Language News and Research

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Language skills are essential to a child’s ability to communicate and develop. These skills enable children to engage with other people and learn from their surroundings and in the classroom.

Key deficiencies found in brains of people with autism

In a pair of groundbreaking studies, brain scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that the anatomical differences that characterize the brains of people with autism are related to the way those brains process information.

13 Jul 2006

Reading to young children improves language and cognitive development

English-speaking mothers who begin reading to their children at a very early age have toddlers with greater language comprehension, larger, more expressive vocabularies and higher cognitive scores by the age of 2.

13 Jul 2006

Parents not to blame for late talking toddlers

New research findings from the world's largest study predicting children's late language emergence has revealed that parents are not to blame for late talking toddlers.

12 Jul 2006

Researchers discover why brain areas fail to work together in autism

In people with autism, the brain areas that perform complex analysis appear less likely to work together during problem solving tasks than in people who do not have the disorder, report researchers working in a network funded by the National Institutes of Health.

12 Jul 2006

Practice builds brain connections for babies learning language, how to speak

Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher. And experience seems to play an important early role in how infants learn to understand and produce language.

11 Jul 2006

Being "at risk for overweight" really means kids are too fat or obese

Obesity appears to be a problem worldwide affecting millions of people in many developed countries.

3 Jul 2006

Children who stutter face greater challenges managing their behavior and emotions

Children who stutter often face greater challenges managing their behavior and emotions than other children, researchers have found, offering new insight into how to help these children in a more holistic way.

18 Jun 2006

Broca's area and the hierarchical organization of human behavior

Researchers have discovered that Broca's area in the brain - best known as the region that evolved to manage speech production - is a major "executive" center in the brain for organizing hierarchies of behaviors.

14 Jun 2006

A core system for the implementation of task sets

Scientists have used data from scans of 183 subjects to identify brain areas that consistently become active in a variety of cognitive tasks, such as reading, learning a rhythm or analyzing a picture.

7 Jun 2006

Drug adverts aimed at cancer patients difficult to read

Oncology drug advertisements that ran in patient-focused cancer magazines presented the drugs' benefits differently -- earlier in the advertisement text and in larger type size -- than their side effects or risks, according to an analysis by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

6 Jun 2006

Smoking cessation messages miss Asian Americans

Cigarettes are a particular problem among Asian-American immigrants, where smoking has been estimated to be more than 10 percent above the national average.

6 Jun 2006

Moderate alcohol intake helps women think

Research involving more than 7,000 older women found that those who drink a moderate amount of alcohol have slightly higher levels of mental function than non-drinkers, particularly in verbal abilities.

1 Jun 2006

New MIT designed device allows visually challenged to access Internet

An MIT poet has developed a small, relatively inexpensive "seeing machine" that can allow people who are blind, or visually challenged like her, to access the Internet, view the face of a friend, "previsit" unfamiliar buildings and more.

1 Jun 2006

New study shows how kids' media use helps parents cope

Electronic media is a central focus of many very young children's lives, used by parents to help manage busy schedules, keep the peace, and facilitate family routines such as eating, relaxing, and falling asleep.

24 May 2006

Patients more satisfied if they have more contact with pharmacist

Getting hospital-based pharmacists out from "behind the counter" to work directly with inpatients and health care teams reduces medication errors and problems, according to a University of Iowa and Department of Veterans Affairs review of previously published studies.

23 May 2006

New on the web: Independent, updated health information for the general public

The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care challenges the language barriers in health and launches Europe's first bilingual evidence-based health information website.

22 May 2006

Genetic testing can improve newborn screening tests for hearing defects

Researchers have identified several changes that could be made to existing newborn screening tests for hearing defects that could advance the standard of care in detecting deaf infants, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

17 May 2006

Comprehensive analysis of the human and mouse transcriptomes

An international consortium of scientists, including a team from The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), is a step closer to the next generation of treatments to combat disease, after publishing a comprehensive analysis of the human and mouse transcriptomes.

3 May 2006

Good and bad sides of the Internet as it relates to children

Between 75 and 90 percent of teenagers in the United States use the Internet to email, instant message (IM), visit chat rooms and explore other sites on the World Wide Web.

3 May 2006

Visual word forming area (VWFA) of the cortex demonstrated to have an effect on word recognition

Humans have an uncanny ability to skim through text, instantly recognizing words by their shape--even though writing developed only about 6000 years ago--long after humans evolved. Thus, neuroscientists have hotly debated whether an area of the cortex called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is truly a specific and necessary area for recognizing words.

28 Apr 2006