A new study suggests that the language a bilingual person speaks may affect their physical sensations, including pain. Researchers at the University of Miami tried to discover if the ways we express feelings, such as pain, love, or joy, in various languages resulted in differences in the sensations themselves. They asked, “Would a painful event…
COVID-19 has changed the world irrevocably, forcing the translation and interpretation industry to rapidly adopt digital technology and tools to reduce the disruption of day-to-day operations. Since early March, multinational corporations and international associations have had to turn global, face-to-face events into online video conferences. While frontline workers are undoubtedly the heroes of this crisis,…
The top row shows the left hemisphere brain activity by age with the bottom row showing right hemisphere activity at the same age. Orange/yellow patches are the areas of activity when listening to sentences. Infants and young children have brains with a linguistic superpower, according to Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists, who found that unlike…
Bilingual children and adolescents may grow up with more grey matter, according to a new study published in Brain Structure and Function, in which an international team of academics led by the UK’s University of Reading and the U.S. Georgetown University examined detailed scans of children’s and adolescents’ brains and found that bilingual participants had…
Chimpanzees produce lip-smacks at a speech-like rhythm of open-close mouth cycles, suggesting that speech-rhythm was built upon existing primate signal systems Chimpanzees grooming each other Credit: Catherine Hobaiter In the paper ‘Chimpanzee lip-smacks confirm primate continuity for speech-rhythm evolution’, published in Biology Letters, a consortium of UK-based researchers have found that the rhythm of chimpanzee…
In the largest study to date looking at how infants from across the world respond to the different ways adults speak, psychologists found that babies respond best when adults use baby talk (infant-directed speech or IDS), like “googy-gaga,” “ooh,” and “coo.” “Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference,” published in the…
Neuroscientists have discovered that the human language pathway in the brain is at least 25 million years old, pushing back its evolutionary origin by at least 20 million years. Previously, a precursor of the language pathway was thought by many scientists to have emerged more recently, about five million years ago, with a common ancestor…
While having full-on conversations with babies can seem bizarre, it actually boost language skills, according to a new study. Unlike traditional ‘baby talk’, which typically includes talking with a different cadence at a higher tone using incorrect grammar, (think, “My widdle chiddle muhchkin”), “parentese” is a version of ‘baby talk’ that follows adult grammar patterns,…
These results contribute to the growing body of evidence showing that bilinguals are more resilient in dealing with neurodegeneration than monolinguals. A new study published in Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders provides new evidence that bilingualism can delay symptoms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. Led by famed researcher of the effects of bilingualism, Ellen Bialystok, with…
Study shows Americans are the nationality most concerned about perceptions of their accent and that accents are associated with traits from professionalism to passion! The popular language-learning app Babbel commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct the largest global study to date into perceptions of accents and “accent anxiety.” The research, which was undertaken throughout November and…