Browsed by
Category: Language

Some neural networks learn language like humans

Some neural networks learn language like humans

Steve Nadis writes: How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from elaborate webs of artificial neurons, ostensibly mimicking the way our brains process information, we don’t know if they process input in similar ways. “There’s been a long-standing debate as to whether neural networks learn in the same way that humans do,” said…

Read More Read More

Your brain wires itself to match your native language

Your brain wires itself to match your native language

Science News reports: The language we learn growing up seems to leave a lasting, biological imprint on our brains. German and Arabic native speakers have different connection strengths in specific parts of the brain’s language circuit, researchers report February 19 in NeuroImage, hinting that the cognitive demands of our native languages physically shape the brain. The new study, based on nearly 100 brain scans, is one of the first in which scientists have identified these kinds of structural wiring differences…

Read More Read More

The ChatGPT debate: Are we intelligent enough to understand ‘intelligence’?

The ChatGPT debate: Are we intelligent enough to understand ‘intelligence’?

Gabriel A. Silva writes: In the 2016 science fiction drama Arrival about first contact with aliens, the movie’s two protagonists, a linguist and a physicist, meet in a military helicopter on their way to attempt to decipher and understand why the aliens came to earth and what they want. The physicist, Ian Donnelly, introduces himself to the linguist, Louise Banks, by quoting from a book she published: ‘Language is the cornerstone of civilization. It is the glue that holds a…

Read More Read More

Why cursing is a healthy feature of human behavior

Why cursing is a healthy feature of human behavior

Alex Orlando writes: Well, damn. Maybe you stubbed your toe first thing in the morning. Or some thoughtless commuter forced you to slam the brakes on the drive to work. Perhaps you’re just fed up with it all and feel like sinking to your knees and cursing the heavens. If you’ve ever suppressed the urge to unleash a string of obscenities, maybe think again. Some research suggests that it might be a better idea to simply let the filth fly….

Read More Read More

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

Stephen Ornes writes: What movie do these emojis describe? That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The simplest LLMs produced surreal responses. “The movie is a movie about a man who is a man who is a man,” one began. Medium-complexity models came closer, guessing The Emoji Movie. But the most complex model nailed it in one guess: Finding Nemo….

Read More Read More

Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

A honeybee is performing the waggle dance in the center of this photo to communicate the location of a rich nectar source to its nestmates. Heather Broccard-Bell, CC BY-ND By James C. Nieh, University of California, San Diego The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings. Scientists now know that human…

Read More Read More

British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

Michael J Warren writes: In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is the ‘swan’s song’, men’s laughter is now ‘the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry’, and the warming tonic of mead is echoed in the…

Read More Read More

Finding language in the brain

Finding language in the brain

Giosuè Baggio writes: What exactly is language? At first thought, it’s a continuous flow of sounds we hear, sounds we make, scribbles on paper or on a screen, movements of our hands, and expressions on our faces. But if we pause for a moment, we find that behind this rich experiential display is something different: the smaller and larger building blocks of a Lego-like game of construction, with parts of words, words, phrases, sentences, and larger structures still. We can…

Read More Read More

The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren write: If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move? These…

Read More Read More

‘Phenomenal’ ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages

‘Phenomenal’ ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages

Science reports: Few places have shaped Eurasian history as much as the ancient Near East. Agriculture and some of the world’s first civilizations were born there, and the region was home to ancient Greeks, Troy, and large swaths of the Roman Empire. “It’s absolutely central, and a lot of us work on it for precisely that reason,” says German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Svend Hansen. “It’s always been a bridge of cultures and a key driver of innovation and change.” But…

Read More Read More

We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

Madeline Ostrander writes: From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions. As a scholar, Albrecht…

Read More Read More

Eastern Ukrainians reject their Russian birth language

Eastern Ukrainians reject their Russian birth language

The Observer reports: Gamlet Zinkivskyi grew up speaking Russian in the city of Kharkiv, just like his parents. But when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, it was the final push for him to switch fully to Ukrainian. “Unfortunately, I grew up speaking Russian, but it’s not pleasant to speak the same language as the army that is destroying whole areas of our country,” said Zinkivskyi, a 35-year-old street artist widely known to Kharkiv residents, who…

Read More Read More

Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences

Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences

Science Daily reports: Humans are the only species on earth known to use language. We do this by combining sounds to form words and words to form hierarchically structured sentences. The question, where this extraordinary capacity originates from, still remains to be answered. In order to retrace the evolutionary origins of human language, researchers often use a comparative approach — they compare the vocal production of other animals, in particular of primates, to those of humans. In contrast to humans,…

Read More Read More

What the Vai script reveals about the evolution of writing

What the Vai script reveals about the evolution of writing

Piers Kelly writes: In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. “Look!” said the spectral visitor. “These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language.” Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed…

Read More Read More

In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’

In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’

Timothy Snyder writes: The City Council of Mariupol, Ukraine, was trying to make a point about mass death. Their city had been hit hardest by the Russian invasion, and thousands of corpses lay amid the rubble after weeks of urban warfare. After the revelation of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other cities in northern Ukraine, the elected representatives of the port city wished to remind the world that the scale of killing in the south was still higher. In dry…

Read More Read More

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

The Guardian reports: Buried in forest litter or sprouting from trees, fungi might give the impression of being silent and relatively self-contained organisms, but a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators. Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech. Previous research has suggested that fungi conduct electrical impulses through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae – similar to how nerve cells transmit…

Read More Read More