News by Subject Social & Behavior

Neuroscientists at UC San Francisco have discovered how the listening brain scans speech to break it down into syllables. The findings provide for the first time a neural basis for the fundamental atoms of language and insights into our perception of the rhythmic poetry of speech.

Linguistic research suggests that accents are strongly shaped by the speaker's first language they learned growing up. New research from an international collaboration between the University of Rochester and universities in Germany and Holland sheds light on just how strong these effects can be. This work is the first to evaluate these effects on a large scale and may lead to novel methods of instruction for adults learning to speak foreign languages.

Some children learn to read early. Others need more time. But we can do some things to help them, and one of them is important to do first.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and elsewhere report in Brain that the left lateral temporal cortex must be intact in stroke patients with aphasia if they are to have their speech entrained. In speech entrainment, stroke survivors practice fluent speech production by following along with another speaker. The efficacy of this experimental approach for certain patients with non-fluent aphasia will be assessed by an MUSC-led multi-site trial.

Toddler speech delays and temper tantrums have long been assumed to be linked. Now, for the first time, a new, large-scale study supports that assumption with data.

This study of patients from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds who received care at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system looked at how common attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses were over a 10-year period across seven racial/ethnic groups.