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Here we share reviews and articles about Psycholinguistics and other relevant fields.
It's across these two "timescales of experience" -- and the workings of the neocortical memory system -- that the researchers assert infants make their first links between words and objects.
"The idea is that over long periods of time, traces of memory for visual objects are being built up slowly in the neocortex," Clerkin said. "When a word is spoken at a specific moment and the memory trace is also reactivated close in time to the name, this mechanism allows the infants to make a connection rapidly."
The researchers said their work also has significant implications for machine learning researchers who are designing and building artificial intelligence to recognize object categories. That work, which focuses on how names teach categories, requires massive amounts of training for machine learning systems to even approach human object recognition.
The implication of the infant pathway in this study suggests a new approach to machine learning, in which training is structured more like the natural environment, and object categories are learned first without labels, after which they are linked to labels.
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220607182305.htm
The new data collection, and the automatically computed language features will contribute to new insights into open questions on linguistic diversity and language evolution. "Nobody thinks that the analysis must stop with the examples we give in our paper," says List. "On the contrary, we hope that linguists, psychologists, and evolutionary scientists will feel encouraged to build on our example by expanding the data and developing new methods," adds Forkel.
Even in their current study, the authors present findings that warrant future investigations. "When investigating which languages use the same word for 'arm' and 'hand', we found that these languages typically also use the same word for 'leg' and 'foot'," List reports. "While this may seem to be a silly coincidence, it shows that the lexicon of human languages is often much more structured than one might assume when investigating one language in isolation."
#data #language #linguistic #linguist #linguists_computational #new_standards #language_uses #standardized #standardization #computing #computed #say #database #lexibank #list #report #add #future #presented #present #small #question #evolution #large #gray #word #use_words #feature #differ #different #method #independent #biological #jakobson
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220616121630.htm
👉🏽 Whole-body learning can boost children's letter sound recognition -- the first step toward reading
Children who move while learning sounds of letters significantly improve their ability to recognize individual letter sounds.
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Reading is a complex and crucial skill that impacts the ability of youth to perform as students, across social contexts and in their eventual working lives. Therefore, it is important to develop reading skills during childhood.
Children get twice as good with difficult letter sounds
Now, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Denmark's National Centre for Reading has focused on whether whole-body learning in instruction, known as embodied learning, has a positive impact on children's ability to learn letter sounds.
"Our research demonstrated that children who used their whole body to shape the sounds of letters became twice as proficient at letter sounds that are more difficult to learn compared to those who received traditional instruction," says PhD student Linn Damsgaard of UCPH's Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports.
With regards to difficult letter sounds, she adds, "There are many difficult letter sounds in Danish and these sounds are particularly important, because once children become proficient at them, it has already been shown that they will be better readers."
The project included 149 children, 5 -- 6 years old, who had just started school. They were divided into three groups: one that stood up and used their whole body to shape letter sounds; a seated group that shaped letter sounds with their hands and arms; and a control group that received traditional, seated instruction during which they wrote letters out by hand.
The study also demonstrated that students who shaped difficult letter sounds with hand movements while seated also had a greater increase in proficiency than the control group.
Giving beginner readers the best start possible
Associate Professor Jacob Wienecke of UCPH's Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports led the study and explains the project's background:
"The overarching goal is to learn more about which methods can be used to give beginner readers a good start. The idea is that if, through play and movement, we can reach children where they are and where their strengths truly lie -- and we can create a form of learning that combines reading with play -- then that's truly positive."
Previously, the researchers demonstrated that the children felt more motivated by teaching methods which incorporated physical movement. Associate Professor Jacob Wienecke hopes this will provide an opportunity to inspire teachers and school managers to prioritise movement across subjects.
The study also investigated whether a direct effect of embodied learning could be found through children's reading of individual words. This was not possible, which may be due, among other things, to the fact that the children were at such an early stage of their literacy development that they could not yet transfer their knowledge of letter sounds to reading words. Or, as PhD student Linn Damsgaard describes it: "Just because you learn the notes and sounds of a flute, doesn't make you a master."
The study is the first in the world to examine the effect of linking whole-body movement to the learning of letters and their sounds. It is published in Educational Psychology Review as: Effects of Eight Weeks with Embodied Learning on 5-6 Years Old Danish Children's Pre-reading Skills and Word Reading Skills: The PLAYMORE Project, DK.
#child #reading #movement #letter #started #start #learning #learn #instruction #truly #positive #psychology #working #group #associate #seated_group #traditional #damsgaard #reader #wienecke #develop #development
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220608091403.htm
📚 Limor Raviv, Gary Lupyan, Shawn C. Green. How variability shapes learning and generalization. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.007
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👉🏽 The role of variability: From playing tennis to learning language
The effect of variability on learning is recognized in many fields: learning is harder when input is variable, but variability leads to better generalization of the knowledge we learned. In this review, researchers bring together over 150 studies on variability across domains, including language acquisition, motor learning, visual perception, face recognition and education, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms behind variability.
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Chihuahuas and Great Danes
This principle is found in many domains, including speech perception, grammar, and learning words and categories. For instance, infants will struggle to learn the category 'dog' if they are only exposed to Chihuahuas, instead of many different kinds of dogs (Chihuahuas, Poodles and Great Danes).
"There are over ten different names for this basic principle!," says MPI's Limor Raviv, the senior investigator of the study. "Learning from less variable input is often fast, but may fail to generalise to new stimuli. But these important insights have not been unified into a single theoretical framework, which has obscured the bigger picture."
To identify key patterns and understand the underlying principles of variability effects, Raviv and her colleagues reviewed over 150 studies on variability and generalisation across fields, including computer science, linguistics, categorization, motor learning, visual perception and formal education.
Mr. Miyagi
The researchers discovered that, across studies, the term variability can refer to at least four different kinds of variability, such as set size (e.g. the number of different examples or locations on the tennis court) and scheduling (e.g. practice schedules with different orders or time lags). "These four kinds of variability have never been directly compared -- which means that we currently don't know which is most effective for learning," says Raviv.
The impact of variability depends on whether it is relevant to the task or not (arguably, the colour of the tennis court is not relevant to serving practice). But according to the 'Mr. Miyagi principle' (inspired by the 1984 classic movie Karate Kid), practicing seemingly unrelated skills (such as waxing cars) may actually benefit learning of other skills (such as martial arts).
Competing theories
But why does variability impact learning and generalisation? One theory is that more variable input can highlight which aspects of a task are relevant and which are not (colour is useful for distinguishing between lemons and limes, but not for distinguishing between cars and trucks).
Another theory is that greater variability leads to broader generalisations. This is because variability will represent the real world better, including atypical examples (such as Chihuahuas).
A third reason has to do with the way memory works: when training is variable, learners are forced to actively reconstruct their memories.
Face recognition
"Understanding the impact of variability is important for literally every aspect of our daily life. Beyond affecting the way we learn language, motor skills, and categories, it even has an impact on our social lives," explains Raviv. "For example, face recognition is affected by whether people grew up in a small community (fewer than 1000 people) or in larger community (over 30,000 people). Exposure to fewer faces during childhood is associated with diminished face memory."
"We hope this work will spark people's curiosity and generate more work on the topic," concludes Raviv. "Our paper raises a lot of open questions. For example: Is the relationship between variability and learning broadly similar across species, or are there species-specific adaptations? Can we find similar effects of variability beyond the brain, for instance in the immune system?"
📚 L. Fisher, M. Evans, K. Forbes, A. Gayton, Y. Liu, D. Rutgers. Language experiences, evaluations and emotions (3Es): analysis of structural models of multilingual identity for language learners in schools in England. International Journal of Multilingualism, 2022; 1 DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2022.2060235
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👉🏽 Want more students to learn languages? Win over the parents, research suggests
New research shows that children's willingness to study subjects like French, German or Spanish is shaped far more by the attitudes of their parents, than by their teachers or friends. The study's authors argue that efforts to reverse the steady decline in language-learning in the UK should target families rather than just children, because of the important role parents' beliefs play in shaping children's views of themselves as language-learners.
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The finding implies that parents may have an important part to play in reversing the national decline in language-learning. The authors of the study, which was led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, say that efforts to increase uptake in these subjects would benefit from involving families, as well as schools.
Entry rates for modern languages have declined steadily, at both GCSE and A-Level, since the early 2000s. GCSE entry data, for example, show that the combined total number of pupils taking French, German, Spanish and other Modern Languages last year was almost half that of 2001.
The new study surveyed more than 1,300 Year 8 students, aged 12-13, to understand what makes them self-identify as 'multilingual': as capable learners and users of other languages. The responses revealed that their parents' beliefs about languages had almost twice as much influence as the opinions of their teachers, and were also significantly more influential than the views of their peers.
Specifically, parental attitudes help students who are still forming a view about languages work out whether these subjects matter personally to them. In general, the study shows that they are more likely to consider themselves 'multilingual' if they identify with languages at this personal level and see them as relevant to their own lives. Simply learning languages at school and being told that they are useful appears to make less difference.
Professor Linda Fisher, from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: "Students' personal commitment to languages is determined by their experiences, their beliefs, and their emotional response to speaking or using them. Slightly surprisingly, the people who feed into that most appear to be their parents."
"This can be a positive or negative influence depending on the parents' own views. Its importance underlines the fact that if we want more young people to learn languages, we need to pay attention to wider social and cultural attitudes to languages beyond the classroom. Waning interest in these subjects is a public communication challenge; it's not just about what happens in schools."
Some language-learning specialists argue that most people are fundamentally "multilingual." Even if they do not speak another language fluently, they may know assorted words and phrases, or another kind of 'language': such as a dialect, sign language, or computer code.
Recognising that they have this multilingual capability appears to strengthen students' self-belief when they encounter modern languages at school. There is also evidence that students who self-identify as multilingual perform better across the school curriculum, including in non-language subjects.
The study explored what leads students to see themselves in these terms, and whether this varies between different groups -- for example, those who have 'English as an Additional Language' (EAL), and typically speak another language at home.
In the survey, students were asked to state how strongly they agreed or disagreed with various statements, such as: "Learning other languages is pointless because everyone speaks English," and: "My parents think that it's cool to be able to speak other languages." They were also asked about their own experience with languages, and how multilingual they considered themselves to be. The researchers then developed a model showing the relative importance of different potential influences on their self-identification as language-learners.
📚 Cesar A. Medina, Eddie Vargas, Stephanie J. Munger, Julie E. Miller. Vocal changes in a zebra finch model of Parkinson’s disease characterized by alpha-synuclein overexpression in the song-dedicated anterior forebrain pathway. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (5): e0265604 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265604
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👉🏽 Researchers find link between Parkinson's gene and vocal issues that could lead to earlier diagnosis
Neuroscientists found that higher levels of the alpha-synuclein protein in the brain can lead to changes in vocal production.
@psycholinguistics
But the disease is also known to hinder vocal production, giving those with Parkinson's a soft monotonous voice. Those symptoms, research has suggested, often appear much earlier in the disease's development -- sometimes decades before movement-related symptoms.
New research by University of Arizona neuroscientists suggests that a specific gene commonly associated with Parkinson's may be behind those vocal-related issues -- a finding that could help lead to earlier diagnoses and treatments for Parkinson's patients.
The research was conducted in the lab of Julie E. Miller, an assistant professor of neuroscience and of speech, language, and hearing sciences in the College of Science.
"We have this big gap here -- we don't know how this disease impacts the brain regions for vocal production, and this is really an opportunity to intervene early and come up with better treatments," said Miller, who also has joint appointments in the Department of Neurology and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, and is a member of the UArizona BIO5 Institute.
The study was published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. César A. Medina, a former Ph.D. student in Miller's lab who is now a postdoctoral scholar at Johns Hopkins University, is the paper's lead author. Also involved in the research were Eddie Vargas, a former UArizona undergraduate student who will soon attend the College of Medicine -- Tucson, and Stephanie Munger, a research professional in the Department of Neuroscience.
A unique, ideal model for studying human speech
To investigate any correlation between vocal changes and the Parkinson's-related gene -- known as alpha-synuclein -- the researchers turned to the zebra finch, a songbird native to Australia.
The birds are an ideal model for human speech and voice pathways for several reasons, Medina said. Young finches learn their songs from older, father-like male birds, much in the same way babies learn to speak by listening to their parents. The part of a finch's brain that deals with speech and language is also organized very similarly to its counterpart in the human brain.
"These similarities across behavior, anatomy and genetics allow us to use the zebra finches as a model for human speech and voice," Medina said.
To see how alpha-synuclein might affect vocal production in the birds, researchers first took baseline recordings of their songs. They then introduced a copy of the gene into some of the birds; other birds were not given the gene so researchers could compare the results. All the birds' songs were recorded again immediately after introducing the gene, and then one, two and three months later.
The researchers used computer software to analyze and compare the acoustic features of the songs over time, studying pitch, amplitude and duration of the songs to determine whether and when the birds' vocal production changed.
Initial findings showed that alpha-synuclein did affect song production. The birds with the gene sang less after two months, and they sang less at the start of a song session three months after receiving the gene. The vocalizations were also softer and shorter, findings similar to what is seen in the human disease.
Another step toward earlier diagnoses and treatments
To determine whether the effects on speech were connected to changes in the brain, the researchers zeroed in on a section of the brain called Area X. They found that there were higher levels of the alpha-synuclein protein in Area X, helping them establish that the gene did, in fact, cause the changes in the brain that led to changes in vocal production, Medina said.
This connection, he added, had been predicted in previous Parkinson's research, but it was not conclusive.
📚 Christina M. Cerkevich, Jean-Alban Rathelot, Peter L. Strick. Cortical basis for skilled vocalization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (19) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2122345119
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👉🏽 Fresh look at trope about Eskimo words for snow
Researchers have taken a fresh look at words for snow, taking on an urban legend referred to by some as 'the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.'
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Researchers at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University have taken a fresh look at words for snow, taking on an urban legend referred to by some as "the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax."
But instead of counting the words for snow used by Inuit, Yupik and other natives of the Arctic regions, as others have done, they looked at how people in warmer climates speak of snow and ice compared to their cold-weather counterparts.
"We found that languages from warm parts of the world are more likely to use the same word for snow and ice," said Alexandra Carstensen, a doctoral student in psychology and co-author of the study published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
The finding that people in warmer regions are less likely to distinguish between ice and snow indirectly supports a claim by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911 that the words used to describe different types of snow in Arctic languages reflect the "chief interests of a people."
By the same principle, people in warmer climates, where snow is less of a concern, are less likely to care as much about the difference between snow and ice, and so use one word to describe both, just as Hawaiians use the word hau for snow and ice.
To test that theory, researchers used multiple dictionaries and linguistic and meteorological data -- as well as Google Translate and Twitter -- to conduct an extensive search for words for snow and ice in nearly 300 diverse languages. They then linked those words to local climates and geography worldwide.
"We wanted to broaden the investigation past Eskimo languages in particular," said study senior author Charles Kemp, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. "The idea that languages reflect the needs of their speakers is general, and can be explored using data from all over the world."
The study builds on the team's previous research showing how language is shaped by our need to communicate precisely and efficiently.
"We think that terms for snow and ice reveal the same basic principle at work, modulated by local communicative need," said study lead author Terry Regier, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley.
#said #study #researcher #research #language #author #eskimo_vocabulary #ice #mellon #legend #franz #principle #climate #communicate #communicative #snow #indirectly #past
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413151235.htm
📚 Yael Weiss, Jason D. Yeatman, Suzanne Ender, Liesbeth Gijbels, Hailley Loop, Julia C. Mizrahi, Bo Y. Woo, Patricia K. Kuhl. Can an Online Reading Camp Teach 5-Year-Old Children to Read? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2022; 16 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.793213
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👉🏽 New insights on infant word learning
Psychology researchers provide a fresh perspective on how infants connect names with objects, a critical skill for language development.
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The work, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is led by Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington, and Elizabeth Clerkin, a postdoctoral researcher in the department.
Before they can speak, infants between the ages of 7 and 11 months begin to pair the words they hear with the everyday objects in their surroundings. To explain this phenomenon, the field of developmental psychology has focused on "naming moments," when the names and objects are presented to the infant at the same time.
However, the names of objects are rarely spoken in tandem with the objects, and the brain's hippocampal memory system, which can form strong memories from singular events, may not be mature enough in infants for them to form durable memories of those rare direct co-occurrences between objects and names.
"Our study shows that a different perspective is potentially needed to explain how infants are making these links by looking at the time outside naming moments," Clerkin said. "We focus on understanding how infants are developing their memories for the objects and categories more generally."
In other words, early language learning may be tied to memory representations that build up over time, rather than to repeated connections between words and objects.
To conduct their study, Smith and Clerkin looked at infants' daily encounters with the objects in their surroundings, during which infants build up "a deep and robust familiarity" with their environment. The researchers compiled a catalog of objects and the heard names of objects as they occurred in infants' daily lives. They then considered how these experiences align with infant memory systems in a way that would make it possible to link objects and names at those scarce moments of co-occurrence.
Specifically, the researchers drew upon 67 hours of audiovisual mealtime recordings of 14 infants, ranging from 7 to 11 months old, sampling statistical regularities of the infants' everyday interactions with people and objects. These data are part of a much larger dataset called the Home View Project, for which Smith's lab outfitted infants with head cameras so that parents or caretakers could record several hours of daily activity in their homes.
"When scientists think about how it is that infants managed to learn words, they've traditionally focused on internal cognitive mechanisms," Smith said. "This assumption about co-occurring names and objects is not wrong, but if you look at the infants' learning environment more broadly, you see their learning task -- and the mechanisms by which this learning may occur -- differently. We need to study the structure of these learning environments, not just the internal cognitive mechanism, because that will tell us more about what needs to be in place for children to learn language."
A full understanding of the learning environment could enable researchers and clinicians to develop interventions for children who are considered "late talkers," revealing ways in which the environment could be augmented to help children who are learning language more slowly than their peers.
This broader view of object name learning ultimately aligns with a memory system operating in the brain's neocortex that is known to be functional in infancy and builds up memory representations over long stretches of time, Smith said.
She added that when well-established memories are re-activated by new information, the new information is rapidly integrated into the existing memory. A single instance of hearing the word "table," for example, will make sense when it is heard in the context of visual memories of a table.
📚 Johann-Mattis List, Robert Forkel, Simon J. Greenhill, Christoph Rzymski, Johannes Englisch, Russell D. Gray. Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features. Scientific Data, 2022; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41597-022-01432-0
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👉🏽 Shedding light on linguistic diversity and its evolution
Scholars have created a new global repository of linguistic data. The project is designed to facilitate new insights into the evolution of words and sounds of the languages spoken across the world today. The Lexibank database contains standardized lexical data for more than 2000 languages. It is the most extensive publicly available collection compiled so far.
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Is it true that many languages in the world use words similar to "mama" and "papa" for "mother" and "father"? If a language uses only one word for both "arm" and "hand," does it also use only one word for both "leg" and "foot"? How do languages manage to use a relatively small number of words to express so many concepts? An interdisciplinary team of linguists, computational scientists and psychologists have created a large public database that can be used to study these and many more questions with the help of computational methods.
"When our Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution was founded in 2014, I presented my colleagues with an ambitious goal: there are more than 7000 languages in the world. Create databases with the most extensive documentation of the linguistic diversity as possible," says Max Planck Director Russell Gray. "Our inspiration came from Genbank -- a large genetic database where biologists from all over the world have deposited genomic data," Gray continues. "Genbank was a game changer. The large amount of freely available sequence data revolutionized the ways we can analyze biological diversity. We hope that the first of our global linguistic databases, Lexibank, will help start to revolutionize our knowledge of linguistic diversity in a similar way."
New standards and new software
The Lexibank repository provides data in the form of standardized wordlists for more than 2000 language varieties. "The work on Lexibank coincided with a push towards more consistent data formats in linguistic databases. Thus Lexibank can serve both as a large-scale example of the benefits of standardization and a catalyst for further standardization," reports Robert Forkel, who led the computational part of the data collection. "We decided to create our own standards, called Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, which have now been used successfully in a multitude of projects in which our department is involved."
The new standards proposed by the team are accompanied by new software tools that greatly facilitate linguists' workflows. "We have designed new computer-assisted workflows that enable existing language datasets to be made comparable," says Johann-Mattis List, who led the practical part of the data curation. "With these workflows, we have dramatically increased the efficiency of data standardization and data curation."
Identifying patterns of language evolution
In addition to collecting and sharing the standardized language data, the authors also designed new computational techniques to answer questions about the evolution of linguistic diversity. They illustrate how these methods can be used by computing how languages differ or agree with respect to sixty different features.
"Thanks to our standardized representation of language data, it is now easy to check how many languages use words like'mama' and 'papa' for 'mother' and 'father'," reports List. "It turns out that this pattern can indeed be found in many languages of the world and in very different regions," adds Simon J. Greenhill, one of the founders of the Lexibank project. "Since all the languages with this pattern are not closely related to each other, it reflects independent parallel evolution, just as the great linguist Roman Jakobson suggested in 1968."
Expanding the data and developing new methods
📚 Linn Damsgaard, Anne-Mette Veber Nielsen, Anne Kær Gejl, Anne Sofie Bøgh Malling, Søren Kildahl Jensen, Jacob Wienecke. Effects of 8 Weeks with Embodied Learning on 5–6-Year-Old Danish Children’s Pre-reading Skills and Word Reading Skills: the PLAYMORE Project, DK. Educational Psychology Review, 2022; DOI: 10.1007/s10648-022-09671-8
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#variable #variability #learning #learn #principle #face #including #raviv #different #practice #practicing #people #chihuahua #say #motor #community #memory #theoretical #key #perception #example #competing #art #effect #effective #dog #movie #world #life
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220513113216.htm
Although some influences -- such as that of peers -- differed for EAL and non-EAL students, that of parents was consistently strong. Across the board, the relative impact of parents' attitudes on students' willingness to see themselves as multilingual was found to be about 1.4 times greater than that of their friends, and almost double that of their teachers.
The researchers suggest that encouraging more parents to recognise their own multilingual capabilities would positively affect their children's own language-learning. "In an ideal world we should be encouraging adults, as well as children, to see themselves as having a repertoire of communicative resources," Fisher said. "It's remarkable how quickly attitudes change once you start asking: 'What words do you already know, what dialect do you speak; can you sign?'"
More broadly, the study found that young people are more likely to see themselves in these terms if they are exposed to meaningful experiences that involve other languages -- for example by hearing and using them in their communities, or while travelling abroad. This, along with their personal and emotional response to the idea of languages, informs the degree to which they self-describe as multilingual.
The researchers argue that this raises questions about recent Government reforms to language GCSEs, which are meant to help students "grow in confidence and motivation." The new measures focus narrowly on so-called linguistic "building blocks": for example, requiring students to learn 1,700 common words in the target language. Head teachers' bodies have already criticised them as "prescriptive and grinding" and liable to alienate pupils further.
The new study similarly indicates that encouraging more young people to learn languages requires a broader-minded approach.
"There's no evidence that if you just focus on the mechanics -- phonics, grammar and so on -- you're going to motivate students or, for that matter, teachers," Fisher said. "Students need to discover what languages mean to them, which means they also need to learn about culture, identity and self-expression. Simply drilling verb forms into them will only persuade a swathe of the school population that these subjects are not for them. That is especially likely if their parents don't value languages either."
#language #student #study #self #parental_attitudes #entry #difference #different #differed #parent #personal #simply_learning #learn #fisher #teacher #influence #communication #communicative #community #school #multilingual #response #phonics #total #government #speaking #speak #speaks #decline #declined #matter_personally #capable #capability #building #linguistic #relative #important #importance #said #requiring #requires #pupil #german #eal
@psycholinguistics
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220502194729.htm
The next step, Miller said, is figuring out how to apply these findings to human data, which could provide more answers that lead to better Parkinson's diagnoses and treatments -- ones that come long before movement-related symptoms tell a patient to visit a neurologist.
The long-term goal of the Miller Lab, she said, is to partner with other researchers and private companies to develop drugs that target alpha-synuclein and other genes associated with Parkinson's.
Doing so, Medina said, would mean "we could stop the progression of Parkinson's disease before it becomes a detrimental impediment to the quality of life for the patient."
#gene #researcher #vocal #vocalization #symptoms_research #finding #studying_human #production #said #medina #brain #study #song #bird #miller #finch #journal #interdisciplinary #neuroscientist #lead #ideal #baseline #hopkins #voice #treatment #alpha #long
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220504144523.htm
👉🏽 Neuroscientists find multiple brain regions control speech, challenging common assumption
Neurobiologists give new meaning to the term 'motor mouth'. By carefully mapping neural networks in marmoset and macaque monkeys, they determined that multiple areas in the brain's frontal lobe control the muscles of vocalization and could provide a foundation for complex speech.
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The findings -- which could lead to a better understanding of speech disorders -- refute a long-existing presumption that only the primary motor cortex, nicknamed M1, directly influences the larynx or voice box, said principal investigator Peter L. Strick, Ph.D., Thomas Detre Professor and chair of neurobiology at Pitt. Instead, several cortical regions send signals to laryngeal muscles to create greater vocal finesse in some nonhuman primates.
"This kind of parallel processing in our neural wiring might explain why humans are capable of highly sophisticated language that allows us to share information, express and perceive emotion, and tell memorable stories," said Strick, who also is scientific director of Pitt's Brain Institute. "Our remarkable speech skills are due to more evolved brains, not better muscles."
Led by Christina M. Cerkevich, Ph.D., research assistant professor of neurobiology, the investigators compared in marmosets and macaques neural networks that are the origin of descending command signals to control monkey vocalizations.
"We selected these two monkey species because of the striking differences in their vocal behavior," Cerkevich explained. "Marmosets readily vocalize in ways that are akin to humans by taking turns to speak and altering the volume, timing and pitch of their calls to each other. Macaques, on the other hand, make mostly simple, spontaneous calls."
The researchers injected a transneuronal tracer made from rabies virus into the cricothyroid muscle of the monkeys' larynxes. The tracer infects nerve cells and has the unique property of moving from one neuron to another only at synapses, which are the special sites where neurons interact with each other. This makes it possible to track neuronal circuits from the muscle back to the areas of the cerebral cortex that control it.
In addition to M1, both kinds of monkeys had multiple premotor areas in the frontal lobe that send descending command signals to the cricothyroid muscle. But two of the premotor areas provided a substantially larger source of descending output in marmosets, leading the researchers to propose that the enhanced vocal motor skills of marmosets are due, in part, to the expansion of neural signaling from these premotor areas.
"This result challenges the long-held view that improvements in motor skills of vocalization are due largely to changes in the output from M1, the primary motor cortex," Strick said. "It appears there is no single control center, but rather parallel processing sites that enable complex vocalization and, ultimately, speech."
Next steps include studying other nodes in the vocal motor network and to understand how alterations in this network contribute to or result in vocal disorders, including stuttering and speech apraxia.
Jean-Alban Rathelot, Ph.D., of Aix-Marseille Université in Marseille, France, was also a member of the research team. Study funding was provided by National Institutes of Health grants R01NS24328 352, R01AT010414, P40OD010996, and T32NS086749; and the DSF Charitable Foundation.
#vocal #vocalization #vocalize #muscle #motor #marseille #neuron #neuronal #phd #speech_disorders #monkey #neural #including #said #cortex #control_monkey #research #researcher #include_studying #investigator #larger #charitable #information #spontaneous #sophisticated #descending #study #marmoset #send_signals #network #signaling #premotor #area
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220504170821.htm
📚 Terry Regier, Alexandra Carstensen, Charles Kemp. Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited. PLOS ONE, 2016; 11 (4): e0151138 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151138
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Researchers plan to hold additional online reading camps, and to add brain scans prior to and after the camps to evaluate how learning to read affects brain development.
The study was funded by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Petunia Charitable Fund.
Additional co-authors were Suzanne Ender, Liesbeth Gijbels, Hailley Loop, Julia Mizrahi and Bo Woo, all of I-LABS.
#read #researcher #research #camp #brain #online #reading_skills #said #child #group #grouped #lesson #learning #learn #family #socially #social #author #study #letter #sound #zoom #methodology #larger #neuroscience #standardized #phonological #colored #color #additional #teach #kuhl #science #including #included #student #participant
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220411133459.htm