News by Subject Social & Behavior

Blinking may feel like an unconscious activity, but new research by Paul Hömke and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, suggests that humans unknowingly perceive eye blinks as nonverbal cues when engaging in conversation. The new study is published Dec. 12, 2018, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

A new study of the progress made over the last 25 years in documenting and revitalizing endangered languages shows both significant advances and critical shortfalls. The article, "Language documentation twenty-five years on", will be published in the December, 2018 issue of the scholarly journal Language.

One of the most obvious changes that comes with ageing is that people start doing things more slowly. Numerous studies have shown that ageing also affects language processing. Even neurologically healthy people speak, retrieve words and read more slowly as they get older. But is this slowdown inevitable? Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have been working to answer this question in their article 'No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing'.

Learning how to read may have some disadvantages for learning grammar. Children who cannot read yet often treat multiword phrases as wholes ('how-are-you'). After learning to read, children notice individual words more, as these are separated by spaces in written language ('how are you').

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) have revealed a link between role-nouns (e.g. job titles) in gendered languages and gender equality. The study, which examined whether the masculine form in the plural in German is understood as gender-neutral or as specific to males, confirms earlier findings in behavioural research: people tend to interpret the grammatically masculine form as male-specific, despite it being used regularly to refer to both males and females.

Upchuck, bubby, boff, wriggly, yaps, giggle, cooch, guffaw, puffball, and jiggly: the top 10 funniest words in the English language, according to a new study by University of Alberta psychology experts. The researchers determined that there are two main kinds of predictors of funniness in words: those related to the form of the word and those related to its meaning.

Researchers at University of Helsinki, Finland, and University College London have found evidence that children with hearing impairment and cochlear implants can benefit from hobbies involving music and especially singing.

Searching through the mountains of published cancer research could be made easier for scientists, thanks to a new AI system.