All Articles Tagged As: speech

Scientist unveils secret of newborn's first words (8/30/2008)

A new study could explain why "daddy" and "mommy" are often a baby's first words - the human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns. ...> Full Article

Aboriginal kids can count without numbers (8/24/2008)

Knowing the words for numbers is not necessary to be able to count ...> Full Article

Researchers study woman who acquires new accent after stroke (7/5/2008)

A woman in southern Ontario is one of the first cases in Canada of a rare neurological syndrome in which a person starts speaking with a different accent ...> Full Article

When using gestures, rules of grammar remain the same (7/3/2008)

The mind apparently has a consistent way of ordering an event that defies the order in which subjects, verbs, and objects typically appear in languages ...> Full Article

Transfer of learning traced to areas of the brain (6/15/2008)

Practice makes perfect, but a question that still remains a mystery is why it is so difficult to transfer learning from a trained to an untrained task? Why are we no better at remembering faces when we have been training our memory for words? Scientists say that the answer lies in the brain areas activated by each task. ...> Full Article

Poor spellers with good phonetic skills are more often right-handed (6/1/2008)

To here but not to sea: Spelling difficulties and handedness explored ...> Full Article

Computer model reveals how brain represents meaning (6/1/2008)

Predicts brain activation patterns for thousands of concrete nouns ...> Full Article

Decoding the Dictionary: Study Suggests Lexicon Evolved To Fit in the Brain (5/3/2008)

The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary boasts 22,000 pages of definitions. While that may seem far from succinct, new research suggests the reference manual is meticulously organized to be as concise as possible - a format that mirrors the way our brains make sense of and categorize the countless words in our vast vocabulary. ...> Full Article

Singing in the brain: Baby birds' chirps use different neural pathway (5/2/2008)

Young songbirds babble before they can mimic an adult's song, much like their human counterparts. Now, in work that offers insights into how birds--and perhaps people--learn new behaviors, scientists have found that immature and adult birdsongs are driven by two separate brain pathways, rather than one pathway that slowly matures. ...> Full Article

Language skills develop at 6, say researchers (4/30/2008)

Psychologists have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults. ...> Full Article

Chimps May Have A 'Language-ready' Brain (3/4/2008)

An area of the brain involved in the planning and production of spoken and signed language in humans plays a similar role in chimpanzee communication, researchers report. ...> Full Article

Brain Area Critical for Chimpanzee Communication Corresponds to Similar Area in Human Brain (3/3/2008)

Researchers have found the area in the chimpanzee brain involved in the production of chimpanzee manual gestures and vocalizations is similar to what is known as Broca's area in the human brain. The study, available in today's online edition of Current Biology, is the first to directly link chimpanzee and human brain areas associated with communicative behaviors, suggesting chimpanzee communication is not only more complicated than previously thought, but also that the neurobiological foundations of human language may have been present in the common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees. ...> Full Article

Linguist tunes in to pitch processing in brain (2/19/2008)

More of the brain is busy processing pitch from language and other sounds than previously thought, according to a researcher in neurophonetics at Purdue University. ...> Full Article

Songbirds' Brains Provide Clues to Human Speech (1/20/2008)

Analyzing how the brains of songbirds respond to singing patterns has provided new information about how humans learn to communicate with each other, according to Duke University researchers. ...> Full Article

Human auditory neurons more sensitive than those of other mammals (1/17/2008)

The human ear is exquisitely tuned to discern different sound frequencies, whether such tones are high or low, near or far. But the ability of our ears pales in comparison to the remarkable knack of single neurons in our brains to distinguish between the very subtlest of frequency differences. ...> Full Article

Scientists identify new genetic link to autism (1/13/2008)

Gene's presence in brain's language centers may explain speech delay ...> Full Article