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Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language. While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages. "Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i

In fear of being left behind, China wanted to modernize their language to keep up with the rest of the world. This article considers how the political climate and technological advancements impacted the modernization and simplification of characters and phonetic writing of the pronunciation.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Musicians have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. In contrast, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds amid the din. Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first. Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said at the press briefing.

Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

Brain imaging studies have explored the neural mechanisms of recovery in adults following acquired disorders and, more recently, childhood developmental disorders. However, the neural systems underlying adult rehabilitation of neurobiologically based learning disabilities remain unexplored, despite their high incidence. Here we characterize the differences in brain activity during a phonological manipulation task before and after a behavioral intervention in adults with developmental dyslexia. Phonologically targeted training resulted in performance improvements in tutored compared to nontutored dyslexics, and these gains were associated with signal increases in bilateral parietal and right perisylvian cortices. Our findings demonstrate that behavioral changes in tutored dyslexic adults are associated with (1) increased activity in those left-hemisphere regions engaged by normal readers and (2) compensatory activity in the right perisylvian cortex. Hence, behavioral plasticity in adult developmental dyslexia involves two distinct neural mechanisms, each of which has previously been observed either for remediation of developmental or acquired reading disorders.

Like a human's brain, a dog's brain responds to the meaning of a word and how the word is said. And like with a human's brain, the dog's left hemisphere reacts to meaning and the right hemisphere reacts to intonation. In the study, words were said to dogs in positive and neutral tones, but only positive words spoken in a positive tone prompted strong activity in the brain's reward center. This study suggested that non-primates could process meaning and emotion long before humans could talk.

This article talks about the evolution of profanity and how certain words came to be classified as taboo. Researchers have found that cursing, is a human universal. Every language studied, living or dead, have all left traces of forbidden speech. They have also discovered that cursing is often a mixture of raw, spontaneous feelings, as they are oftentimes used to place emphasis on a specific word or sentence.

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

We each absorb select scenes in our environment through which we interpret a situation, creating our own reality by that to which we give attention. Our brain naturally tries to process what could otherwise be overwhelming amounts of information, by reducing it to a simplified story. However, because that story is based on a small sliver of reality, our perception may be incorrect. Thought holes, or cognitive distortions, are skewed perceptions of reality. They are negative interpretations of a situation based on poor assumptions. Studies show self-defeating thoughts (i.e., "I'm a loser") can trigger self-defeating emotions (i.e., pain, anxiety, malaise) that, in turn, cause self-defeating actions (i.e., acting out, skipping school). Left unchecked, this tendency can also lead to more severe conditions, such as depression and anxiety. Accurate thinking--identifying and recognizing one's false assumptions--can help reduce negative thinking. Here are 8 common thought holes: 1. Jumping to conclusions: judging a situation based on assumptions as opposed to definitive facts 2. Mental filtering: paying attention to the negative details in a situation while ignoring the positive 3. Magnifying: magnifying negative aspects in a situation 4. Minimizing: minimizing positive aspects in a situation 5. Personalizing: assuming the blame for problems even when you are not primarily responsible 6. Externalizing: pushing the blame for problems onto others even when you are primarily responsible 7. Overgeneralizing: concluding that one bad incident will lead to a repeated pattern of defeat 8. Emotional reasoning: assuming your negative emotions translate into reality, or confusing feelings with facts

Making specific references to print in books while reading to children -- such as pointing out letters and words on the pages, showing capital letters, and showing how you read from left to right and top to bottom on the page--promotes greater literacy achievement in the long-term.

"Catholics throughout the English-speaking world on Sunday left behind words they have prayed for nearly four decades... The new translation, which alters some of the most familiar phrases of the Catholic liturgy, is praised by church officials as more authentic, more faithful, more accurate, and more reverential. ... [and] bemoaned by critics as being too slavish to the Latin, and in the process abandoning some of the ecumenical goals that influenced the last translation... And the Vatican rejected efforts to make the text more gender-neutral in places, sticking with the male pronouns used in Latin."

"...scientists found that different toddler sounds - or "vocalizations" - emerge and fade in a definite rhythm in the course of a tantrum. "We have the most quantitative theory of tantrums that has ever been developed in the history of humankind" ... where one age-old theory of tantrums might suggest that meltdowns begin in anger (yells and screams) and end in sadness (cries and whimpers), Potegal found that the two emotions were more deeply intertwined. ... The trick in getting a tantrum to end as soon as possible, Potegal said, was to get the child past the peaks of anger. Once the child was past being angry, what was left was sadness, and sad children reach out for comfort. The quickest way past the anger, the scientists said, was to do nothing."

"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games ... The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional Stroop task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting Stroop task."

Actually, there are some studies just about emotional Stroop tests that sound similar to the one in the violent video games study. This looks like a good presentation about how emotional Stroop tests work: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/Emotion1.pdf This one talks about why those Stroop tests work: "In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology.The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition." - http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/papers/stickiness/WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf This is a meta-analysis of emotional Stroop test studies that describes (actually, it's critical of) how such studies are done: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/coglab/publications/LarsenMercerBalota2006.pdf

Thanks, Ryan! I will take a look at these.

According to research led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, a region of the brain known as the angular gyrus is probably at least partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor. Ramachandran and colleagues tested four right-handed patients with damage to the left angular gyrus. Fluent in English and otherwise intelligent and mentally lucid, the patients showed gross deficits in comprehending such common proverbs as "the grass is always greener on the other side" and "an empty vessel makes more noise." Asked to explain the sayings, the patients tended give responses that were literal. The metaphorical meaning escaped them almost entirely.

Dyslexia stems from physiological differences in the brain circuitry. Those differences can make it harder, and less efficient, for children to process the tiny components of language, called phonemes. Using cutting-edge MRI technology, the researchers are able to pinpoint a specific neural pathway, a white matter tract in the brain's left hemisphere that appears to be related to dyslexia: It's called the arcuate fasciculus. "It's an arch-shaped bundle of fibers that connects the frontal language areas of the brain to the areas in the temporal lobe that are important for language," Elizabeth Norton, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute of Brain Research, explains.

Language-lovers and locals of an isolated mining region of the Ozarks are scrambling to preserve what's left of a dialect known as Pawpaw French before it fades. The dialect once dominated this community in southeastern Missouri, but due to stigmatization, is dying out. Pawpaw French - named after a local fruit-bearing tree - is a linguistic bridge that melds a Canadian French accent with a Louisiana French vocabulary.