Language Acquisition News

June 15, 2025

Top Headlines

Brain-Computer Interface Restores Real-Time Speech in ALS Patient

June 12, 2025 — A team at UC Davis has made a major leap in neurotechnology, enabling a man with ALS to speak again through a brain-computer interface that converts thoughts into speech in real time. Unlike prior systems that translated neural signals into text, ...

Good News for People With Migraine Who Take Drugs Before or During Pregnancy

May 21, 2025 — There's good news for people with migraine who take common drugs before or during pregnancy -- a new study found no increase in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and ADHD in their children. ...

Language Isn't Just for Communication -- It Also Shapes How Sensory Experiences Are Stored in the Brain

May 20, 2025 — Our ability to store information about familiar objects depends on the connection between visual and language processing regions in the brain, according to a new ...

The Key to Spotting Dyslexia Early Could Be AI-Powered Handwriting Analysis

May 14, 2025 — A new study outlines how artificial intelligence-powered handwriting analysis may serve as an early detection tool for dyslexia and dysgraphia among young ...

Mapping a New Brain Network for Naming

May 13, 2025 — Researchers identified two brain networks involved in word retrieval -- the cognitive process of accessing words we need to speak. A semantic network processes meaning in middle/inferior frontal gyri, while an articulatory network in inferior ...

The Origins of Language

May 9, 2025 — Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into ...

Advancing AI for Diverse Applications in Manufacturing, Business and Education

May 2, 2025 — Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) and have been widely used for conversational interactions. However, assessing the personality of a given LLM remains ...

Children's Reading and Writing Develop Better When They Are Trained in Handwriting

Apr. 30, 2025 — Researchers explored how manual and keyboard practice influenced children's abilities in their reading and writing learning process. 5-year-olds were taught an artificial alphabet using different ...

Listeners Use Gestures to Predict Upcoming Words

Apr. 25, 2025 — In face-to-face conversations, speakers use hand movements to signal meaning. But do listeners actually use these gestures to predict what someone might say next? In a study using virtual avatars, scientists show that listeners used the avatar's ...

By 15 Months, Infants Begin to Learn New Words for Objects, Even Those They've Never Seen

Apr. 23, 2025 — A new study by developmental scientists offers the first evidence that infants as young as 15 months can identify an object they have learned about from listening to language -- even if the object ...

Novel Treatment Approach for Language Disorder Shows Promise

Apr. 21, 2025 — Neuroscientists have developed a new treatment approach for a language disorder that combines traditional speech therapy with noninvasive electrical stimulation of the brain. Brain stimulation helped induce neuroplasticity, the brain's capacity to ...

Common Phrases, Not Fancy Words, Make You Sound More Fluent in a Foreign Language

Apr. 3, 2025 — Fluency in a foreign language is often thought to be about speaking quickly and using advanced vocabulary. However, researchers reveal that speakers who use common, everyday expressions sound more ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:27am EDT

To the Brain, Esperanto and Klingon Appear the Same as English or Mandarin

Mar. 22, 2025 — New research finds the brain's language-processing network also responds to artificial languages such as Esperanto and languages made for TV, such as Klingon on 'Star Trek' and High Valyrian and ...

Parts of the Brain That Are Needed to Remember Words Identified

Mar. 20, 2025 — The parts of the brain that are needed to remember words, and how these are affected by a common form of epilepsy, have been identified by a team of neurologists and neurosurgeons at ...

When Did Human Language Emerge?

Mar. 18, 2025 — Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ...

It's Not Just What You Say -- It's Also How You Say It

Mar. 3, 2025 — First study to reveal the brain encodes pitch accents separately from the sounds that make up words. Heschl's gyrus region of the brain, an earlier stage of auditory processing, plays a much larger ...

How Many Languages Can You Learn at the Same Time? -- Ghanaian Babies Grow Up Speaking Two to Six Languages

Feb. 28, 2025 — Africa is a multilingual continent and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study by a psycholinguist now shows that the roots ...

Electroencephalography May Help Guide Treatments for Language Disorders

Feb. 20, 2025 — Electroencephalography (EEG) may offer a more accessible alternative to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for guiding transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) when treating aphasia. ...

Like Human Brains, Large Language Models Reason About Diverse Data in a General Way

Feb. 19, 2025 — Researchers find large language models process diverse types of data, like different languages, audio inputs, images, etc., similarly to how humans ...

A Single Protein May Have Helped Shape the Emergence of Spoken Language

Feb. 18, 2025 — How much does the evolution of human speech owe to one amino ...

Study Maps New Brain Regions Behind Intended Speech

Feb. 16, 2025 — Imagine seeing a furry, four-legged animal that meows. Mentally, you know what it is, but the word 'cat' is stuck on the tip of your tongue. This phenomenon, known as Broca's aphasia or expressive ...

The Complicated Question of How We Determine Who Has an Accent

Feb. 16, 2025 — How do you tell if someone has a particular accent? It might seem obvious: You hear someone pronounce words in a way that is different from 'normal' and connect it to other people from a specific ...

Does Teamwork Fulfill the Goal of Project-Based Learning?

Apr. 7, 2025 — A researcher investigated the impact of the group work environment on motivation in English as a second language classes. The study revealed that the group work environment plays an important role in ...

Improved Brain Decoder Holds Promise for Communication in People With Aphasia

Feb. 6, 2025 — A new AI-based tool can translate a person's thoughts into continuous text, without requiring the person to comprehend spoken words. This latest advance suggests it may be possible, with further ...

The Benefits of Speaking Multiple Languages

Jan. 29, 2025 — New psychology research indicates that multilingual children may have enhanced executive function and perspective taking ...

Towards a New Generation of Human-Inspired Language Models

Jan. 28, 2025 — Can a computer learn a language the way a child does? A recent study sheds new light on this question. The researchers advocate for a fundamental revision of how artificial intelligence acquires and ...

Building Sentence Structure May Be Language-Specific

Jan. 21, 2025 — Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to ...

Reading Signs: New Method Improves AI Translation of Sign Language

Jan. 15, 2025 — A research team improved the AI recognition accuracy of word-level sign language recognition by adding data such as the signer's hand and facial expressions, as well as skeletal information on ...

Automatic Speech Recognition on Par With Humans in Noisy Conditions

Jan. 14, 2025 — Are humans or machines better at recognizing speech? A new study shows that in noisy conditions, current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems achieve remarkable accuracy and sometimes even ...

Words Activate Hidden Brain Processes Shaping Emotions, Decisions, and Behavior

Jan. 8, 2025 — In a study, scientists have shown neurotransmitters in the human brain are active during the processing of the emotional content of language, providing new understanding into how people interpret the ...

Multilingualism Improves Crucial Cognitive Functions in Autistic Children, Study Finds

Jan. 3, 2025 — A new study adds to the growing body of evidence on the cognitive benefits of speaking multiple languages, finding that multilingualism not only enhances general cognitive abilities but also may help ...

Unraveling the Power and Influence of Language

Dec. 23, 2024 — A choice was made to include each word in this sentence. Every message, even the most mundane, is crafted with a specific frame in mind that impacts how the message is perceived. The study of framing ...

Dyslexia Genetics Linked to Brain Structure

Dec. 18, 2024 — Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty in which genes often play a role. How do genes associated with dyslexia relate to brain structure in the general population? In a large-scale study, a team of ...

Tracking Other People's Minds in Communication

Dec. 18, 2024 — Language and social cognition are fundamental to human communication. But how do these capacities interact? In a review paper, researchers show how language and social cognition are integrated in ...

Heart Rate Activity Influences When Infants Speak

Dec. 17, 2024 — A psychologist found that a baby's first sweet sounds and early attempts at forming words are directly linked to the baby's heart ...

Breaking Barriers: Study Uses AI to Interpret American Sign Language in Real-Time

Dec. 16, 2024 — A study is the first-of-its-kind to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet gestures using computer vision. Researchers developed a custom dataset of 29,820 static images of ASL hand ...

Enabling AI to Explain Its Predictions in Plain Language

Dec. 10, 2024 — Researchers developed a system that converts AI explanations into narrative text that can be more easily understood by users. This system could help people determine when to trust a model's ...

Mothers' Language Choices Have Double the Impact in Bilingual Families

Dec. 10, 2024 — New research shows that mothers have twice the impact on language exposure, challenging traditional parenting advice. In a new study, researchers found that there wasn't a single strategy that ...

Could Online Technology Be a Clue as to Why Boys in Norway Are Outperforming Girls in Learning English as a Second Language?

Dec. 8, 2024 — Bucking conventionality, boys in Norway are making early gains in reading English as a second language and even outperforming girls at age 10 and 13 -- a new a study of more than one million students ...

Unlocking the Science of Sleep: How Rest Enhances Language Learning

Dec. 5, 2024 — Sleep is critical for all sorts of reasons, but a team of international scientists has discovered a new incentive for getting eight hours of sleep every night: it helps the brain to store and learn a ...

Scientists Discover Shared Genetic Foundations Between Musical Rhythm and Human Language

Nov. 27, 2024 — A study has revealed that genetic variants associated with higher likelihood of rhythm impairments tended to be also associated with higher likelihood of dyslexia. The reverse was also the case: ...

Great Apes Visually Track Subject-Object Relationships Like Humans Do, Study Finds

Nov. 26, 2024 — Great apes track events with their eyes in the same way that humans do, according to a new ...