Links for Keyword: Language

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to our mailing list, to receive news updates. Learn more.

Links 1 - 20 of 641

By Ryan Dalton In the dystopian world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government of Oceania aims to achieve thought control through the restriction of language. As explained by the character ‘Syme’, a lexicologist who is working to replace the English language with the greatly-simplified ‘Newspeak’: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” While Syme’s own reflections were short-lived, the merits of his argument were not: the words and structure of a language can influence the thoughts and decisions of its speakers. This holds for English and Greek, Inuktitut and Newspeak. It also may hold for the ‘neural code’, the basic electrical vocabulary of the neurons in the brain. Neural codes, like spoken languages, are tasked with conveying all manner of information. Some of this information is immediately required for survival; other information has a less acute use. To accommodate these different needs, a balance is struck between the richness of information being transferred and the speed or reliability with which it is transferred. Where the balance is set depends on context. In the example of language, the mention of the movie Jaws at a dinner party might result in a ranging and patient—if disconcerting—discussion around the emotional impact of the film. In contrast, the observation of a dorsal fin breaking through the surf at the beach would probably elicit a single word, screamed by many beachgoers at once: “shark!” In one context, the language used has been optimized for richness; in the other, for speed and reliability. © 2019 Scientific American

How the Brain and Body Work Together to Create Thinking

/ By Dan Falk Suppose I give you the name of a body part, and ask you to list its main uses: I say legs, you say walking and running; I say ears, you say hearing. And if I say the brain? Well, that’s a no-brainer (so to speak); obviously the brain is for thinking. Of course, it does a bunch of other things, too; after all, when the brain ceases to function, we die — but clearly it’s where cognition happens. Tversky argues that gesturing is more than just a by-product of speech: it literally helps us think. Or is it? No one would argue that the brain isn’t vital for thinking — but quite a few 21st-century psychologists and cognitive scientists believe that the body, as well as the brain, is needed for thinking to actually happen. And it’s not just that the brain needs a body to keep it alive (that much is obvious), but rather, that the brain and the body somehow work together: it’s the combination of brain-plus-body that creates the mental world. The latest version of this proposition comes from Barbara Tversky, a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University who also teaches at Columbia. Her new book, “Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought,” is an extended argument for the interplay of mind and body in enabling cognition. She draws on many different lines of evidence, including the way we talk about movement and space, the way we use maps, the way we talk about and use numbers, and the way we gesture. Copyright 2019 Undark

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 26364 - Posted: 06.28.2019

My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer

By Darcey Steinke The J in “juice” was the first letter-sound, according to my mother, that I repeated in staccato, going off like a skipping record. This was when I was 3, before my stutter was stigmatized as shameful. In those earliest years my relationship to language was uncomplicated: I assumed my voice was more like a bird’s or a squirrel’s than my playmates’. This seemed exciting. I imagined, unlike fluent children, I might be able to converse with wild creatures, I’d learn their secrets, tell them mine and forge friendships based on interspecies intimacy. School put an end to this fantasy. Throughout elementary school I stuttered every time a teacher called on me and whenever I was asked to read out loud. In the third grade the humiliation of being forced to read a few paragraphs about stewardesses in the Weekly Reader still burns. The ST is hard for stutterers. What would have taken a fluent child five minutes took me an excruciating 25. It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds, open and mysterious and nearly impossible to wrangle. Each letter had a degree of difficulty that changed depending upon its position in the sentence. Much later when I read that Nabokov as a child assigned colors to letters, it made sense to me that the hard G looked like “vulcanized rubber” and the R, “a sooty rag being ripped.” My beloved V, in the Nabokovian system, was a jewel-like “rose quartz.” My mother, knowing that kids ridiculed me — she once found a book, “The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot,” that had been tossed onto our lawn — wanted to eradicate my speech impediment. She encouraged me to practice the strategies taught to me by a string of therapists, bouncing off an easy sound to a harder one and unclenching my throat, trying to slide out of a stammer. When I was 13 she got me a scholarship to a famous speech therapy program at a college near our house in Virginia. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language
Link ID: 26313 - Posted: 06.10.2019

In Turkey, Keeping Alive a Language of Whistles

By Malin Fezehai Muazzez Kocek, 46, is considered one of the best whistlers in Kuşköy, a village tucked away in the picturesque Pontic Mountains in Turkey’s northern Giresun province. Her whistle can be heard over the area’s vast tea fields and hazelnut orchards, several miles farther than a person’s voice. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Kuşköy in 2012, she greeted him and proudly whistled, “Welcome to our village!” She uses kuş dili, or “bird language,” which transforms the full Turkish vocabulary into varied-pitch frequencies and melodic lines. For hundreds of years, this whistled form of communication has been a critical for the farming community in the region, allowing complex conversations over long distances and facilitating animal herding. Today, there are about 10,000 people in the larger region that speak it, but because of the increased use of cellphones, which remove the need for a voice to carry over great distances, that number is dwindling. The language is at risk of dying out. Of Ms. Kocek’s three children, only her middle daughter, Kader, 14, knows bird language. Ms. Kocek began learning bird language at six years old, by working in the fields with her father. She has tried to pass the tradition on to her three daughters; even though they understand it, only her middle child, Kader Kocek, 14, knows how to speak, and can whistle Turkey’s national anthem. Turkey is one of a handful of countries in the world where whistling languages exist. Similar ways of communicating are known to have been used in the Canary Islands, Greece, Mexico, and Mozambique. They fascinate researchers and linguistic experts, because they suggest that the brain structures that process language are not as fixed as once thought. There is a long-held belief that language interpretation occurs mostly in the left hemisphere, and melody, rhythm and singing on the right. But a study that biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün conducted in Kuşköy, suggests that whistling language is processed in both hemispheres. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Being bilingual is great. But it may not boost some brain functions

Laura Sanders Advantages of speaking a second language are obvious: easier logistics when traveling, wider access to great literature and, of course, more people to talk with. Some studies have also pointed to the idea that polyglots have stronger executive functioning skills, brain abilities such as switching between tasks and ignoring distractions. But a large study of bilingual children in the U.S. finds scant evidence of those extra bilingual brain benefits. Bilingual children performed no better in tests measuring such thinking skills than children who knew just one language, researchers report May 20 in Nature Human Behaviour. To look for a relationship between bilingualism and executive function, researchers relied on a survey of U.S. adolescents called the ABCD study. From data collected at 21 research sites across the country, researchers identified 4,524 kids ages 9 and 10. Of these children, 1,740 spoke English and a second language (mostly Spanish, though 40 second languages were represented). On three tests that measured executive function, such as the ability to ignore distractions or quickly switch between tasks with different rules, the bilingual children performed similarly to children who spoke only English, the researchers found. “We really looked,” says study coauthor Anthony Dick, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at Florida International University in Miami said. “We didn’t find anything.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

How Language Shapes the Brain

By Sayuri Hayakawa, Viorica Marian As Emperor Akihito steps down from the Chrysanthemum Throne in Japan’s first abdication in 200 years, Naruhito officially becomes the new Emperor on May 1, 2019, ushering in a new era called Reiwa (令和; “harmony”). Japan’s tradition of naming eras reflects the ancient belief in the divine spirit of language. Kotodama (言霊; “word spirit”) is the idea that words have an almost magical power to alter physical reality. Through its pervasive impact on society, including its influence on superstitions and social etiquette, traditional poetry and modern pop songs, the word kotodama has, in a way, provided proof of its own concept. For centuries, many cultures have believed in the spiritual force of language. Over time, these ideas have extended from the realm of magic and mythology to become a topic of scientific investigation—ultimately leading to the discovery that language can indeed affect the physical world, for example, by altering our physiology. Our bodies evolve to adapt to our environments, not only over millions of years but also over the days and years of an individual’s life. For instance, off the coast of Thailand, there are children who can “see like dolphins.” Cultural and environmental factors have shaped how these sea nomads of the Moken tribe conduct their daily lives, allowing them to adjust their pupils underwater in a way that most of us cannot. © 2019 Scientific American

Scientists Create Speech From Brain Signals

By Benedict Carey “In my head, I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph,” wrote Jean-Dominique Bauby in his memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” In the book, Mr. Bauby, a journalist and editor, recalled his life before and after a paralyzing stroke that left him virtually unable to move a muscle; he tapped out the book letter by letter, by blinking an eyelid. Thousands of people are reduced to similarly painstaking means of communication as a result of injuries suffered in accidents or combat, of strokes, or of neurodegenerative disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., that disable the ability to speak. Now, scientists are reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth. (The physicist and author Stephen Hawking used a muscle in his cheek to type keyboard characters, which a computer synthesized into speech.) “It’s formidable work, and it moves us up another level toward restoring speech” by decoding brain signals, said Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who was not a member of the research group. Researchers have developed other virtual speech aids. Those work by decoding the brain signals responsible for recognizing letters and words, the verbal representations of speech. But those approaches lack the speed and fluidity of natural speaking. The new system, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, deciphers the brain’s motor commands guiding vocal movement during speech — the tap of the tongue, the narrowing of the lips — and generates intelligible sentences that approximate a speaker’s natural cadence. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 26174 - Posted: 04.25.2019

A toddler’s dwindling voice was chalked up to acid reflux. Her problem was far more serious

By Sandra G. Boodman “She never cried loudly enough to bother us,” recalled Natalia Weil of her daughter, who was born in 2011. Although Vivienne babbled energetically in her early months, her vocalizing diminished around the time of her first birthday. So did the quality of her voice, which dwindled from normal to raspy to little more than a whisper. Vivienne also was a late talker: She didn’t begin speaking until she was 2. Her suburban Maryland pediatrician initially suspected that a respiratory infection was to blame for the toddler’s hoarseness, and counseled patience. But after the problem persisted, the doctor diagnosed acid reflux and prescribed a drug to treat the voice problems reflux can cause. But Vivienne’s problem turned out to be far more serious — and unusual — than excess stomach acid. The day she learned what was wrong ranks among the worst of Weil’s life. “I had never heard of it,” said Weil, now 33, of her daughter’s diagnosis. “Most people haven’t.” The chronic illness seriously damaged Vivienne Weil’s voice. The 8-year-old has blossomed recently after a new treatment restored it. Her mother says she is eagerly making new friends and has become “a happy, babbly little girl.” (Natalia Weil) At first, Natalia, a statistician, and her husband, Jason, a photographer, were reassured by the pediatrician, who blamed a respiratory infection for their daughter’s voice problem. Her explanation sounded logical: Toddlers get an average of seven or eight colds annually. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

The rise of farming altered our bite and changed how people talk

Bruce Bower Humankind’s gift of gab is not set in stone, and farming could help to explain why. Over the last 6,000 years or so, farming societies increasingly have substituted processed dairy and grain products for tougher-to-chew game meat and wild plants common in hunter-gatherer diets. Switching to those diets of softer, processed foods altered people’s jaw structure over time, rendering certain sounds like “f” and “v” easier to utter, and changing languages worldwide, scientists contend. People who regularly chew tough foods such as game meat experience a jaw shift that removes a slight overbite from childhood. But individuals who grow up eating softer foods retain that overbite into adulthood, say comparative linguist Damián Blasi of the University of Zurich and his colleagues. Computer simulations suggest that adults with an overbite are better able to produce certain sounds that require touching the lower lip to the upper teeth, the researchers report in the March 15 Science. Linguists classify those speech sounds, found in about half of the world’s languages, as labiodentals. And when Blasi and his team reconstructed language change over time among Indo-European tongues (SN: 11/25/17, p. 16), currently spoken from Iceland to India, the researchers found that the likelihood of using labiodentals in those languages rose substantially over the past 6,000 to 7,000 years. That was especially true when foods such as milled grains and dairy products started appearing (SN: 2/1/03, p. 67). “Labiodental sounds emerged recently in our species, and appear more frequently in populations with long traditions of eating soft foods,” Blasi said at a March 12 telephone news conference. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language
Link ID: 26037 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are

Jules Howard It’s a bit garbled but you can definitely hear it in the mobile phone footage. As the chimpanzees arrange their branches into a makeshift ladder and one of them makes its daring escape from its Belfast zoo enclosure, some words ring out loud and clear: “Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla!” a child onlooker shouts from the crowd. And … POP … with that a tiny explosion goes off inside my head. Something knocks me back about this sentence. It’s a “kids-say-the-funniest things” kind of sentence, and in any other situation I’d offer a warm smile and a chuckle of approval. But not this time. This statement has brought out the pedant in me. At this point, you may wonder if I’m capable of fleshing out a 700-word article chastising a toddler for mistakenly referring to a chimpanzee as a gorilla. The good news is that, though I am more than capable of such a callous feat, I don’t intend to write about this child’s naive zoological error. In fact, this piece isn’t really about the (gorgeous, I’m sure) child. It’s about us. You and me, and the words we use. So let’s repeat it. That sentence, I mean. “Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla!” the child shouted. The words I’d like to focus on in this sentence are the words “you” and “bad”. The words “you” and “bad” are nice examples of a simple law of nearly all human languages. They are examples of Zipf’s law of abbreviation, where more commonly used words in a language tend to be shorter. It’s thought that this form of information-shortening allows the transmission of more complex information in a shorter amount of time, and it’s why one in four words you and I write or say is likely to be something of the “you, me, us, the, to” variety. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Electrical stimulation of brain trialled as aid to treating stutter

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent People who stutter are being given electrical brain stimulation in a clinical trial aimed at improving fluency without the need for gruelling speech training. If shown to be effective, the technique – which involves passing an almost imperceptible current through the brain – could be routinely offered by speech therapists. “Stuttering can have serious effects on individuals in terms of their choice of career, what they can get out of education, their earning potential and personal life,” said Prof Kate Watkins, the trial’s principal investigator and a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. About one in 20 young children go through a phase of stuttering, but most grow out of it. It is estimated that stuttering affects about one in 100 adults, with men about four times more likely to stutter than women. Advertisement In the film The King’s Speech, a speech therapist uses a barrage of techniques to help King George VI, played by Colin Firth, to overcome his stutter, including breathing exercises and speaking without hearing his own voice. The royal client also learns that he can sing without stuttering, a common occurrence in people with the impediment. Speech therapy has advanced since the 1930s, but some of the most effective programmes for improving fluency still require intensive training and involve lengthy periods of using unnatural-sounding speech. © 2019 Guardian News and Media Limited

Our Language Affects What We See

By Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D. Does the language you speak influence how you think? This is the question behind the famous linguistic relativity hypothesis, that the grammar or vocabulary of a language imposes on its speakers a particular way of thinking about the world. The strongest form of the hypothesis is that language determines thought. This version has been rejected by most scholars. A weak form is now thought to be obviously true, which is that if one language has a specific vocabulary item for a concept but another language does not, then speaking about the concept may happen more frequently or more easily. For example, if someone explained to you, an English speaker, the meaning for the German term Schadenfreude, you could recognize the concept, but you may not have used the concept as regularly as a comparable German speaker. Scholars are now interested in whether having a vocabulary item for a concept influences thought in domains far from language, such as visual perception. Consider the case of the "Russian blues." While English has a single word for blue, Russian has two words, goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. These are considered "basic level" terms, like green and purple, since no adjective is needed to distinguish them. Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues displayed two shades of blue on a computer screen and asked Russian speakers to determine, as quickly as possible, whether the two blue colors were different from each other or the same as each other. The fastest discriminations were when the displayed colors were goluboy and siniy, rather than two shades of goluboy or two shades of siniy. The reaction time advantage for lexically distinct blue colors was strongest when the blue hues were perceptually similar.

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 25869 - Posted: 01.16.2019

Artificial intelligence turns brain activity into speech

By Kelly Servick For many people who are paralyzed and unable to speak, signals of what they'd like to say hide in their brains. No one has been able to decipher those signals directly. But three research teams recently made progress in turning data from electrodes surgically placed on the brain into computer-generated speech. Using computational models known as neural networks, they reconstructed words and sentences that were, in some cases, intelligible to human listeners. None of the efforts, described in papers in recent months on the preprint server bioRxiv, managed to re-create speech that people had merely imagined. Instead, the researchers monitored parts of the brain as people either read aloud, silently mouthed speech, or listened to recordings. But showing the reconstructed speech is understandable is "definitely exciting," says Stephanie Martin, a neural engineer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland who was not involved in the new projects. People who have lost the ability to speak after a stroke or disease can use their eyes or make other small movements to control a cursor or select on-screen letters. (Cosmologist Stephen Hawking tensed his cheek to trigger a switch mounted on his glasses.) But if a brain-computer interface could re-create their speech directly, they might regain much more: control over tone and inflection, for example, or the ability to interject in a fast-moving conversation. The hurdles are high. "We are trying to work out the pattern of … neurons that turn on and off at different time points, and infer the speech sound," says Nima Mesgarani, a computer scientist at Columbia University. "The mapping from one to the other is not very straightforward." How these signals translate to speech sounds varies from person to person, so computer models must be "trained" on each individual. And the models do best with extremely precise data, which requires opening the skull. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Why Millions Of Kids Can't Read, And What Better Teaching Can Do About It

Emily Hanford Jack Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read. What he did know is that a lot of students in his district were struggling. Silva is the chief academic officer for Bethlehem, Pa., public schools. In 2015, only 56 percent of third-graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test. That year, he set out to do something about that. "It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which 4 in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?' " he recalls. Bethlehem is not an outlier. Across the country, millions of kids are struggling. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32 percent of fourth-graders and 24 percent of eighth-graders aren't reading at a basic level. Fewer than 40 percent are proficient or advanced. One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty. In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren't reading very well either. Silva didn't know what to do. To begin with, he didn't know how students in his district were being taught to read. So, he assigned his new director of literacy, Kim Harper, to find out. Harper attended a professional-development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how students should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word she didn't know, the teacher would tell her to look at the picture and guess. © 2019 npr

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 25835 - Posted: 01.03.2019

Speaking two languages may help the aging brain

By Ramin Skibba Even when you’re fluent in two languages, it can be a challenge to switch back and forth smoothly between them. It’s common to mangle a split verb in Spanish, use the wrong preposition in English or lose sight of the connection between the beginning and end of a long German sentence. So, does mastering a second language hone our multitasking skills or merely muddle us up? This debate has been pitting linguists and psychologists against one another since the 1920s, when many experts thought that bilingual children were fated to suffer cognitive impairments later in life. But the science has marched on. Psycholinguist Mark Antoniou of Western Sydney University in Australia argues that bilingualism — as he defines it, using at least two languages in your daily life — may benefit our brains, especially as we age. In a recent article, he addressed how best to teach languages to children and laid out evidence that multiple-language use on a regular basis may help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Q: What are the benefits of bilingualism? A: The first main advantage involves what’s loosely referred to as executive function. This describes skills that allow you to control, direct and manage your attention, as well as your ability to plan. It also helps you ignore irrelevant information and focus on what’s important. Because a bilingual person has mastery of two languages, and the languages are activated automatically and subconsciously, the person is constantly managing the interference of the languages so that she or he doesn’t say the wrong word in the wrong language at the wrong time. The brain areas responsible for that are also used when you’re trying to complete a task while there are distractions. The task could have nothing to do with language; it could be trying to listen to something in a noisy environment or doing some visual task. The muscle memory developed from using two languages also can apply to different skills. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Your Brain Sees Ambiguous Language as a Type of Illusion

By Stephen L. Macknik Sensory information flowing into our brains is inherently ambiguous. We perceive 3D despite having only 2D images on our retinas. It’s an illusion. A sunburn on our face can feel weirdly cool. Illusion. A little perfume smells good but too much is obnoxious. Also an illusion. The brain expends a great deal of effort to disambiguate the meaning of each incoming signal—often using context as a clue—but the neural mechanisms of these abilities remain mysterious. Neuroscientists are a little closer to understanding how to study these mechanisms, thanks to a new study by Kevin Ortego, Michael Pitts, & Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez from Pitts's lab at Reed College, presented at the 2018 Society for Neuroscience meeting, on the brain's responses to both visual and language illusions. Illusions are experiences in which the physical reality is different from our perception or expectation. Ambiguous stimuli are important tools to science because the physical reality can legitimately be interpreted in more than one way. Take the classic rabbit-duck illusion, published by the Fliegende Blätter magazine, in Münich, at the end of the 19th century, in which the image can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. Bistable illusions like these can flip back and forth between competing interpretations, but one cannot see both percepts at the same time. Recent examples of ambiguous illusions show that numerous interpretations are possible. The first place winner of this year's Best Illusion of the Year Contest, created by from Kokichi Sugihara, shows three different ways of perceiving the same object, depending on your specific vantage point. © 2018 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language
Link ID: 25744 - Posted: 12.03.2018

Texas Boy Speaks Clearly for First Time After Dentist Discovered He Was Tongue-Tied

By Sandra E. Garcia For years, parents of a Texas boy believed he was mostly nonverbal because of a brain aneurysm he had when he was 10 days old. The boy, Mason Motz, 6, of Katy, Tex., started going to speech therapy when he was 1. In addition to his difficulties speaking, he was given a diagnosis of Sotos syndrome, a disorder that can cause learning disabilities or delayed development, according to the National Institutes of Health. His parents, Dalan and Meredith Motz, became used to how their son communicated. “He could pronounce the beginning of the word but would utter the end of the word,” Ms. Motz said in an interview. “My husband and I were the only ones that could understand him.” That all changed in April 2017, when Dr. Amy Luedemann-Lazar, a pediatric dentist, was performing unrelated procedures on Mason’s teeth. She noticed that his lingual frenulum, the band of tissue under his tongue, was shorter than is typical and was attached close to the tip of his tongue, keeping him from moving it freely. Dr. Luedemann-Lazar ran out to the waiting room to ask the Motzes if she could untie Mason’s tongue using a laser. After a quick Google search, the parents gave her permission to do so. Dr. Luedemann-Lazar completed the procedure in 10 seconds, she said. After his surgery, Mason went home. He had not eaten all day. Ms. Motz heard him say: “I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. Can we watch a movie?” “We’re sitting here thinking, ‘Did he just say that?’” Ms. Motz said. “It sounded like words.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Primate speech: How some species are 'wired' for talk

By Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News Our primate cousins have surprised and impressed scientists in recent years, with revelations about monkeys' tool-using abilities and chimps' development of complex sign language. But researchers are still probing the question: why are we humans the only apes that can talk? That puzzle has now led to an insight into how different non-human primates' brains are "wired" for vocal ability. A new study has compared different primate species' brains. It revealed that primates with wider "vocal repertoires" had more of their brain dedicated to controlling their vocal apparatus. That suggests that our own speaking skills may have evolved as our brains gradually rewired to control that apparatus, rather than purely because we're smarter than non-human apes. Humans and other primates have very similar vocal anatomy - in terms of their tongues and larynx. That's the physical machinery in the throat which allows us to turn air into sound. So, as lead researcher Dr Jacob Dunn from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge explained, it remains a mystery that only human primates can actually talk. "That's likely due to differences in the brain," Dr Dunn told BBC News, "but there haven't been comparative studies across species." So how do our primate brains differ? That comparison is exactly what Dr Dunn and his colleague Prof Jeroen Smaers set out to do. They ranked 34 different primate species based on their vocal abilities - the number of distinct calls they are known to make in the wild. They then examined the brain of each species, using information from existing, preserved brains that had been kept for research. © 2018 BBC

The ‘language gene’ didn’t give humans a big leg up in evolution

Tina Hesman Saey Humans’ gift of gab probably wasn’t the evolutionary boon that scientists once thought. There’s no evidence that FOXP2, sometimes called “the language gene,” gave humans such a big evolutionary advantage that it was quickly adopted across the species, what scientists call a selective sweep. That finding, reported online August 2 in Cell, follows years of debate about the role of FOXP2 in human evolution. In 2002, the gene became famous when researchers thought they had found evidence that a tweak in FOXP2 spread quickly to all humans — and only humans — about 200,000 years ago. That tweak swapped two amino acids in the human version of the gene for ones different than in other animals’ versions of the gene. FOXP2 is involved in vocal learning in songbirds, and people with mutations in the gene have speech and language problems. Many researchers initially thought that the amino acid swap was what enabled humans to speak. Speech would have given humans a leg up on competition from Neandertals and other ancient hominids. That view helped make FOXP2 a textbook example of selective sweeps. Some researchers even suggested that FOXP2 was the gene that defines humans, until it became clear that the gene did not allow humans to settle the world and replace other hominids, says archeaogeneticist Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the study. “It was not the one gene to rule them all.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Diverse genome study upends understanding of how language evolved

Matthew Warren The evolution of human language was once thought to have hinged on changes to a single gene that were so beneficial that they raced through ancient human populations. But an analysis now suggests that this gene, FOXP2, did not undergo changes in Homo sapiens’ recent history after all — and that previous findings might simply have been false signals. “The situation’s a lot more complicated than the very clean story that has been making it into textbooks all this time,” says Elizabeth Atkinson, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the paper, which was published on 2 August in Cell1. Originally discovered in a family who had a history of profound speech and language disorders, FOXP2 was the first gene found to be involved in language production2. Later research touted its importance to the evolution of human language. A key 2002 paper found that humans carry two mutations to FOXP2 not found in any other primates3. When the researchers looked at genetic variation surrounding these mutations, they found the signature of a ‘selective sweep’ — in which a beneficial mutation quickly becomes common across a population. This change to FOXP2 seemed to have happened in the past 200,000 years, the team reported in Nature. The paper has been cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Links By Chapter:

Links for Keyword: Language