By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent, in Washington 7:00AM GMT 19 Feb 2011

Speaking a second language increases “brain power” and delays Alzheimer’s disease by an average of five years, research suggests.

Bilingualism exercises the mind and builds up a “reserve” of brain power which can help it carry on functioning after dementia takes hold.

While the average monolingual person can suffer the first signs of memory loss and confusion in their mid-seventies, the symptoms of Alzheimer’s do not appear for those with a second language until their early eighties.

The effect is most apparent with people who regularly use their second language, but researchers believe that just having learnt one will help.

Even learning another language in middle age helps challenge the brain and build up reserves against memory loss, the study said.

Dr Ellen Bialystok, who led the research at York University in Toronto, Canada, cautioned that knowing a second language would not stop Alzheimer’s, just delay its impact.
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THURSDAY, Aug. 12 (HealthDay News) — Experience, gender and personality appear to influence the “baby talk” parents use when interacting with their infants, say Japanese researchers.

Baby talk is found across languages and cultures, but the brain mechanisms that underlie it are not known.

Reiko Mazuka, Yoshi-Taka Matsuda and colleagues at the Riken Brain Science Institute in Tokyo used functional MRI to assess brain activity in 35 first-time parents whose infants hadn’t started to speak (preverbal) and compared them to 30 men and women without any parenting experience. The study also included 16 mothers with toddlers who spoke two-word utterances and 18 mothers with children in elementary school.

The participants’ brain activity was monitored while they listened to recorded baby talk, which triggers brain activation patterns similar to those that occur when someone speaks baby talk, also called infant-directed speech (IDS).

The brain scans showed that mothers with preverbal infants had increased brain activity in areas of the brain that govern language. This heightened brain activity did not occur in any other group, including mothers whose children had started to speak, according to a Riken news release.
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ANI, Jul 13, 2010, 11.42am IST

The language a person speaks may influence their thoughts, according to a new study.

Researchers Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University and Robert Ward of Bangor University conducted a study amongst Arab Israelis who speak both Arabic and Hebrew.

“It’s likely that a bilingual Arab Israeli will consider Arabs more positively in an Arab speaking environment than a Hebrew speaking environment,” says Danziger.

The study found that the student volunteers found it easier to associate Arab names with “good” trait words and Jewish names with “bad” trait words than Arab names with “bad” trait words and Jewish names with “good” trait words.

In the Hebrew session, however, they showed less of a positive bias toward Arab names over Jewish names.

“The language we speak can change the way we think about other people,” says Ward.

Danziger himself learned both Hebrew and English as a child. “I am a bilingual and I believe that I actually respond differently in Hebrew than I do in English. I think in English I’m more polite than I am in Hebrew,” he says.

The results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Life/Spirituality/Self-Help/Language-influences-how-you-think-about-others/articleshow/6162053.cms

By Steven Reinberg

THURSDAY, June 24 (HealthDay News) — People with Alzheimer’s who are losing their language skills may see some improvement by using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), early research by an Italian team suggests.

The noninvasive procedure delivers a series of rapid magnetic pulses at frequencies up to 100 Hz to the brain. Earlier studies have found that these pulses can change brain activity, depending on the frequency, the researchers explained.

Though “preliminary,” the new findings “hold considerable promise, not only for advancing our understanding of brain plasticity mechanisms, but also for designing new rehabilitation strategies in patients with neurodegenerative disease,” according to lead researcher Maria Cotelli, from IRCCS Centro San Giovanni di Dio Fatebenefratelli in Brescia.

The report is published in the June 24 online edition of the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

For the study, Cotelli’s team tried rTMS in 10 patients with moderate Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers randomly assigned the patients to four weeks of rTMS at 20 Hz or two weeks of a dummy treatment followed by two weeks of rTMS. Pulses were delivered to the prefrontal lobes of the brain.

The people in the study had their memory, executive functions and language tested at the start of the study, after two and four weeks of treatment, and again after eight weeks.
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BANGOR, Wales, June 2 (UPI) — Welsh scientists say they’ve discovered people who learn a second language in adolescence or later recall the sounds of words from their native language.

The researchers, Yan Jing Wu and Guillaume Thierry of Bangor University, said they found adults fluent in English whose first language is Chinese automatically retrieve their native language when reading in English. That finding, they said, will help researchers understand how the brain manages symbols and sounds in different languages.

Thierry explained although most bilingual people believe they function solely in one language at any given time, the study shows that is not necessarily the case.

“Bilingual individuals retrieve information from their native language even when it’s not necessary, or, even more surprising, when it is counterproductive, since native language information does not help when reading or listening to second-language words,” Thierry said.

Michael Chee of the National University of Singapore, who was unaffiliated with the study, said the findings show even though people who learn a second language later in life are discouraged from directly translating words from their native language, they may be doing so anyway.

The study that involved analyzing brain activity is detailed in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Source: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/06/02/Bilingual-people-rely-on-native-language/UPI-88661275502669/

May 19, 2010, 12:00 EST

WEDNESDAY, May 19 (HealthDay News) — Parents who engage their young children in conversational give-and-take help their offspring gain a significant leg up in terms of language acquisition, new Dutch research reveals.

The boost to childhood language proficiency appears to be predicated on allowing children to engage in so-called “serious” conversations with their family members — dialogues that permit them to make meaningful contributions to the subject at hand.

The findings are based on the results of a study that tracked 150 Dutch children aged 3 to 6 for a follow-up period of three years. The children were from a mixture of families of Turkish, Moroccan-Berber, and Dutch backgrounds.

Lead researcher Lotte Henrichs noted that as soon as children start school, they are confronted with a need to follow difficult and sometimes abstract concepts, expressed by their teachers through the routine use of complex sentence structures and summed up by the term “academic language.”

By its nature, academic language is part of the normal student-teacher discourse, and has a scientific texture that is typically marked by multiple clauses and conjunctions, Henrichs explained.

The study revealed that parents who encourage their kids to contribute to conversations are preparing their children for gaining a natural proficiency in this particular sort of linguistic skill.
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May 4, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) — Language is a defining aspect of what makes us human. Although some brain regions are known to be associated with language, neuroscientists have had a surprisingly difficult time using brain imaging technology to understand exactly what these ‘language areas’ are doing. In a new study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, MIT neuroscientists report on a new method to analyze brain imaging data — one that may paint a clearer picture of how our brain produces and understands language.

Research with patients who developed specific language deficits (such as the inability to comprehend passive sentences) following brain injury suggest that different aspects of language may reside in different parts of the brain. But attempts to find these functionally specific regions of the brain with current neuroimaging technologies have been inconsistent and controversial.

One reason for this inconsistency may be due to the fact that most previous studies relied on group analyses in which brain imaging data were averaged across multiple subjects — a computation that could introduce statistical noise and bias into the analyses.
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Friday, April 30, 2010 12:00 IST

Washington, DC: There is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species, says a new study from the University of Rochester.

Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence.

Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging through a toolbox to pick a group of tools to accomplish the various basic components that comprise a complex task.

“We’re using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains,” said study coauthor Aaron Newman. “Obviously we’re doing something different [from other animals], because we’re able to learn language unlike any other species. But it’s not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else.”

The team of brain and cognitive scientists – comprised of Newman (now at Dalhousie University after beginning the work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester), Elissa Newport (University of Rochester), Ted Supalla (University of Rochester), Daphne Bavelier (University of Rochester), and Peter Hauser (Rochester Institute of Technology) – published their findings in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_how-the-human-brain-learns-language_1377227

By COURTNEY HUTCHISON, ABC News Medical Unit. Apr. 22, 2010

A Croatian teenager awoke from a coma last week to find she could no longer speak in her native Croatian — but was fluent in German, a language she had just started studying in school, the U.K. press reports.

Following a mysterious 24-hour coma, the thirteen-year-old girl from the southern town of Knin has been able to understand Croatian, according to the U.K. press. She can only respond in German and requires a translator to communicate with her family, the stories said.

Dujomir Marasovic, director of Firule Hospital in Split where the girl is being treated, declined to provide further details about the girl’s case, saying he wishes to protect her privacy.

Though doctors say it’s unlikely that the girl’s German actually improved because of the coma, instances of lost language and bizarre changes in speech are more common than one may think.

ABC News asked neurologists and language experts to weigh in on these kinds of remarkable language phenomena.

Not a Native Speaker
One such rare but well-documented speech condition is known as Foreign Accent Syndrome. Those with this disorder will often be unable to speak after suffering a stroke or other brain trauma and when their voices return, they will sound as if they have a foreign accent.
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Wednesday, April 21, 2010,9:19 [IST]

Washington, April 21 (ANI): Children with hearing loss can benefit immensely if they receive a cochlear implant before 18 months of age, a new study has revealed.

The research, led by Johns Hopkins scientists, has appeared in the April 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The surgery involves placing a small electronic device into the ear that bypasses the inner ear’s damaged nerve cells and transmits sound signals to the brain.

The scientists followed 188 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, with profound hearing loss for three years after receiving cochlear implants at six U.S. hospitals.

They tracked the children’s newly emerging ability to recognize speech after the implant, and compared their levels of language development to those of 97 same-age children with normal hearing.

While speech and language skills improved in all children regardless of age after they received a cochlear implant, age emerged as a powerful predictor in just how much improvement was seen.

Lead investigator John Niparko, director of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Johns Hopkins, said: “We identified a clear pattern where implantation before 18 months of age conferred a much greater benefit than later implantation, allowing children to catch up fast, sometimes to nearly normal levels.
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NEWS: APR 06, 2010

Epileptic activity in the brain can affect language development in children, and EEG registrations should therefore be carried out more frequently on children with severe language impairment to identify more readily those who may need medical treatment, reveals a thesis from the Sahlgrenska Academy.

The thesis studied 60 children of varying ages, divided into groups. The first group comprised children with language dysfunction, for example children with slow speech development who find it difficult to express themselves or who have an inadequate langugage comprehension. The second group consisted of children with epilepsy, while the third comprised children with language dysfunction and epileptic brain activity, sometimes without epileptic seizures. The study was carried out in conjunction with speech and language pathologists, pediatric neurologists and neuropsychologists at the Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital in Gothenburg.

“We reviewed patient records of children with residual speech and language problems at school start, and could see that these children also had other underlying problems,” says Gunilla Rejnö-Habte Selassie, speech and language pathologist and researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation.

The study showed that epilepsy (with seizures) and epileptic brain activity with or without seizures were more common in these children than in children in general. The researchers then wanted to investigate whether the epileptic activity was the cause of the children’s language dysfunction or whether other factors affected their language development.
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Monday, March 29, 2010

A man woke up from a coma last week. Tom Paterson had spent his whole life in a Scottish town called Largs and had a local Ayrshire accent. After six weeks in hospital, he woke up.
“Are you feeling better?” the nurse asked him. “Ya!” he said in a strange, East European accent. “I vanting drink.”

After he left hospital, he said: “All my life I’ve been Tom from Largs and now people think I’m Tomasz from Poland.”

Yes, he had foreign accent syndrome, almost definitely the world’s funniest disease. Comedians pray nightly to catch this ailment, and some of us even hit ourselves over the head at regular intervals in a desperate bid to get an advantage.

No luck, yet for me. FAS was first identified in 1907. But the number of cases appears to be accelerating. (I’m not making this up).

I once listened to a tape of a victim named George Reynolds, who came from Essex, near London. A BBC interviewer asked him: “When you grew up, you spoke in an ordinary Essex voice?”

George replied: “Oh, I was as Essex as they come, like-a-da cockney.” It sounded so Italian, you could smell oregano.
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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Aug. 10 (UPI) — Seeing a smile, or reading about the verb to smile can activate the muscles in the face that make that expression, Dutch researchers found.

Francesco Foroni from VU University in Amsterdam and Gun R. Semin of the University of Utrecht conducted an experiment with a group of students. They had the students read a series of emotion verbs — “to smile,” “to cry” — and adjectives — “funny,” “frustrating” — on a monitor, while the activity of the muscle responsible for smiles and the muscle causing frowns were measured.

Reading “to laugh” resulted in activation of the smiling muscle, but did not cause any response in the muscles responsible for frowning.

However, when the study subjects were presented with the emotion adjectives like “funny” or “frustrating” the volunteers demonstrated much lower muscle activation compared to their reactions to emotion verbs.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, said muscle activity is “induced in the reader when reading verbs representing facial expressions of emotion.”

Source: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2009/08/10/Study-Language-can-affect-emotions/UPI-15061249925667/

Friday, 24 July 2009. Curtin University of Technology

School age children with language and literacy problems are better off with intense daily therapy rather than extended therapy, according to a recent study.

The study, led by Professor Ron Gillam, the 2009 recipient of Curtin University of Technology’s prestigious Haydn Williams Fellowship, is based on children 6 to 9 years old with primary language disorders but no problems in cognition or hearing.

“The group of kids in the study had 100 minutes of therapy each day, over a period of six weeks. We followed their progress for six months,” Professor Gillam said.

“Our results proved six times more successful than a different study in which children received therapy twice a week for 20 minutes each day, over a two-year period.”

Professor Gillam reviewed studies in which speech-language pathologists worked with teachers in a classroom setting.

“When I conducted a systematic review of existing research, classroom based instruction on vocabulary where speech pathologists were working with regular teachers, yielded very successful results,” he said.

The systematic review also showed that when children know what they are working on, and goals are explicit, they tend to make more improvement.
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THURSDAY, July 9 (HealthDay News) – European researchers are contesting the assumption that bilingual toddlers have more trouble learning language skills than children who know just one language.

“While the remarkable performance of children acquiring one language is impressive, many children acquire more than one language simultaneously,” said study author Agnes Melinda Kovacs, a research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy. “As bilingual children presumably have to learn roughly twice as much as their monolingual peers [because they learn two languages instead of one], one would expect their language acquisition to be somewhat delayed. However, bilinguals pass the language development milestones at the same ages as their monolingual peers.”

The finding, which appears online July 9 in Science, came from a test of the responses to verbal and visual cues from 64 babies who were 12 months old. They came from monolingual and bilingual families, although the study did not specify which languages the families spoke.

The toddlers were exposed to two sets of words that had different structural characteristics. After each word, the children viewed a special toy on either the left or right side of a screen, depending on the word’s structure. They then were presented with words they had never heard before but that conformed to one of the two verbal structures. No toy followed.

Researchers determined whether the infants had learned the word structures by measuring the direction of their gaze after hearing each new word. Judging by their eye movements, the bilingual kids did better in recognizing words than their monolingual peers.
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Page last updated at 23:01 GMT, Wednesday, 8 July 2009 00:01 UK

People with superior language skills early in life may be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease decades later, research suggests.

A team from Johns Hopkins University studied the brains of 38 Catholic nuns after death.

They found those with good language skills early in life were less likely to have memory problems – even if their brains showed signs of dementia damage.

The study appears online in the journal Neurology.

Dementia is linked to the formation of protein plaques and nerve cell tangles in the brain.

But scientists remain puzzled about why these signs of damage produce dementia symptoms in some people, but not others.

The researchers focused on nuns who were part of an ongoing clinical study.

They divided the women into those with memory problems and signs of dementia damage in the brain, and those whose memory was unaffected regardless of whether or not they showed signs of dementia damage.

And they also analysed essays that 14 of the women wrote as they entered the convent in their late teens or early 20s, assessing them for complexity of language and grammar.
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