News by Subject Social & Behavior

A study from the University of York found that children from families of higher socioeconomic status had better language abilities at nursery school age and that these verbal skills boosted their later academic performance throughout school.

Expressive language sampling yielded five language-related outcome measures that may be useful for treatment studies in intellectual disabilities, especially fragile X syndrome. The measures were generally valid and reliable across the range of ages, IQs and autism symptom severity of participants. According to the study, led by UC Davis researchers and funded by NIH, the measures are also functional in supporting treatments that can improve language, providing far reaching benefits for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Researchers combined the results of 42 studies in this analysis to examine associations between the quantity, quality and onset of screen use by children and language skills.

Informations on health topics in Internet forums are often so complex that laypersons are barely able to form considered judgements on the advice. One criterion which users apply instead in evaluating the information is the style of the language used. This is the result of the research carried out by psychologists at the University of Münster. The study has been published in the "Journal of Medical Internet Research".

A particular neuronal circuit in the brains of bats controls their vocalisations. This was recently discovered by biologists at Goethe University Frankfurt. Based on the rhythm with which the circuit oscillated, the Frankfurt researchers were able to predict the kind of sounds the bats were about to make. These research results could contribute to a better understanding of human diseases in which language is impaired such as Parkinson's or Tourette syndrome.

Even before uttering their first words, babies master the grammar basics of their mother tongue. Thus eight-month-old French infants can distinguish function words, or functors -- e.g. articles (the), personal pronouns (she), or prepositions (on) -- from content words -- e.g. nouns (rainbow), verbs (to drive), or adjectives (green), according to researchers from the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (CNRS/Université de Paris).

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, has awarded £426,000 to the University of Surrey to undertake a ground-breaking investigation into interlingual live subtitling via respeaking.

In some cases of ineffective messaging, it might be appropriate, despite the aphorism to the contrary, to blame the messenger. "Our findings suggest that telling stories when communicating can make the speaker appear more warm and trustworthy, as opposed to... providing only statistics and figures," says UB researcher

A relatively new theory that identifies universal concerns underlying human judgment could be key to helping people with opposing views on an issue coax each other to a different way of thinking, new research suggests.

Young children from low-income homes whose mothers reported frequent use of toxic chemicals such as household cleaners were more likely to show delays in language development by age 2, a new study found.