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.

A new study examined whether young children's verbal engagement with an onscreen interactive media character could boost their math skills. The study concluded that children's parasocial (that is, one-sided) emotional relationships with the intelligent character and their parasocial interactions (in this case, talking about math with the character) led to quicker, more accurate math responses during virtual game play.

Why do some people learn music more quickly than others? Intelligence could play a role, according to a Michigan State University study that investigated the early stages of learning to play piano.

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.

A two-step task commonly used to study people's decision-making behaviors does not appear to be effective for training people to rely more on goal-oriented behaviors and less on habitual behaviors. Elmar Grosskurth of Inselspital University Hospital Bern, Switzerland, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

A new video game framework brings together two well-studied approaches to educational software in order to keep multiple players engrossed in the learning experience while fostering collaboration and problem solving. The framework is one of the first to integrate narrative-centered learning and collaborative learning techniques, laying the groundwork for future efforts in the field.

Communication skills and group work could be taught alongside regular curricula and a structured protocol, which promotes communication, can go a long way to help children with ASD to socialize with their peers, thereby aiding their development.