Language Acquisition News

February 13, 2025

Top Headlines

Improved Brain Decoder Holds Promise for Communication in People With Aphasia

Feb. 6, 2025 — A new AI-based tool can translate a person's thoughts into continuous text, without requiring the person to comprehend spoken words. This latest advance suggests it may be possible, with further ...

The Benefits of Speaking Multiple Languages

Jan. 29, 2025 — New psychology research indicates that multilingual children may have enhanced executive function and perspective taking ...

Towards a New Generation of Human-Inspired Language Models

Jan. 28, 2025 — Can a computer learn a language the way a child does? A recent study sheds new light on this question. The researchers advocate for a fundamental revision of how artificial intelligence acquires and processes ...

Building Sentence Structure May Be Language-Specific

Jan. 21, 2025 — Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based ...

Latest Headlines

updated 8:59am EST

Automatic Speech Recognition on Par With Humans in Noisy Conditions

Jan. 14, 2025 — Are humans or machines better at recognizing speech? A new study shows that in noisy conditions, current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems achieve remarkable accuracy and sometimes even ...

Reading Signs: New Method Improves AI Translation of Sign Language

Jan. 15, 2025 — A research team improved the AI recognition accuracy of word-level sign language recognition by adding data such as the signer's hand and facial expressions, as well as skeletal information on the ...

Words Activate Hidden Brain Processes Shaping Emotions, Decisions, and Behavior

Jan. 8, 2025 — In a study, scientists have shown neurotransmitters in the human brain are active during the processing of the emotional content of language, ...

Multilingualism Improves Crucial Cognitive Functions in Autistic Children, Study Finds

Jan. 3, 2025 — A new study adds to the growing body of evidence on the cognitive benefits of speaking multiple languages, finding that multilingualism not only ...

Unraveling the Power and Influence of Language

Dec. 23, 2024 — A choice was made to include each word in this sentence. Every message, even the most mundane, is crafted with a specific frame in mind that impacts how the message is perceived. The study of framing ...

Dyslexia Genetics Linked to Brain Structure

Dec. 18, 2024 — Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty in which genes often play a role. How do genes associated with dyslexia relate to brain structure in the general population? In a large-scale study, a team of ...

Heart Rate Activity Influences When Infants Speak

Dec. 17, 2024 — A psychologist found that a baby's first sweet sounds and early attempts at forming words are directly linked to the baby's heart ...

Breaking Barriers: Study Uses AI to Interpret American Sign Language in Real-Time

Dec. 16, 2024 — A study is the first-of-its-kind to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet gestures using computer vision. Researchers developed a custom ...

Mothers' Language Choices Have Double the Impact in Bilingual Families

Dec. 10, 2024 — New research shows that mothers have twice the impact on language exposure, challenging traditional parenting advice. In a new study, researchers found that there wasn't a single strategy that could ...

Could Online Technology Be a Clue as to Why Boys in Norway Are Outperforming Girls in Learning English as a Second Language?

Dec. 8, 2024 — Bucking conventionality, boys in Norway are making early gains in reading English as a second language and even outperforming girls at age 10 and 13 ...

Tracking Other People's Minds in Communication

Dec. 18, 2024 — Language and social cognition are fundamental to human communication. But how do these capacities interact? In a review paper, researchers show how language and social cognition are integrated in ...

Unlocking the Science of Sleep: How Rest Enhances Language Learning

Dec. 5, 2024 — Sleep is critical for all sorts of reasons, but a team of international scientists has discovered a new incentive for getting eight hours of sleep every night: it helps the brain to store and learn a ...

Scientists Discover Shared Genetic Foundations Between Musical Rhythm and Human Language

Nov. 27, 2024 — A study has revealed that genetic variants associated with higher likelihood of rhythm impairments tended to be also associated with higher likelihood of dyslexia. The reverse was also the case: ...

Great Apes Visually Track Subject-Object Relationships Like Humans Do, Study Finds

Nov. 26, 2024 — Great apes track events with their eyes in the same way that humans do, according to a new ...

Your Child, the Sophisticated Language Learner

Nov. 21, 2024 — Sentences contain subtle hints in their grammar that tell young children about the meaning of new words, according to new ...

Hear This! Transforming Health Care With Speech-to-Text Technology

Nov. 21, 2024 — Researchers study the importance of enunciation when using speech-to-text software in medical ...

R Sounds Are Rough, and L Sounds Are Smooth, According to Cross-Cultural Study

Nov. 20, 2024 — People around the world associate a trilled R sound with a rough texture and a jagged shape, and an L sound with smooth texture and a flat shape, according to the findings of a new study. Researchers ...

AI Needs to Work on Its Conversation Game

Nov. 19, 2024 — Linguistics and computer science researchers have discovered some of the root causes of why AI large language models perform poorly in human-like ...

Ouch! Commonalties Found in Pain Vocalizations and Interjections Across Cultures

Nov. 19, 2024 — An interdisciplinary team explored possible regularities in vocal emotional expressions by comparing expressive interjections, such as 'wow,' to nonlinguistic vocalizations, such as screams ...

New Study Sheds Light on Language Development in Children With Hearing Loss

Nov. 14, 2024 — Researchers find a link between early vocabulary composition and later language development in children with cochlear ...

Foreign Accents Protect People from Being Judged for Bad Grammar

Oct. 31, 2024 — Speaking with a foreign accent mitigates the impact of making grammatical errors, depending on the personality type of the listener, a new study has ...

Scanning, Scrolling, and Swiping: New Research Uncovers Why Our Brains Are Effective at Quickly Processing Short Messages

Oct. 23, 2024 — A team of linguistics and psychology researchers has discovered that when a brief sentence is flashed, our brains detect its basic linguistic structure extremely quickly -- in roughly 150 ...

Bilingualism May Maintain Protection Against Alzheimer's

Oct. 22, 2024 — In a study, researchers use neuroimaging methods to examine brain resilience in regions of the brain linked to language and aging. They found that the hippocampus in bilinguals with Alzheimer's ...

Bilingualism Makes the Brain More Efficient, Especially When Learned at a Young Age

Oct. 10, 2024 — A new study from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) of McGill university, the University of Ottawa and the University of Zaragoza in Spain elaborates on bilingualism's role in ...

'Who's a Good Boy?' Humans Use Dog-Specific Voices for Better Canine Comprehension

Oct. 1, 2024 — Humans slow their own speech when talking to their dogs, and this slower tempo matches their pets' receptive abilities, allowing the dogs to better understand their commands, according to a new ...

Automatic Speech Recognition Learned to Understand People With Parkinson's Disease -- By Listening to Them

Sep. 27, 2024 — Listening to people with Parkinson's disease made an automatic speech recognizer 30-percent more accurate, according to a new ...

How Synchronization Supports Social Interactions

Sep. 25, 2024 — Turn-taking dynamics of social interactions are important for speech and gesture synchronization, enabling conversations to proceed efficiently, according to a new ...

Lengthened Consonants Mark the Beginning of Words

Sep. 24, 2024 — Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words from each other with astonishing precision and speed. To find out how this is possible, a team of linguists ...

Reducing the Cultural Bias of AI With One Sentence

Sep. 17, 2024 — Cultural values and traditions differ across the globe, but large language models (LLMs), used in text-generating programs such as ChatGPT, have a tendency to reflect values from English-speaking and ...

Vital Language Sites in Brain Act Like Connectors in a Social Network

Sep. 16, 2024 — When surgeons perform brain surgery on people with brain tumors or epilepsy, they need to remove the tumor or abnormal tissue while preserving parts of the brain that control language and movement. A ...