06 Jan 2011
A new study to examine the long-term effects of late language development in children is to be carried out by psychologists at The University of Manchester.

One in 15 children in the UK has difficulties learning to talk but little is known about how such problems may affect these individuals later in their adult life.

The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will investigate the personal, social and societal functioning of adults who had difficulties learning to speak as children.

Lead researcher Professor Gina Conti-Ramsden, in Manchester’s School of Psychological Sciences, said: “This will be the largest UK study of adult outcomes in individuals with a history of childhood language difficulties ever undertaken.

“It is a unique project that will enable us to identify processes of positive adaptation versus maladjustment in childhood, adolescence and emerging adulthood.
(more…)

05/01/2011 14:52:00

Fewer children who attend regular formal centre- and family-based child care at 1.5 years and 3 years of age were late talkers compared with children who are looked after at home by a parent, child-carer or in an outdoor nursery.

This is shown in a new study by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health of nearly 20,000 children.

The study found no relation between the type of child care at the age of 1 year and subsequent language competence, which may indicate that the positive effect of centre-based child care first occurs between the ages of 1 to 1.5 years.

Furthermore, there were fewer children who were late talkers among those who attended full-time centre-based child care compared with part-time attendance at 3 years of age.

The findings support most of the previous research showing that children who have been in formal child care have better language skills than children who have had more informal care.

The study, “Does universally accessible child care protect children from late talking? Results from a Norwegian population-based prospective study,” is published by Ratib Lekhal and co-authors in the journal Early Child Development and Care.
(more…)

Genevieve Roberts: English dictionaries are groaning with new words, while other tongues are dying out.

Monday, 3 January 2011

What’s in a word? The English language has almost doubled in size in the past century as we are living in a rich linguistic peak.

A recent report concluded that the vocabulary is expanding by 8,500 words a year. After researchers from Harvard University and Google scanned five million books, they came to a total of 1,022,000 words in the language – including “dark matter” that will never make it into a dictionary.

Professor David Crystal, author of Evolving English, says vocabulary growth is never steady but depends on new concepts in society. “There was a peak in Shakespeare’s time around the Renaissance, another during the Industrial Revolution, and another peak now with the Electronic Revolution,” he says.

While there are over a million words in the English language, most readers of The Independent probably know some 75,000 words, 50,000 of which they will use actively, he estimates.

In comparison, Elizabethan English used approximately 150,000 words. Shakespeare used just under 20,000 in his plays, 12 per cent of the language. “Today, we know fewer words percentage-wise because language has increased so hugely,” Professor Crystal says.
(more…)

by JON HAMILTON August 16, 2010

These words you are reading are really just a collection of arbitrary symbols. Yet, after some decoding by your brain, these symbols convey meaning. That’s because humans have evolved a brain with an extraordinary knack for language. And language has given us a major advantage over other species.

Yet scientists still don’t know when and how we began using language.

“The Earth would not be the way it is if humankind didn’t have the ability to communicate, to organize itself, to pass knowledge down from generation to generation,” says Jeff Elman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. “We’d be living in troops of very smart baboons,” he says.

Instead, language has allowed us to cooperate in groups of millions instead of dozens, he says. It also lets us share the complex ideas produced by our brains, and it’s flexible in ways you don’t find in the communication systems of other species.

Bees, for example, use an elaborate communication system to tell one another precisely how to get from the hive to a source of pollen, Elman says. “But that’s all it does,” he says. “They can’t talk about politics. They can’t talk about who’s having an affair with what other bee — and these are things that we can do.”
(more…)

by KATHLEEN MASTERSON August 11, 2010

Most of us do it every day without even thinking about it, yet talking is a uniquely human ability. Not only do humans have evolved brains that process and produce language and syntax, but we also can make a range of sounds and tones that we use to form hundreds of thousands of words.

To make these sounds — and talk — humans use the same basic apparatus that chimps have: lungs, throat, voice box, tongue and lips. But we’re the ones singing opera and talking on the phone. That is because over thousands of years, humans have evolved a longer throat and smaller mouth better suited for shaping sound.

Vocal Acrobatics
Humans have flexibility in the mouth, tongue and lips that lets us form a wide range of precise sounds that chimps simply can’t produce, and some have developed this complex voice instrument more than others. Take opera tenor Gran Wilson. He has toured the world singing and now teaches at the University of Maryland at College Park and at Towson University. In a split second, Wilson can go from his talking voice to full vibrato, enunciating each sound with graceful clarity as his voice fills the room.
(more…)

By Kim McGuire. ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. 04/01/2010

When we hear a song for the first time, it often seems like it goes in one ear and out the other, sometimes only few catchy words from a chorus leaving much of an impression.

But when the Australian zebra finch hears its father sing for the first time, those simple melodies activate large, complex gene networks in the bird’s brain, according to new research by an international team of scientists that includes researchers from Washington University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveal how the team successfully decoded the genome of the zebra finch, only the second bird to have its genetic code completely mapped.

The project provides new information that will help scientists understand how humans learn language and may someday provide insights into diseases like autism that can inhibit speech, team members say.

“Now we can look deep into the genome, not just at the genes involved in vocal learning, but at the complex ways in which they are regulated,” said Richard K. Wilson, the research’s senior author and director of Washington University’s Genome Center. “This information provides clues to how vocal learning occurs at the most basic molecular level in birds and people.”

Past research has shown that hundreds of genes light up in the finch’s brain as the bird learns a new song.
(more…)

By Ashley Mikutis, Assistant Campus Editor. Publication Date: 04/02/2010

To study human language, Purdue researchers have turned to a species with similar language clues – Carolina chickadees.

Many studies have been conducted to find the “missing link” between humans and apes, but some researchers have seen the benefits of looking at other species as well.

Carolina chickadees are considered to have one of the most complex language systems of any species, and they also utilize syntax in their vocal signals.

Jeff Lucas, professor of biological sciences, said he hopes that, by looking at other species, it will enable researchers to understand what factors to select for complexity.

“Why not apes?” Lucas wrote in an e-mail. “Because their vocal communication is extraordinarily simple. Nonetheless, it is important to look at communication across a broad range of species.”

Lucas said the research focuses on the Carolina chickadee as it has a syntactically complex call system that is used in a variety of circumstances.

“We are interested in studying the complexity of note types,” Lucas wrote, “analogous to letters – how many are there and what their function is; information content – how much information is carried in the call; and comparative aspects – how different species vary in the structure of their calls and what it means.”
(more…)

06.29.09, 02:00 PM EDT
Give-and-take conversations speed language development, study finds

MONDAY, June 29 (HealthDay News) — If you want to help children develop language and speech skills, UCLA researchers say, listening to what they have to say is just as important as talking to them.

The effect of a conversation between a child and an adult is about six times as great as the effect of adult speech input alone, the researchers found. The results of their study appear in the July issue of Pediatrics.

“Adults speaking to children helps language develop, but what matters much more is the interaction,” said the study’s lead author, Frederick Zimmerman, an associate professor in the school of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The child speaking is a big part of what drives language development. The more the child speaks, it reinforces their knowledge.”

The researchers also found that TV viewing didn’t have much of an effect — positively or negatively — as long as it wasn’t displacing conversations between an adult and a child.

That, however, may be exactly what’s happening in many homes. A study in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that for every additional hour of television exposure, young children heard 770 fewer words from an adult. And, infants watching TV made fewer vocalizations when adults spoke to them.
(more…)