Birds, whales, monkeys, and other animals constantly demonstrate simple communication through a variety of sounds. But one thing that has always separated them from humans, scientists thought, is that they haven’t achieved syntax—stringing together multiple different sounds to create another meaning, or what we might think of as a sentence. Now, in a study published in yesterday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers argue that they have observed monkeys using these rudimentary rules of grammar.
Klaus Zuberbühler and his team previously established the meanings of specific calls among the Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai National Park of the Ivory Coast, like the sound they dubbed “krak,” which by itself means a leopard approaches. This time, however, they documented call combinations. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix “-oo”: “krak-oo” seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context — when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey [The New York Times].
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Babies pick up their parents’ accents while still in the womb, according to a new study. After studying the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns, researchers concluded that the French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection [BBC News]. The researchers believe that by mimicking their mothers’ inflections, the babies are attempting to form an early bond with their mothers.
Scientists already knew that a baby in the womb can memorize sounds from the outside world, and is particularly sensitive to the melodies of her mother’s language. But the new research showed an “extremely early” impact of native language and confirmed that babies’ cries are their first proper attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers [Reuters]. The data support the idea that crying seeds language development for infants, according to the scientists, who published their research in the journal Current Biology.
To hear the different between German and French crying babies for yourself, click here to listen.
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Image: flickr / chalky lives
A curious experiment has given scientists an unprecedented look into the human brain as it goes about a vital and everyday task: processing and speaking words. The study, published in Science, found that the brain carries out three steps of the task in about half a second, and that all the activity happens sequentially in the same small brain region, known as Broca’s area.
The researchers took advantage of a rare procedure in which epilepsy patients allow doctors to implant dozens of electrodes directly into their brains. While they are awake, the patients answer questions so that doctors can determine which parts of the brain are necessary to maintain language and which parts can be safely removed to treat epileptic seizures [Los Angeles Times]. Three such patients agreed to take part in the language experiment, were given long lists of verbs, and were asked to change some of them to the past or present tense before saying them out loud.
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A new study based on neurological data and brain specimens from a group of nuns, known as the Nun Study, confirms that language skills earlier in life are linked to Alzheimer’s disease risk in older age. But it also adds new, puzzling information to our knowledge about the disease: The brains of the women who did not have Alzheimer’s symptoms had larger brain cells, or neurons, but not necessarily fewer of the plaques and tangles characteristic of the disease.
To assess language skills early in life, researchers examined essays written by 14 women when they entered the convent, looking for the number of ideas expressed in every group of 10 words. A previous study linked grammatically complex writing skills to a decreased risk of dementia, and this study confirmed it: The essays written by women who maintained their memory scored 20 percent higher on language tests. “This is the second independent sample with the same result. We’re back to the metaphor of the brain as a computer and a muscle,” said [geriatric psychiatrist] Dr. Gary J. Kennedy…. “In volunteers who had no signs of Alzheimer’s but did have the plaques and tangles, the neurons were actually larger and more functional with more connections” [U.S. News and World Report].
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Cotton-top tamarin monkeys can distinguish between “right” and “wrong” grammatical patterns, according to a study published in the journal Biology Letters. The findings suggest that humans share the ability with other species to identify certain patterns that are crucial to spoken communication.
Researchers wanted to find out if the monkeys, which do not communicate using spoken language, could recognize grammatical sequences. To do this, the scientists familiarized the monkeys with a series of sounds and patterns. They did this by first playing recordings of humans saying two-syllable nonsense words, and familiarized the monkeys with either a prefix or a suffix. “In the prefixation condition, they heard ’shoy-bi’, ’shoy-la’, ’shoy-ro’ and so on,” explained Ansgar Endress, lead author of the study. “The idea is that they get used to the pattern if you play it long enough” [BBC News].
The next day the scientists played new words for the prefix monkeys, but this time included some words in which the prefix had been changed to a suffix, like “na-shoy.” (They did the reverse for the suffix monkeys.) The scientists hypothesized that when the monkeys heard this “incorrect” sequence of sounds, they would be more likely to look at the loudspeakers from which the sounds were coming, the same way a human would. For example, if a person said he or she “walked to the store,” and then [used] the word “edwalk” instead of “walked,” the listener, used to hearing “walked” might stare at the speaker as if to say, “Huh?” [Discovery News].
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A noisy Italian disco may not seem like a conducive location for scientific experiments, but for a couple of researchers investigating hearing and language processing it was perfect. The undercover scientists studied clubbers who were trying to talk while the music was pumping, and found that they showed a decided preference for speaking into each other’s right ears. What’s more, when the researchers approached clubbers with a request for a cigarette, they found the unwitting test subjects were much more likely to comply if the petition was made in the right ear.
Previous lab studies have also suggested that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out [Wired.com]. Researchers say this bias holds true for both lefties and righties.
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Parents might know that sitting children in front of the television for hours at a time isn’t the best way to encourage intellectual growth. But a new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine shows that simply having the TV on in the background can stifle interaction between parent and child, decreasing the number of words spoken and possibly slowing the development of a baby’s language skills.
Scientists have long suspected that TV viewing can damage early development. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding exposure to television before an infant is two years old, a period when important cognitive changes take place. “We’ve known that television exposure during infancy is associated with language delays and attentional problems, but so far it has remained unclear why,” said lead researcher Dimitri Christakis [LiveScience].
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Researchers have endowed lab mice with the human version of a gene involved in language, and while the mice didn’t exactly sit up and start reciting poetry about cheese, they did show some intriguing differences in both their vocal patterns and brain structure.
Mice have their own form of the gene, called FOXP2, but they and all other animals lack key changes found only in humans and our evolutionary cousins, Neanderthals. Some researchers speculate that these differences may help explain why humans are the only animal able to communicate with complex languages, and not simple grunts, barks or songs [New Scientist]. By tweaking the gene in mice and changing it to the human form, researchers hoped to get a clue as to how our early hominid ancestors were changed by the new form of the gene.
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A computer analysis of symbols inscribed on stone tablets and artifacts more than 4,000 years ago has prompted a new debate on a fiercely contested question: Did the people of the Indus Valley civilization have a written language? According to the researchers who conducted the latest analysis, the answer is yes, and the next step is to search for the grammatical rules governing the language. But other researchers have harsh words for the methods used in the study. “As they say: garbage in, garbage out,” [New Scientist], one critic says.
The Indus civilisation flourished in isolation 4,500 years ago along the border of what is now eastern Pakistan, but almost no historical information exists about the people and their long-lost community. Archaeologists working in the region have unearthed a rich hoard of artifacts, including amulets, seals and ceramic tablets, many of which are embellished with the unusual symbols [The Guardian]. But some researchers contend that the symbols are simply religious or political imagery, and that they don’t add up to a language. They note that most of the inscriptions are extremely short (averaging only four or five symbols), and that few symbols are used repeatedly.
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Toddlers who use gestures to convey more meanings at the age of 14 months have more extensive vocabularies when they enter school several years later, a new study has revealed. “Our findings contradict the folklore,” said Prof Susan Goldin-Meadow, co-author on the study. “Your grandma always told you – if you’re really articulate you shouldn’t have to use your hands at all” [BBC News]. Instead, there’s a clear link between gestures and language acquisition, Goldin-Meadow says.
The effect begins with the parents, researchers say–parents who gesture more when interacting with their toddlers produce the same behavior in their children. But unfortunately, the parental habit is distributed unevenly, researchers say, with wealthier, better-educated parents gesturing much more to their children. This may help explain why some children from low-income families fare less well in school. “When children enter school, there is a large socioeconomic gap in their vocabularies” [Reuters], says lead researcher Meredith Rowe. Encouraging lower income parents to gesture more to their children, Rowe says, might help erase that gap.
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Babies just a few days old can already identify a rhythmic pattern, and their brains show surprise when the music skips a beat, according to a new study. Researchers played recordings that used high-hat cymbals, snare drums, and bass drums to make a funky little beat while monitoring the infants‘ brain activity with non-invasive electroencephalogram brain scanners, and found that newborns respond to a skipped beat in the same way that adults do.
The ability to follow a beat is called beat induction. Neither chimpanzees nor bonobos — our closest primate relatives — are capable of beat induction, which is considered both a uniquely human trait and a cognitive building block of music. Researchers have debated whether this is inborn or learned during the few first months of life, calibrated by the rocking arms and lullabies of parents [Wired News]. While the researchers who conducted the new study say their findings are evidence that beat induction in innate, others argue that the newborns could have already learned to identify rhythmic patterns by listening to their mothers’ heartbeats while in the womb.
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Two groups of researchers seem to have solved the mystery of how and when the first human settlers spread out through the Pacific Islands. One group studied the evolution of a stomach bacteria while the other examined the evolution of language, but both came up with remarkably congruous results. The evolutionary trajectory implied by words and bugs begins with an initial migration from Taiwan 5,000 years ago, with a first wave of people spreading to the Philippines and a second to western Polynesia [Wired News].
In the bacterial study, researchers took stomach samples from people native to Taiwan, Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia and New Guinea. They measured genetic variation in Helicobacter pylori, a common gut microbe that traveled with humans when they first left Africa more than 60,000 years ago…. They found that the [bacteria] from people’s guts in Polynesia and Melanesia–islands stretching from New Caledonia all the way to Samoa–were genetically similar to the samples from aboriginal people in Taiwan. What’s more, the Taiwanese bacteria had more genetic diversity than other populations [The Scientist]. Because genetic mutations accumulate over time, these results indicate that the early Taiwanese people were the ancestors of the other groups that split off over the centuries.
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Female macaques are much chattier than male macaques, according to a new study. The researchers say vocal communication is an important part of macaque social bonding and the findings may reflect similar patterns in the evolution of human language. Klaus Zuberbühler, who studies primate communication, says social animals communicate to resolve the constant tension between a “need to compete and a desire to cooperate” [New Scientist].
The researchers studied macaques living on Cayo Santiago island off Puerto Rico, and for three months they followed a group of macaques that consisted of 16 females and 8 males. Friendly monkey chit-chat included a variety of grunts, coos, and girneys (nasally whines, usually between mother and infant). The researchers counted the social vocalizations, excluding those that were used only to indicate food or predators, and found that females vocalized 13 times more often than the males. Researcher Nathalie Greeno says, “The results suggest that females rely on vocal communication more than males due to their need to maintain the larger social networks” [News Scientist].
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When a male toadfish lying in the mud starts humming a love song to a female or grunting a threat to another male, he’s not only playing the mating game; he’s also giving humans a hint of the origins of language.
Researchers studied the brains of the rare vocalizing toadfish as well as its close relative, the midshipman fish, to see which neurons controlled their production of various sounds. They found the answer in a clump of of neurons that are shared by all vertebrates, suggesting that the ability to vocalize evolved around 400 million years ago, before the first fishapods crawled out of the sea. “I’m not saying fish have a language or are using higher powers of the brain,” [said lead researcher Andrew Bass]. “But some of the networks of neurons, nerve cells in the brain, are very ancient” [AP].
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