Language Trainers Blog

New research conducted at the Aix-Marseille University in France shows that baboons have the ability to identify words. By using different combinations of four letters, the primates are showing signs of being able to recognise which combinations of letters are real words and which aren’t.

They are “actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables,” says the study’s lead research author Jonathan Grainger.

A testing area was installed into the baboon’s play area, with four touch screen computers. A mixture of real words and nonsense words were displayed on the screen, and the baboons had to touch either a green oval signs on the screen for the real words, or a blue cross to signal the nonsense words.  The baboons were free to choose when they used the computers and for how long, but were given treats when they correctly identified the real words.  The study concluded that the baboons identified the correct words three times out of four.

The researchers now believe that the ability to recognise words is related to object identification rather than spoken language skills.

Source: Science Journal

New research from the University of Haifa in Israel suggests that reading in Arabic is more challenging than reading in English or in Hebrew.

“It emerges that the contribution of the two halves of the brain to processing written language depends on the graphic and linguistic structure of these languages,” says Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim from the Learning Disabilities Department, one of two researchers involved in the study.

Each side of the brain, which are referred to as cerebral hemispheres, is responsible for different functions within language interpretation. The left side processes verbal messages, grammar and literal translation, whereas the right side functions to process spatial tasks such as contextualisation.

The results of the study show that for readers of Hebrew and English, both sides of the brain are independently involved in the task of reading. For readers of Arabic, it was found that the right side of the brain was not able to function independently of the left side.

Further information on the study can be found here.

Low levels of vitamin D in pregnant women have been found to be linked to difficulty in language development in children, say Australian scientists at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth.

Researchers tested vitamin D concentrations of more than 700 pregnant Caucasian women, and conducted follow-ups until each child was 17. The most significant language impairment was seen in children aged between 5 and 10 years. Language development impairment which continued into primary school years affected 6 per cent of Australian children.

Lead author of the study, Associate Professor Andrew Whitehouse, said “the developing baby is completely reliant on the mother for its vitamin D levels and what we have shown is that this might have an impact on the child’s brain development.”

The main source of vitamin D is direct sunlight.

The new research was published in Pediatrics journal.

Other peoples’ ability to pronounce your name could affect how successful you are, a new study has found. Researchers at Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences say that easy to pronounce names are generally perceived more favourably when it comes to job promotions, voting preferences and even at school.

The study, which is published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, looks at the “name pronunciation effect,” using surnames from a variety of nationalities. Amongst the easiest to pronounce was Sherman, whilst Farquharson proved more challenging to pronounce. Author Dr Simon Latham claims that the effects can be independent of the length of the name, or how unusual it is.

I’ve always been a little bit fascinated with the words that different languages use to describe the noises that animals make.  I know that these words are affected by the phonemes that each language has at its disposal, but it wasn’t until recently that I realised that the actual sounds that the animals make have regional differences, too.

Last time I talked a little bit about Dr Victoria de Rijke, or Dr Quack, and her studies on regional differences in duck quacks.  She’s also headed up an initiative called The Quack Project, which has collected animal sounds from 15 different languages.  Cutely, the recordings are all of young children.  MP3s in these languages, for cockerel, cow, dog, duck, frog, horse, and pig, are available here.

This page has a list of how you pronounce a pig’s sound (oink in English), from snork in Afrikaans to the quite different ood in Thai.  One of the sounds which brings the most argument and laughs between languages is that of the cockcrow.  Bootstrappin’ has a great post about the differences and a long list of regional rooster sounds, including the Spanish quiquiriquí and the Icelandic gaggala gaggala gú.  The majority of the noises have a hard k sound, like the French cocorico and the Dutch kukeleku.

But how much of these differences are because the actual animals make different noises?  I haven’t found a resource that records animal sounds from around the world, but a Thai language blog has at least compared Thai and American roosters.  Do you agree with the author that Thai roosters need to try harder?

It’s no secret that as well as loving linguistics, I am also a bit of a science nerd.  As such, I’m a big fan of Dr Karl Kruszelnicki and listen to the podcast of his Triple J talkback show every week.  A couple of weeks ago a caller had a question that combined science and language.  He was asking whether or not animals have different ‘accents’ depending on where they come from, e.g. would two dogs of the same breed sound different if one was from Australia and one was from the UK.  Dr Karl’s answer was ‘almost certainly’, most likely related to the environment that the animal lives in, and might even be related to the exposure that the animals have to human speech and noises.

He mentioned Dr Victoria de Rijke, aka ‘Dr Duck’, who has done studies with Middlesex University on the differences between the quacks of ducks in central London and ducks living in the Cornish countryside.  According to the study, pressures of city life and competing noise lead ‘Cockney’ ducks to use loud blasting quacks, whereas the ducks living in the countryside can get away with lower, more relaxed, laughing quacks.   This makes a lot of sense, since ducks all need to be heard by other ducks, but city ducks need to work a bit harder at it.

Another interesting aside that Dr Karl slipped in (I do so love his tangentially related tidbits of information) is that it’s been shown that people are less likely to believe or trust someone who has a foreign accent.  We’re not talking about native speakers from other countries (e.g. Australians vs Americans), but people who are obviously non-native speakers.  This study showed that there was a significant difference in how credible participants thought speakers were, dependent on whether they had a native, moderate, or strong accent when speaking English.  I suppose that if a person sounds less confident in speaking, it may be misconstrued as them being less confident about what they are saying, which often is not the case.  It’s a bit worrying to think that there might be unconscious racism going on just because someone has an accent.  Does that mean that Cornish ducks wouldn’t believe Cockney ducks?

Listen to the original podcast here (the bit about the ducks is around 32 minutes in), subscribe to it here, and/or follow Dr Karl on Twitter.

I was catching up on some of the Dr Karl podcasts on the ABC the other day (I love that man), and he mentioned something about babies crying in their native language.

A smallish study was done with babies born into French and German families, and it was found that the babies’ cry melodies matched up with the intonations found in their parents’ languages, even from the very early days.  French babies have a rising cry melody, and German babies tend to cry with a falling tone, both of which match up with characteristics from their mother tongue.

Apparently babies can distinguish voices in the last three months in the womb, and matching their cries to their parents’ voices is a way to communicate and increase bonding with their mothers.  The parents may not even notice (didn’t you always think that all babies crying sounded the same?), but I wonder if parents would notice the difference between babies ’speaking’ their own language, and a foreign one.

Source: Reuters. Image: nateOne.