Currently the EU is officially working and speaking in 24 different languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Growing up in such an environment by necessity leads to a great number of people speaking more than just […]
Language Processes
When you chuang to close the chuang because you want to go to chuang: Modeling spoken word recognition in Chinese We noted earlier this week that Chinese is a language without inflection of verbs or nouns. That is, whereas in English you “walk” and Fred “walks”, in Chinese the same word would be used irrespective of who […]
Human beings today communicate in 7,000 different languages. Although many languages are expected to go extinct in the future because there are not enough people left who keep them alive, the ability to speak more than one language will continue to be in high demand. In fact, by some estimates, more of us are bilingual (i.e., speak two languages, […]
Signing a Swedish sound beats catching a ball: linguistic processing in sign language and working memory performance Imagine that you are discussing a familiar topic with a friend in a quiet room. If you are a neurotypical individual, understanding them and knowing what to say next may seem effortless. Now imagine that you are having […]
About 15 years ago, I tried computer speech dictation for the first time. I had a paper to write, and I thought speaking to the computer would be much more efficient than typing. It was a complete disaster; what appeared in my word processor bore no resemblance to what I was saying. Luckily I was […]
What is the connection between the spelling of a word and its meaning? Does the fact that the words “lead” (the metal) and “lead” (to go in front) are spelled the same somehow make them more similar in meaning than they would be if their spelling differed? A recent paper by Peleg and colleagues published in […]
We have no difficulty picking “rat” as the odd one out from the set “goat – deer – rat”. This ready access to semantic structure in our memories supports many essential cognitive capabilities. It allows us to be guided in our current understanding and behavior by prior knowledge and experience. For example, if we learned […]
We all take speech for granted. We are able to say things to others without thinking about how we do that. We may struggle to know what to say when we are left speechless, but once we gather our thoughts, we can utter them without difficulty. Once you consider speech production more carefully, however, it reveals its full complexity. In […]
When the cat barks and the guitar has a bow: Neurocognitive signatures of processing perplexing text “A mouse was looking for something to eat while a bigger animal was waiting to hunt it.” What’s your best guess about which animal was lurking over the unfortunate mouse’s shoulder? I suspect you would be surprised if the […]
There are some 40,000,000 foreign-born people living in the United States today. Most of those people hail from Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean, and their native language is therefore most likely not English. And indeed, it is not uncommon for people in the U.S.—and also the U.K., Canada, and Australia—to speak English with a […]