Tag: language
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Listening to words…
For humans to achieve accurate speech recognition and communicate with one another, the auditory system must recognize distinct categories of sounds – such as words – from a continuous incoming stream of sounds. This task becomes complicated when considering the variability in sounds produced by individuals with different accents, pitches, or intonations. In a new…
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Μπορείς να με καταλάβεις;
As two people speak, their brains begin to work simultaneously, synchronizing and establishing a unique bond. This is what in neuroscience is called brain synchronization. New research by the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) in San Sebastián and published in Cortex magazine confirms that this phenomenon depends on the language we use…
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Language. Thought. Time. Dasein.
The relationship between language and thought is controversial. One hypothesis is that language fosters habits of processing information that are retained even in non-linguistic domains. Languages, for instance, vary in their branching direction. In typical right-branching (RB) languages, like Italian, the head of the sentence usually comes first, followed by a sequence of modifiers that…
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Sign language. Spoken language limitations.
Sign languages are considered by linguists as full-fledged and grammatically very sophisticated languages. But they also have unique insights to offer on how meaning works in language in general. Sign languages can help reveal hidden aspects of the logical structure of spoken language, but they also highlight its limitations because speech lacks the rich iconic…
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Language. Civilization. Silence. Re-death.
Sixty years ago, renowned Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner published one of the most important books ever written about language. Verbal Behavior offered a comprehensive account of our unique capacity for symbolic communication, arguing forcefully over nearly 500 pages that it was learned rather than innate. The culmination of years of work, it was certainly…
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