbery and ended up in a maximum security facility. For the next two decades, Mr. Taylor was in and out of institutions like this. That is until the Brain Injury Alliance of Colorado diagnosed him with a brain injury in 2016 while he was awaiting trial. After administering a screening, psychologists at the Men’s Mental Health Transition Unit — a pioneering mental health program in the Denver County Jail — gave Mr. Taylor access to therapies for mental health, including cognitive behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, which helps process traumatic memories and experiences. These treatments taught him about his brain, and he says it has made all the difference. It is tempting to dismiss brain injury at an early age as the cause of years of criminal behavior. It’s certainly true in Mr. Taylor’s case that there were other contributing factors, including ongoing substance abuse, a lack of money and weak social and psychological support. But after spending years researching brain injuries in an effort to understand my own recovery from several and as a friend of Mr. Taylor’s, I’m reckoning with the fact that experts are only now beginning to recognize the connection between brain injury and incarceration. While such trauma may not offer a tidy explanation for histories like his, growing insight into this connection offers an opportunity to change the grim legacy of incarceration and mental illness in this country by treating an underlying factor that can fuel recidivism. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 29585 - Posted: 12.04.2024

By Janna Levin It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capacity has often been cited as a defining characteristic of our species, and one that sets us apart in the long history of life on Earth. Yet we know that other species communicate in complex ways. Studies of the neurological foundations of language suggest that birdsong, or communication among bats or elephants, originates with brain structures similar to our own. So why do some species vocalize while others don’t? In this episode, Erich Jarvis, who studies behavior and neurogenetics at the Rockefeller University, chats with Janna Levin about the surprising connections between human speech, birdsong and dance. JANNA LEVIN: All animals exhibit some form of communication, from the primitive hiss of a lizard to the complex gestures natural to chimps, or the songs shared by whales. But human language does seem exceptional, a vast and discrete cognitive leap. Yet recent research is finding surprising neurological connections between our expressive speech and the types of communication innate to other animals, giving us new ideas about the biological and developmental origins of language. Erich is a professor at the Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. At Rockefeller, he directs the Field Research Center of Ethology and Ecology. He also directs the Neurogenetics Lab of Language and codirects the Vertebrate Genome Lab, where he studies song-learning birds and other species to gain insight into the mechanism’s underlying language and vocal learning. ERICH JARVIS: So, the first part: Language is built-in genetically in us humans. We’re born with the capacity to learn how to produce and how to understand language, and pass it on culturally from one generation to the next. The actual detail is learned, but the actual plan in the brain is there. Second part of your question: Is it, you know, special or unique to humans? It is specialized in humans, but certainly many components of what gives rise to language is not unique to humans. There’s a spectrum of abilities out there in other species that we share some aspects of with other species. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29572 - Posted: 11.23.2024

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Whether it is news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in a single glance. Prof Liina Pylkkanen, co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume words are understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the whole sentence. “From this perspective, at-a-glance language processing really shouldn’t work since there’s just not enough time for all the sequential processing of words and their combination into a larger representation,” she said. However, the research offers fresh insights, revealing we can detect certain sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds (ms) – a timeframe similar to the blink of an eye. Pylkkanen said: “We don’t yet know exactly how this ultrafast structure detection is possible, but the general hypothesis is that when something you perceive fits really well with what you know about – in this case, we’re talking about knowledge of the grammar – this top-down knowledge can help you identify the stimulus really fast. “So just like your own car is quickly identifiable in a parking lot, certain language structures are quickly identifiable and can then give rise to a rapid effect of syntax in the brain.” The team say the findings suggest parallels with the way in which we perceive visual scenes, with Pylkkanen noting the results could have practical uses for the designers of digital media, as well as advertisers and designers of road signs. Writing in the journal Science Advances, Pylkkanen and colleagues report how they used a non-invasive scanning device to measure the brain activity of 36 participants. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 29527 - Posted: 10.26.2024

By Katarina Zimmer Adriana Weisleder knows well the benefits of being bilingual: being able to communicate with one’s community, cultivating connection with one’s heritage culture, contributing to the richness and diversity of society, and opening up professional opportunities. Research also suggests some cognitive benefits of bilingualism — such as improved multitasking — although those are more debated, says Weisleder, a developmental psychologist and language scientist of Costa Rican heritage who directs the Child Language Lab at Northwestern University near Chicago. Nearly 22 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home; many of them are English and Spanish speakers from immigrant families. Yet many children from immigrant families in the United States struggle to develop or maintain proficiency in two languages. Some may lose their heritage language in favor of English; others may fall behind in schools where their progress is evaluated only in English. In a 2020 article in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Weisleder and educational psychologist Meredith Rowe explain how a person’s environment — at a family, community and societal level — affects language acquisition. In the US, for instance, language development in children from immigrant families is influenced by parental misconceptions about raising children bilingually, a general scarcity of support for bilinguals in schools, and anti-immigrant sentiment in society more broadly. In her research, Weisleder leads in-depth studies of bilingual toddlers in different social contexts to better understand how they comprehend and learn multiple languages. She hopes her insights will help to dispel misconceptions and fears around bilingualism and improve support for children learning multiple languages.

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29526 - Posted: 10.26.2024

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Even if your cat hasn’t gotten your tongue, it’s most likely getting your words. Without any particular training, the animals—like human babies—appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports. That means that, despite all appearances to the contrary, our furtive feline friends may actually be listening to what we say. Cats have a long history with us—about 10,000 years at last count—notes Brittany Florkiewicz, an evolutionary psychologist at Lyon College who was not involved in the work. “So it makes sense that they can learn these types of associations.” Scientists have discovered a lot about how cats respond to human language in the past 5 years. In 2019, a team in Tokyo showed that cats “know” their names, responding to them by moving their heads and ears in a particular way. In 2022, some of the same researchers demonstrated that the animals can “match” photos of their human and feline family members to their respective names. “I was very surprised, because that meant cats were able to eavesdrop on human conversations and understand words without any special reward-based training,” says Saho Takagi, a comparative cognitive scientist at Azabu University and member of the 2022 study. She wondered: Are cats “hard-wired” to learn human language? To find out, Takagi and some of her former teammates gave 31 adult pet cats—including 23 that were up for adoption at cat cafés—a type of word test designed for human babies. The scientists propped each kitty in front of a laptop and showed the animals two 9-second animated cartoon images while broadcasting audio tracks of their caregivers saying a made-up word four times. The researchers played the nonsense word “keraru” while a growing and shrinking blue-and-white unicorn appeared on the screen, or “parumo” while a red-faced cartoon Sun grew and shrank. The cats watched and heard these sequences until they got bored—signaled by a 50% drop in eye contact with the screen.

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29521 - Posted: 10.19.2024

By Erica Goode Over the last decades, researchers who study animal behavior have succeeded in largely blurring the line between Homo sapiens and other animals. Like their human counterparts, animals feel emotions, they solve problems, they communicate and form complicated relationships, investigators have found. Any number of books — think of Ed Yong’s “An Immense World” or Marc Bekoff’s “The Emotional Lives of Animals” — have been dedicated to exploring these relatively recently recognized abilities. Yet few books on the ways animals communicate have been written through the eyes of a scientist as cautious and as thoughtful as zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, the author of “Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication.” Kershenbaum, a lecturer and fellow at the University of Cambridge, is distrustful of simplistic explanations, wary of assumptions, devoted to caveats — few statements come without qualification. In Socratic fashion, he asks a lot of questions, the answers to which, in many cases, neither he nor anyone else can yet provide. That did not deter him from writing the book and it should not deter other people from reading it. But those who pick up “Why Animals Talk” expecting to find proof of animal telepathy or hoping for a dictionary of elephant-speak or a word-for-word translation of humpback whale songs, will be disappointed. (On Amazon, one disgruntled reviewer summarized the book: “Animals don’t really talk – The End.”) If there is a message that Kershenbaum wants to get across, it’s that, as much as we’d like to be able to hold conversations with our pets or chat with chimpanzees at the zoo, it makes no sense to expect animals to communicate in the same way that humans do, “with the same equipment as we have, the same ears and eyes and brains.”

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 29513 - Posted: 10.12.2024

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Even a mild concussion can cause disconcerting and sometimes lasting symptoms, such as trouble concentrating and dizziness. But can it make someone more likely to commit a crime? After all, a disproportionate number of people in the criminal justice system previously suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). But according to new research into the medical and juvenile justice records of Danish teenagers who suffered a blow to head as children, such injuries don’t cause criminal behavior. Although TBI and criminality often travel together, the researchers found in this Danish population it’s a case of correlation, not causation. “I think this study very clearly indicates that you can’t just [say], ‘Hey, my kid has a mild TBI, he or she is screwed,” says Joseph Schwartz, a criminologist at Florida State University who has studied the issue in juveniles and adults. At the same time, he cautions that there are important variables this study wasn’t designed to capture, such as the treatment received, the effect of repeat TBIs, and the circumstances surrounding the injury. All of these, he says, could influence criminal behavior in some people. Beyond showing high rates of past TBI among those charged with or convicted of crimes, research into this topic has been limited. Studies have found that mild TBI is associated with later behavioral problems, including impulsivity and inattentiveness, which are also linked with criminal behavior. At the same time, it’s well known that “the risk factors in the child and the family for TBIs are the same as the risk factors for delinquency,” including poverty and parental substance abuse, says Sheilagh Hodgins, a clinical psychologist at the University of Montreal. She notes, too, that impulsivity and attention and conduct disorders heighten the risk of sustaining a mild TBI in the first place. © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Aggression
Link ID: 29503 - Posted: 10.02.2024