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Latest blog posts from Lingformant: Linguistics in the News

Un-total recall: Amnesics remember grammar, but not meaning of new sentences
Syntactic persistence is the tendency for speakers to produce sentences using similar grammatical patterns and rules of language as those they have used before. Although the way this occurs is not well understood, previous research has indicated that this effect may involve a specific aspect of... Read more...
Published 3 weeks ago

New life for Middle English: Norwegian detective work gives new knowledge of the English language
After several years of detective work, philologists at the University of Stavanger in Norway have collected a unique collection of texts online. Now they’re about to start the most comprehensive analysis of middle English ever. … Full article: AlphaGalileo. Read more...
Published 3 weeks ago

Computers figuring out what words mean
The Internet got smarter this week with the release of a semantic map that teaches computers the meanings behind words �" and gives the machines a vocabulary far larger than that of a typical US college graduate. … Full article: PhysOrg Read more...
Published 3 weeks ago

Speaking Without Sound
Children learn to talk by listening to others speak, but what happens when that line of communication is severed? Surprisingly, people who go deaf as adults can chat intelligibly for years afterward. Now, thanks to a robot that tweaks jaw movements, scientists may have figured out why. … Full... Read more...
Published 3 weeks ago

Breakthrough in understanding of speech offers hope to the deaf
Scientists on Sunday said intelligible speech is learnt in part through nerve signals from the vocal tract, a discovery that could open up an ambitious avenue of therapy for the deaf. … Full article: Physorg Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago

Monkey Brains Hint at Evolutionary Root of Language Processing
The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only... Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago

Scientists watch as listener’s brain predicts speaker’s words
Scientists at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that our brains automatically consider many possible words and their meanings before we’ve even heard the final sound of the word. … Full article: EurekAlert Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago

Gender differences seen in brain connections
Human brains appear to come in at least two flavours: male and female. Now variations in the density of the synapses that connect neurons may help to explain differences in how men and women think. … Full article: New Scientist Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago

Bilingual children more likely to stutter
Children who are bilingual before the age of 5 are significantly more likely to stutter and to find it harder to lose their impediment, than children who speak only one language before this age, suggests research published ahead of print in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The researchers base... Read more...
Published 4 weeks ago

Playing, and even watching, sports improves brain function
Being an athlete or merely a fan improves language skills when it comes to discussing their sport because parts of the brain usually involved in playing sports are instead used to understand sport language, new research at the University of Chicago shows. … Full article: EurekAlert Read more...
Published a month ago

Graduate student working at Great Ape Trust publishes paper in scientific journal
What happens when linguistic tools used to analyze human language are applied to a conversation between a language-competent bonobo and a human? The findings, published this month in the Journal of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, indicate that bonobos may exhibit larger... Read more...
Published a month ago

Young children’s ‘theory of mind’ linked to subsequent metacognitive development in adolescence
A new study in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education detects a systematic link between children’s “theory of mind” as assessed in kindergarten and their metacognitive knowledge in elementary school. … Full article: EurekAlert Read more...
Published 2 months ago