News by Subject Social & Behavior

Human and avian youngsters learn behaviors by imitating adults. But learners are selective in who they copy, and scientists don't understand how they choose the right teacher. Young male zebra finches must learn to copy the song of an adult male to mate, but juveniles won't imitate songs played through a loudspeaker or sung by other species of birds. New findings from Duke University scientists show how the juvenile birds identify the right teacher.

An international team of researchers, members of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats Initiative (CLDF) led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has set out a proposal for new guidelines on cross-linguistic data formats, in order to facilitate sharing and data comparisons between the growing number of large linguistic databases worldwide. This format provides a software package, a basic ontology and usage examples.

Experimental results suggest that dogs have at least a rudimentary neural representation of meaning for words they have been taught, differentiating words they have heard before from those they have not.

The genetic diversity of peoples of the Ural language family living in Europe and Siberia are strongly influenced by a geography. However, the genetics from Estonia and Russia found common genetic component in Ural-speaking populations. Presumably, it originated from West Siberia. This means that the Ural family languages have spread over a wide area due to population migrations.

New University of Sydney research shows bottles, dummies, and thumb sucking in the early years of life do not cause or worsen phonological impairment, the most common type of speech disorder in children.