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Here we share reviews and articles about Psycholinguistics and other relevant fields.
They found that the best-performing next-word prediction models had activity patterns that very closely resembled those seen in the human brain. Activity in those same models was also highly correlated with measures of human behavioral measures such as how fast people were able to read the text.
"We found that the models that predict the neural responses well also tend to best predict human behavior responses, in the form of reading times. And then both of these are explained by the model performance on next-word prediction. This triangle really connects everything together," Schrimpf says.
Game changer
One of the key computational features of predictive models such as GPT-3 is an element known as a forward one-way predictive transformer. This kind of transformer is able to make predictions of what is going to come next, based on previous sequences. A significant feature of this transformer is that it can make predictions based on a very long prior context (hundreds of words), not just the last few words.
Scientists have not found any brain circuits or learning mechanisms that correspond to this type of processing, Tenenbaum says. However, the new findings are consistent with hypotheses that have been previously proposed that prediction is one of the key functions in language processing, he says.
"One of the challenges of language processing is the real-time aspect of it," he says. "Language comes in, and you have to keep up with it and be able to make sense of it in real time."
The researchers now plan to build variants of these language processing models to see how small changes in their architecture affect their performance and their ability to fit human neural data.
"For me, this result has been a game changer," Fedorenko says. "It's totally transforming my research program, because I would not have predicted that in my lifetime we would get to these computationally explicit models that capture enough about the brain so that we can actually leverage them in understanding how the brain works."
The researchers also plan to try to combine these high-performing language models with some computer models Tenenbaum's lab has previously developed that can perform other kinds of tasks such as constructing perceptual representations of the physical world.
"If we're able to understand what these language models do and how they can connect to models which do things that are more like perceiving and thinking, then that can give us more integrative models of how things work in the brain," Tenenbaum says. "This could take us toward better artificial intelligence models, as well as giving us better models of how more of the brain works and how general intelligence emerges, than we've had in the past."
The research was funded by a Takeda Fellowship; the MIT Shoemaker Fellowship; the Semiconductor Research Corporation; the MIT Media Lab Consortia; the MIT Singleton Fellowship; the MIT Presidential Graduate Fellowship; the Friends of the McGovern Institute Fellowship; the MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, through the National Science Foundation; the National Institutes of Health; MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and the McGovern Institute.
Other authors of the paper are Idan Blank PhD '16 and graduate students Greta Tuckute, Carina Kauf, and Eghbal Hosseini.
#model #brain #predictive_language_models #predict #predicting #prediction #predicted #human_brain_performs #mit #perform #performance #performing #say #research #researcher #computational #function #functional #fellowship #intelligence #generation #generative #generate #general #measured #measurement #measure #neural #science #tenenbaum #time #read #development #developed #graduate #new #perceptual #blank #stories_reading #processing #national #visual_object #object #cognitive #prior_context #answering_document #institute #transformer #transforming #fedorenko #text #story #professor #career
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211025172047.htm
👉🏽 Non-English-language science could help save biodiversity
It is commonly assumed that any important scientific knowledge would be available in English, and so scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents. But is this assumption correct? According to new research, the answer is no, and science written in languages other than English may hold untapped information crucial to the conservation of global biodiversity.
@psycholinguistics
Few studies to date have quantified the contribution of science written in non-English languages to scientific communities and the application of science. These researchers scrutinized over 400,000 peer-reviewed papers in 326 journals published in 16 languages, identifying 1,234 studies that provide scientific knowledge on saving species and ecosystems.
Importantly, the number of such non-English-language studies being published is increasing, particularly in geographic areas and for species where English-language knowledge is scarce, including Latin America and other regions where conservation is needed the most.
These findings have important implications for global efforts tackling the biodiversity crisis, where lack of evidence is an issue commonly faced when trying to implement evidence-based conservation. The authors demonstrate that incorporating non-English-language studies can expand the availability of scientific evidence on species and ecosystems into 12-25% more areas and 5-32% more species.
"This can be a game changer," says Dr. Amano. Most global studies and assessments on biodiversity report significant gaps in the availability of scientific knowledge, quite often without having explored science written in non-English languages. The findings of this research indicate that making the best use of non-English-language science can be a quick, cost-effective approach to filling such gaps, facilitating a wider application of evidence-based conservation globally. "When English alone is clearly not providing us with sufficient scientific evidence for making effective conservation decisions, we cannot afford to be overlooking any evidence out there as we try to tackle this urgent issue."
This research also sheds light on how linguistically and culturally diverse scientific communities can maximize the contribution of science to addressing urgent global challenges. "This research would not have been possible without the tremendous contribution from our 62 collaborators, who are collectively native speakers of 17 languages," stresses Amano, who is a native Japanese speaker himself. "This clearly showcases why it is important to nurture culturally-diverse scientific communities. Global challenges call for contributions from diverse communities from every corner of the globe."
#global #globally #language #scientific #effective #conservation #native #researcher #research #changer #science #urgent #evidence #latin #including #diverse #gap #biodiversity
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211007145822.htm
📚 Brigitte Eisenwort, Carolin Schmid, Maksim Tilis, Dmitrij Tsoy, Gabriela Diendorfer-Radner, Anika Sedlaczek, Claudia Klier. Important aspects in the assessment of bilingual children with suspected language impairment: The Vienna Model. neuropsychiatrie, 2020; DOI: 10.1007/s40211-020-00361-x
@psycholinguistics
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👉🏽 Learning a new language changes the brain's division of labor
Learning a language later in life changes how the two halves of the brain contribute. As skills improve, language comprehension changes hemisphere specialization, but production does not, according to new research.
@psycholinguistics
The two sides of the brain don't evenly split labor for every function. In most people, language relies on the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere can take over after an injury to the left. The right hemisphere can also contribute when learning a new language, making it unclear if the left hemisphere is actually specialized for language.
Gurunandan et al. used fMRI to compare neural activity between hemispheres in adult language learners while reading, listening, and speaking in their native and new languages. In the earlier stages of language learning, native and new languages looked quite similar in the brain, but in advanced learners, the two languages were more distinct. The native and new languages were able to recruit opposite hemispheres for comprehension but speaking either language remained reliant on the left hemisphere. These results suggest production is hard-wired to the left hemisphere, while comprehension is more flexible.
This may explain why it is more difficult to learn to speak a new language as an adult, even though it is possible to learn to understand it quite well.
#language #hemisphere #split #suggest #neural #opposite #learning #learn
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201117122840.htm
📚 Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Lila Rabinovich, Kate Weber, Marianna Babboni, Monica Dean, Lance Ignon. Public understanding of climate change terminology. Climatic Change, 2021; 167 (3-4) DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-03183-0
@psycholinguistics
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The parallel nature of speech processing may give doctors new ideas for how to treat conditions such as dyslexia, where children have trouble identifying speech sounds.
"While this is important step forward, we don't understand this parallel auditory system very well yet. The findings suggest that the routing of sound information could be very different than we ever imagined. It certainly raises more questions than it answers," Chang says.
#auditory #chang #word #like #likely #brain_region #stg #process #suggesting #suggests #suggest #say #model #speech_processing #high #electrical #electric #sound #sounded #mapping #temporal #evidence #pathway #step #new #san #area #participant #neurophysiological #largely_involved
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210818130509.htm
👉🏽 Culture affects how people deceive others, study shows
People's language changes when they lie depending on their cultural background, psychologists have discovered. Linguistic cues to deception do not appear consistently across all cultures. The differences are dictated by known cultural differences in cognition and social norms. This has implications for everything from forensic risk assessments, discrimination proceedings and the evaluation of asylum seekers.
@psycholinguistics
Professor Paul Taylor of Lancaster University in the UK said: "Science has long known that people's use of language changes when they lie. Our research shows that prevalent beliefs about what those changes look like are not true for all cultures."
The researchers asked participants of Black African, South Asian, White European and White British ethnicity to complete a Catch-the-Liar task in which they provided genuine and false statements.
They found the statements of Western liars tend to include fewer first-person "I" pronouns than the statements of truth-tellers. This is a common finding and believed to be due to the liar trying to distance themselves from the lie.
However, they did not find this difference when examining the lies of Black African and South Asian participants. Instead, these participants increased their use of first person pronoun and decreased their third person "he/she" pronouns -- they sought to distance their social group rather than them self from the lie.
There were also differences in the kinds of contextual details reported. The White European and White British participants followed the known trend of decreasing the perceptual information they provided in their lie. In contrast, the Black African and South Asian participants increased the perceptual information they gave when lying, to compensate for providing less social details.
"The results demonstrate that linguistic cues to deception do not appear consistently across all cultures. The differences are dictated by known cultural differences in cognition and social norms."
This has implications for everything from forensic risk assessments, discrimination proceedings and the evaluation of asylum seekers.
"In the absence of culture-specific training, an individual's judgements about veracity is most likely drawn from either experience or an evidenced-based understanding based on studies of Western liars. In these scenarios, erroneous judgements of veracity may impact on justice
"In today's world, where law enforcement and justice are asked to respond to a greater cultural diversity of suspect it will be important to use findings such as those presented here to adapt existing practices and policies so that they afford justice for all communities within the population."
#participant #culture #cultural #liar #social #detail #known #paul #finding #based #erroneous #existing #british #white #asian #like #likely #discrimination #risk #change
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170606201354.htm
📚 Asifa Majid, Niclas Burenhult, Marcus Stensmyr, Josje de Valk, Bill S. Hansson. Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2018; 373 (1752): 20170139 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0139
@psycholinguistics
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👉🏽 Babies from bilingual homes switch attention faster
Babies born into bilingual homes change the focus of their attention more quickly and more frequently than babies in homes where only one language is spoken, according to new research.
@psycholinguistics
The study, led by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), used eye-tracking technology to record the gaze of 102 infants carrying out a variety of tasks.
The researchers chose to test babies aged between seven and nine months to rule out any benefits gained from being able to speak a second language, often referred to as the "bilingual advantage." Instead, the study focused on the effects of growing up hearing two or more languages.
When shown two pictures side by side, infants from bilingual homes shifted attention from one picture to another more frequently than infants from monolingual homes, suggesting these babies were exploring more of their environment.
The study also found that when a new picture appeared on the screen, babies from bilingual homes were 33% faster at redirecting their attention towards the new picture.
Lead author Dr Dean D'Souza, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "Bilingual environments may be more variable and unpredictable than monolingual environments -- and therefore more challenging to learn in.
"We know that babies can easily acquire multiple languages, so we wanted to investigate how they manage it. Our research suggests that babies in bilingual homes adapt to their more complex environment by seeking out additional information.
"Scanning their surroundings faster and more frequently might help the infants in a number of ways. For example, redirecting attention from a toy to a speaker's mouth could help infants to match ambiguous speech sounds with mouth movements."
The researchers are currently investigating whether faster and more frequent switching in infancy has cascading effects over developmental time, for example affecting behaviour in older children and adults.
#home #baby #picture #bilingual #study #senior #information #infant #environment #ambiguous_speech #language #acquire
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200225221348.htm
📚 Li Wang, Peter Q. Pfordresher, Cunmei Jiang, Fang Liu. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation. Autism Research, 2021; DOI: 10.1002/aur.2569
@psycholinguistics
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👉🏽 Artificial intelligence sheds light on how the brain processes language
New research suggests the underlying function of 'next-word prediction' computational models closely resembles the function of language-processing centers in the human brain.
@psycholinguistics
The most recent generation of predictive language models also appears to learn something about the underlying meaning of language. These models can not only predict the word that comes next, but also perform tasks that seem to require some degree of genuine understanding, such as question answering, document summarization, and story completion.
Such models were designed to optimize performance for the specific function of predicting text, without attempting to mimic anything about how the human brain performs this task or understands language. But a new study from MIT neuroscientists suggests the underlying function of these models resembles the function of language-processing centers in the human brain.
Computer models that perform well on other types of language tasks do not show this similarity to the human brain, offering evidence that the human brain may use next-word prediction to drive language processing.
"The better the model is at predicting the next word, the more closely it fits the human brain," says Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), and an author of the new study. "It's amazing that the models fit so well, and it very indirectly suggests that maybe what the human language system is doing is predicting what's going to happen next."
Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science at MIT and a member of CBMM and MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Evelina Fedorenko, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience and a member of the McGovern Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Martin Schrimpf, an MIT graduate student who works in CBMM, is the first author of the paper.
Making predictions
The new, high-performing next-word prediction models belong to a class of models called deep neural networks. These networks contain computational "nodes" that form connections of varying strength, and layers that pass information between each other in prescribed ways.
Over the past decade, scientists have used deep neural networks to create models of vision that can recognize objects as well as the primate brain does. Research at MIT has also shown that the underlying function of visual object recognition models matches the organization of the primate visual cortex, even though those computer models were not specifically designed to mimic the brain.
In the new study, the MIT team used a similar approach to compare language-processing centers in the human brain with language-processing models. The researchers analyzed 43 different language models, including several that are optimized for next-word prediction. These include a model called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), which, given a prompt, can generate text similar to what a human would produce. Other models were designed to perform different language tasks, such as filling in a blank in a sentence.
As each model was presented with a string of words, the researchers measured the activity of the nodes that make up the network. They then compared these patterns to activity in the human brain, measured in subjects performing three language tasks: listening to stories, reading sentences one at a time, and reading sentences in which one word is revealed at a time. These human datasets included functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) data and intracranial electrocorticographic measurements taken in people undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy.
📚 Tatsuya Amano, Violeta Berdejo-Espinola, Alec P. Christie, Kate Willott, Munemitsu Akasaka, András Báldi, Anna Berthinussen, Sandro Bertolino, Andrew J. Bladon, Min Chen, Chang-Yong Choi, Magda Bou Dagher Kharrat, Luis G. de Oliveira, Perla Farhat, Marina Golivets, Nataly Hidalgo Aranzamendi, Kerstin Jantke, Joanna Kajzer-Bonk, M. Çisel Kemahlı Aytekin, Igor Khorozyan, Kensuke Kito, Ko Konno, Da-Li Lin, Nick Littlewood, Yang Liu, Yifan Liu, Matthias-Claudio Loretto, Valentina Marconi, Philip A. Martin, William H. Morgan, Juan P. Narváez-Gómez, Pablo Jose Negret, Elham Nourani, Jose M. Ochoa Quintero, Nancy Ockendon, Rachel Rui Ying Oh, Silviu O. Petrovan, Ana C. Piovezan-Borges, Ingrid L. Pollet, Danielle L. Ramos, Ana L. Reboredo Segovia, A. Nayelli Rivera-Villanueva, Ricardo Rocha, Marie-Morgane Rouyer, Katherine A. Sainsbury, Richard Schuster, Dominik Schwab, Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, Hae-Min Seo, Gorm Shackelford, Yushin Shinoda, Rebecca K. Smith, Shan-dar Tao, Ming-shan Tsai, Elizabeth H. M. Tyler, Flóra Vajna, José Osvaldo Valdebenito, Svetlana Vozykova, Paweł Waryszak, Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez, Rafael D. Zenni, Wenjun Zhou, William J. Sutherland. Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity. PLOS Biology, 2021; 19 (10): e3001296 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001296
@psycholinguistics
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👉🏽 Children with a migration background often misdiagnosed as having an 'impairment of language acquisition'
Around 45% of children in Austrian day nurseries have a first language other than German. Those who our experiencing difficulty in learning the second language are often diagnosed as having a suspected 'impairment of language acquisition'. In fact, this often merely reflects the fact that they have not yet fully acquired the second language.
@psycholinguistics
In 2019, an average of around 2.1 million Austrian inhabitants came from a migration background. Due to the changing demographic due to migration over the last few decades, more and more children are growing up multilingual. Many of them display problems in learning their second language (German) and are often diagnosed as having a suspected "impairment of language acquisition," whereas the real problem is that they have not yet fully acquired their second language. This is due to the similarity between the manifesting features, which can only be differentiated by specialists.
Seeking a more accurate diagnosis, many of these children with a migration background attend the Outpatient Clinic for Children with Suspected Language Acquisition Impairments at MedUni Vienna's Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which has capacity to assess four children per week. The clinic uses the "Vienna Model" of language assessment, which means that medical students, who are native speakers of the child's mother tongue, support MedUni Vienna linguists in analysing the child's language competence in their first language. This has the advantage that specific cultural aspects can be identified as well as grammatical skills. "While, in principle, we could also use native speakers studying other subjects to help us, involving medical students has the great advantage that it simultaneously gives them experience in doctor-patient communications and furnishes them with background knowledge about developmental disorders and in particular language acquisition impairments as part of their studies," explains study leader Brigitte Eisenwort.
Of around 40 children assessed in 2019, around half were found to have no clinically relevant language acquisition impairment. Instead, the problem lay with disruptive sociolinguistic factors, such as limited input in their mother tongue, for example.
Says Eisenwort: "Many children with a migration background receive a restricted input in their mother tongue, since the parents themselves had acquired a mother tongue that was suppressed for political reasons, for example, and therefore were unable to pass on a rich vocabulary or, in the process of migration, no longer have any need for complex sentence structures and sophisticated vocabulary, so that they are no longer able to pass these on to their children."
According to Eisenwort, a key factor in assessing a child is to first take a detailed language history and then assess the child in both or all languages. Eisenwort suggests that an important measure for improving language competence in the majority language would be to give children the opportunity to communicate with native German-speakers in small groups. The next research project, which will start shortly, is a joint project with the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) looking at "Viennese children with a native language other than German," in which the focus will be on phonetic and phonological skills of children who grow up bilingual with a Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian mother tongue.
#language #background #problem #research #eisenwort #vienna #child #austrian_inhabitants #native #skill #oaw #sentence #medical #cultural #vocabulary #input #impairment #clinic #clinically #studying #study #sociolinguistic #factor
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201116112905.htm
📚 Kshipra Gurunandan, Jaione Arnaez-Telleria, Manuel Carreiras, Pedro M. Paz-Alonso. Converging evidence for differential specialisation and plasticity of language systems. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2020; JN-RM-0851-20 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0851-20.2020
@psycholinguistics
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👉🏽 Climate change challenge: Terminology used by scientists confounds public
A new study finds that U.S. residents struggle to understand terms frequently used by scientists to describe climate change.
@psycholinguistics
The study was published in a special edition of Climatic Change titled Climate Change Communication and the IPCC.
The study was spearheaded by the USC Dornsife Public Exchange and included a team of USC researchers and personnel from the United Nations Foundation.
Study participants were asked to rate how easy it was to understand eight terms drawn from publicly available reports written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (The documents used for the study did not include the IPCC's latest report, which was released to the public on Aug. 9, 2021.) The UN Foundation chose the terms through informal consultation with the IPCC.
The eight terms were "mitigation," "carbon neutral," "unprecedented transition," "tipping point," "sustainable development," "carbon dioxide removal," "adaptation" and "abrupt change." "Mitigation" was the most difficult term to understand; "abrupt change" was the easiest.
Participants were also asked to provide suggestions for alternative language. In general, they advised using simpler terms and using them in the context of climate change. For example, for the term "unprecedented transition," which the IPCC defines as "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," participants suggested: "a change not seen before."
For "tipping point," which the IPCC defines as "an irreversible change in the climate system," one respondent offered: "too late to fix anything."
Previously published research suggests simplifying language to increase comprehension by:
Researcher Commentary
Wändi Bruine de Bruin, the study's lead author and Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California (USC):
"One survey respondent summed it up nicely when saying, 'It sounds like you're talking over people.' Scientists need to replace jargon with everyday language to be understood by a lay audience."
"In several cases the respondents proposed simple, elegant alternatives to existing language," Bruine de Bruin said. "It reminded us that, even though climate change may be a complex issue, there is no need to make it even more complex by using complicated words."
Pete Ogden, vice president for energy, climate, and the environment at the United Nations Foundation said, "We have to get better at communicating the dire threat from climate change if we expect to build support for more forceful action to stop it. We need to start by using language that anyone can understand."
Study Design
A qualitative researcher from USC Dornsife's Center for Economic and Social Research posed the terms to 20 participants with a variety of backgrounds and views about climate change. The participants were drawn from USC Dornsife's Understanding America Study for their varying views about climate change and diversity in terms of age, race, gender and education.
In a qualitative study such as this one, a sample of 20 is large enough to find terms that are likely to be misunderstood (Morgan et al. 2002). Indeed, 88% of the misunderstandings in this study were raised in the first 10 interviews. After 17 interviews, no new misunderstandings were raised. Researchers say a follow-up survey would be needed to examine how often misunderstandings occur or who is most likely to experience them.
#researcher #change #research_suggests #study #language #respondent #term #report #foundation #participant #suggestion #suggested #carbon #unprecedented #public #available_reports #scientist #race #far #misunderstanding #usc #climatic #climate #bruine #bruin #vice #word #understand #understanding
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210826170208.htm
📚 Liberty S. Hamilton, Yulia Oganian, Jeffery Hall, Edward F. Chang. Parallel and distributed encoding of speech across human auditory cortex. Cell, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.07.019
@psycholinguistics
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👉🏽 Sounds and words are processed separately and simultaneously in the brain
After years of research, neuroscientists have discovered a new pathway in the human brain that processes the sounds of language. The findings suggest that auditory and speech processing occur in parallel, contradicting a long-held theory that the brain processed acoustic information then transformed it into linguistic information.
@psycholinguistics
Sounds of language, upon reaching the ears, are converted into electrical signals by the cochlea and sent to a brain region called the auditory cortex on the temporal lobe. For decades, scientists have thought that speech processing in the auditory cortex followed a serial pathway, similar to an assembly line in a factory. It was thought that first, the primary auditory cortex processes the simple acoustic information, such as frequencies of sounds. Then, an adjacent region, called the superior temporal gyrus (STG), extracts features more important to speech, like consonants and vowels, transforming sounds into meaningful words.
But direct evidence for this theory has been lacking as it requires very detailed neurophysiological recordings from the entire auditory cortex with extremely high spatiotemporal resolution. This is challenging, because the primary auditory cortex is located deep in the cleft that separates the frontal and temporal lobes of the human brain.
"So, we went into this study, hoping to find evidence for that -- the transformation of the low-level representation of sounds into the high-level representation of words," says neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Edward Chang at the University of California, San Francisco.
Over the course of seven years, Chang and his team have studied nine participants who had to undergo brain surgeries for medical reasons, such as to remove a tumor or locate a seizure focus. For these procedures, arrays of small electrodes were placed to cover their entire auditory cortex to collect neural signals for language and seizure mapping. The participants also volunteered to have the recordings analyzed to understand how the auditory cortex processes speech sounds.
"This study is the first time that we could cover all of these areas simultaneously directly from the brain surface and study the transformation of sounds to words," Chang says. Previous attempts to study the region's activities largely involved inserting a wire into the area, which could only reveal the signals at a limited number of spots.
When the played short phrases and sentences for the participants, the researchers were expecting to find a flow of information from the primary auditory cortex to the adjacent STG, as the traditional model proposes. If that's the case, the two areas should be activated one after the other.
Surprisingly, the team found that some areas located in the STG responded as fast as the primary auditory cortex when sentences were played, suggesting that both areas started processing acoustic information at the same time.
Additionally, as part of clinical language mapping, reseaarchers stimulated the participants' primary auditory cortex with small electric currents. If speech processing follows a serial pathway as the traditional model suggests, the stimuli would likely distort the patients' perception of speech. On the contrary, while participants experienced auditory noise hallucinations induced by the stimuli, they were still able to clearly hear and repeat words said to them. However, when the STG was stimulated, the participants reported that they could hear people speaking, "but can't make out the words."
"In fact, one of the patients said that it sounded like the syllables were being swapped in the words," Chang says.
The latest evidence suggests the traditional hierarchy model of speech processing is over-simplified and likely incorrect. The researchers speculate that the STG may function independently from -- instead of as a next step of -- processing in the primary auditory cortex.
📚 Paul J. Taylor, Samuel Larner, Stacey M. Conchie, Tarek Menacere. Culture moderates changes in linguistic self-presentation and detail provision when deceiving others. Royal Society Open Science, 2017; 4 (6): 170128 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170128
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👉🏽 Odors are perceived the same way by hunter-gatherers and Westerners
Previous research has shown the hunter-gatherer Jahai are much better at naming odors than Westerners. They even have a more elaborate lexicon for it. New research by language scientists show that despite these linguistic differences, the Jahai and Dutch find the same odors pleasant and unpleasant.
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Scholars have for centuries pointed out that smell is impossible to put into words. Dutch, like English, seems to support this view. Perhaps the only really clear example of a smell word in Dutch is "muf." The Jahai, a group of hunter-gatherers living in the Malay Peninsula, appear to be special in that they have developed an exquisite lexicon of words for smell, like other hunter-gatherers. Earlier work of Majid and colleagues already showed that hunter-gatherers seem to be especially good at talking about smell.
Special odor words
In a new study, the researchers tested 30 Jahai speakers and 30 Dutch speakers and asked them to name odors. At the same time they also videoed their faces so they could measure their facial expressions to the different odors after the experiment. The researchers replicated the finding that Jahai speakers use special odor words to talk about smells (e.g., c??s used to refer to stinging sorts of smells associated with petrol, smoke, and various insects and plants, pl?e? used for bloody, fishy, meaty sorts of smells), while Dutch speakers referred to concrete sources (e.g., bloemen 'flowers', als je d'r langsfietst of achter de vuilniswagen staat niet d'r bovenop 'if you ride along or stand behind a garbage truck, but not right on top of it').
Faster responses
In comparison to the Dutch, Jahai speakers also agree more with each other in how to describe odors, they give shorter responses, and also response faster (Jahai 2 seconds; Dutch 13 seconds). The Dutch seem to struggle to come up with a way to describe smells because they do not have dedicated vocabulary. On the other hand, the rapid responses of the Jahai show that their words come to mind easily.
Despite these differences in language use, both Jahai and Dutch responded emotionally in the same way to smells: they found the same sorts of odors disgusting (as reflected in their faces by a nose wrinkle and lowered brow). This suggests that although culture shapes language, odors are perceived in the same way across the globe in diverse cultures.
#dutch #odor #jahai #smell #response #word #speaker #easily #flower #staat #peninsula #fishy #sort #earlier
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180618113019.htm
📚 Dean D'Souza, Daniel Brady, Jennifer X. Haensel, Hana D'Souza. Is mere exposure enough? The effects of bilingual environments on infant cognitive development. Royal Society Open Science, 2020; 7 (2): 180191 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180191
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👉🏽 What a song reveals about vocal imitation deficits for autistic individuals
A new paper comparing the ability to match pitch and duration in speech and song is providing valuable insight into vocal imitation deficits for children and adults with autism spectrum disorder.
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The results show how individuals with ASD perform quite differently in two different categories of pitch imitation, a finding that has broad implications when thinking about the challenges associated with autism, including difficulties when interacting with others and making social connections.
"This project shows that some of the conclusions we may want to draw about autism from other tasks may not be as widely generalizable as we think," says Peter Pfordresher, a professor of psychology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study, which was led by Fang Liu, associate professor of psychology and clinical language sciences at the University of Reading.
The research team found that autistic children and adults were better at imitating and holding relative pitch than they were with absolute pitch across both speech and music domains. There's a significant distinction between the two that is illustrated using the melody associated with the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
Absolute pitch is the specific note associated with each syllable in a song. Think about the seven notes you would produce when singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Absolute pitch is the ability to sing each note correctly, essentially matching the notes after hearing the tune. This definition differs from what musical performers would call absolute, or sometimes, perfect pitch, which refers to the ability to identify or sing a note without an immediate reference.
Relative pitch, meanwhile, is the pitch change from one note to the next, or the interval separating the pitch in the first syllable of "Mary" from the word's second syllable.
"Previous research in areas such as action imitation has suggested that people with ASD can reproduce the end goal of another's action, but not the exact form in which the action is carried out. That's where we see atypical imitation," says Liu.
As an example, Liu says that an autistic individual, when asked to imitate the action of reaching for a cup, might just get the cup without trying to mimic the exact trajectory of the arm as it goes through the reaching motion.
"Our research on vocal imitation suggests something similar: Autistic participants performed better on imitating the structure of a tune (relative pitch) than they did on the exact form (absolute pitch)."
And this has significance when thinking about music in a broad cultural sense.
Pfordresher, an expert on the relationship between music and language, says there is mounting evidence demonstrating the importance of collective interactions with music, in particular its ability to promote social bonding.
"People with autism have difficulties making social connections with people," says Pfordresher. "Relative pitch is generally considered to be more important for music. However, absolute pitch is critical if you're singing with somebody, and singing in unison is important for making social connections."
"Clinicians working with autistic individuals may want to focus on these forms of imitation to help those with ASD foster musical interactions that could facilitate their ability to bond with others and to form relationships."
#say #imitation #imitating #imitate #associated #relative #pitch #liu_associate #autistic #note #social #music #musical_performers #perform #performed #pfordresher #form #evidence #differently #different #differs #language #absolute #mary #rhyme #research
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210809170802.htm