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Category: Language

New theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language

New theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language

ZME Science reports: The campfire may have done more than keep our ancestors warm. It may have helped turn ape-like communication into language. For hundreds of thousands of years, fire stretched the human day beyond sunset, gathering people into a flickering circle when hunting, gathering and other practical work had stopped. A new theory argues that this unusual social setting (no other creature could control fire) may have created the conditions for something radically different to emerge: sustained storytelling. The…

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The brain isn’t hardwired to read – here’s how we pull it off and why some are better at it than others

The brain isn’t hardwired to read – here’s how we pull it off and why some are better at it than others

By Mikael Roll, Lund University For an experienced reader, recognising the words on this page feels effortless. Yet, evolutionarily speaking, your brain shouldn’t be able to read. Reading has existed for too short a time to have shaped a dedicated centre in the brain. Therefore, the brain has to learn to read using systems that evolved for other purposes. But it has long been unclear exactly which systems it recruits to do so and how. This is important, as differences…

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Aging brains maintain robust language networks despite cognitive decline

Aging brains maintain robust language networks despite cognitive decline

Neuroscience News reports: As human beings age, many cognitive functions naturally decline. Brain scans have consistently shown age-related deterioration in neural networks responsible for executive functions, working memory, and problem-solving. But when it comes to language, the aging brain tells a completely different, highly resilient story. Barring neurological conditions such as stroke or dementia, most older adults retain excellent language skills. In fact, many individuals experience linguistic improvement as they accumulate a richer vocabulary throughout their lives. A newly published…

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Neuroscience separates logic and language

Neuroscience separates logic and language

MIT News reports: Some people find it useful to talk through their problems — but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say. In research published last month in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that…

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The brain’s language network is more extensive than previously thought

The brain’s language network is more extensive than previously thought

MIT News reports: For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language. However, a new study by MIT researchers shows that language processing also occurs in many other parts of the brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, the researchers identified 17 additional regions of the brain that appear to play a role in language. These regions are scattered across the brain, including parts of…

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Birdsong follows a fundamental law of human language

Birdsong follows a fundamental law of human language

Scientific American reports: The twittering of songbirds may bear little resemblance to human speech, but new research on Bengalese finches shows that their vocalizations do follow a fundamental structural principle found in all languages. Zipf’s law states that a handful of words—or, in this case, chirps, whistles and trills—occur frequently, while most are rare. Specifically, the most common word (“the,” in English) appears roughly twice as often as the second-most common (“of”), three times as often as the third most…

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What happens when a language goes extinct?

What happens when a language goes extinct?

Sophia Smith Galer writes: We are lucky to know anything at all about the Ubykh language. In the 1800s, tens of thousands of people spoke it on the Black Sea coast. When Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs resisted until they were forced into exile in the Ottoman empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatised community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that…

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Ocean voices: Sperm whales’ speech is as subtle and complex as human language, study finds

Ocean voices: Sperm whales’ speech is as subtle and complex as human language, study finds

The Guardian reports: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has…

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We’re speaking less every day

We’re speaking less every day

BBC Science Focus reports: The spoken word is in decline, according to new research from the universities of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and Arizona. Psychologists discovered that, since 2005, the average person has spoken less each year than the year before, by approximately 338 fewer words per day. That’s equivalent to a yearly loss of around 120,000 words per person, representing thousands of lost human interactions. “Small changes in daily behaviour accumulate over time,” said first author Dr Valeria Pfeifer, assistant…

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Ancient artifacts hint at earliest protowriting

Ancient artifacts hint at earliest protowriting

Science reports: In a series of caves at the base of the Swabian Alps in southwestern Germany, archaeologists have uncovered bone flutes, tools to make rope and clothes, the oldest known Venus figurines, and hundreds of handheld objects etched with intricate geometric designs. These engraved items, first discovered in the 1860s, were carved from mammoth ivory and bones of cave lions, cave bears, and other animals now long extinct. According to an analysis published online today in the Proceedings of…

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Chimp sounds trigger a strange brain signal in humans

Chimp sounds trigger a strange brain signal in humans

SciTechDaily reports: The human brain is not limited to recognizing speech from other people. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have found that specific parts of the auditory cortex react strongly to the vocalizations of chimpanzees. These primates are our closest relatives both in evolutionary terms and in the acoustic qualities of their calls. The study, published in the journal eLife, points to the presence of specialized subregions in the human brain that are particularly responsive to the sounds…

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Aphoristic intelligence beats artificial intelligence

Aphoristic intelligence beats artificial intelligence

James Geary writes: The first aphorism I ever read was on the Quotable Quotes page of Reader’s Digest, one of only two publications available in my house growing up. (The other was Time magazine.) I must have been about 8 years old when I came across the following sentence by Gerald Burrill, then the Episcopal bishop of Chicago: The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. At the time, I had no idea what an aphorism was….

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‘Who controls the present controls the past’: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ explains about the twisting of history to control the public

‘Who controls the present controls the past’: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ explains about the twisting of history to control the public

George Orwell’s ‘1984’ has some lessons for 2025. NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images By Laura Beers, American University When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign. It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power. It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past. In his second…

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Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

  NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…

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How the right created its own draconian version of woke

How the right created its own draconian version of woke

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes: One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words. “Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for…

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A word that hasn’t changed in sound or meaning in 8,000 years

A word that hasn’t changed in sound or meaning in 8,000 years

Sevindj Nurkiyazova writes: One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in…

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