Tag: language

2021-22, education, Linguistics

Sing and You Shall Learn: How Singing Enables Easier Language Acquisition

Thumyat Noe ’23 Learning a new language is challenging, but several studies claim that music may improve the learning process. For instance, primary school children with prior musical experience tend to have greater developed auditory working and verbal memories, allowing for easier language acquisition. Furthermore, according to a previous study, singing increased phonological awareness in Spanish-speaking students, yielding an improvement in English vocabulary recall and … Continue reading Sing and You Shall Learn: How Singing Enables Easier Language Acquisition

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General Neuroscience

Bilinguals’ Ease of Lexical Access Related to the Switching of Languages

Sooraj Shah ’24 Over 43% of the United States population is bilingual and speaks more than one language. A skill fostered at a young age, bilingual speakers can converse and switch freely between multiple languages, but the root cause of why and when this occurs is not clear. A study conducted in Spain in collaboration with Stony Brook University’s Psychology Department explored the relationship between … Continue reading Bilinguals’ Ease of Lexical Access Related to the Switching of Languages

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Psychology

Visual cues aid in perceiving accented speech

Priyanshi Patel ’22 Previous research has shown that lip reading helps understand difficult speech. However, little research has been conducted on the role of visual information in perceiving accented speech, a type of difficult speech. Communication between native and nonnative English speakers is very common, especially on university campuses. There often exists a language barrier between native students and international students or instructors or teaching … Continue reading Visual cues aid in perceiving accented speech

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2017-18

Lying is Easier in a Foreign Language

Samara Khan ‘19 As globalization increases, more and more communication is taking place in a language that might be foreign to some of the people in the conversation. Although there has been a lot of research regarding the perceived trustworthiness of people speaking their native and non-native languages, very little exploration has gone towards investigating how people lie in a non-native language. In situations such … Continue reading Lying is Easier in a Foreign Language

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2017-18

Musical Training Found to be Beneficial to Speech Perception

Anna Tarasova ‘19 Music is an integral part of both ancient and modern society and culture. It has long been used for a variety of communicative and expressive purposes. Recent studies have suggested that musical training may be associated with an improvement in linguistic abilities in childhood. The mechanism responsible for this relationship is uncertain, although it may be due to the acoustic similarity of … Continue reading Musical Training Found to be Beneficial to Speech Perception

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2017-18

Biological and Cultural Co-Evolution: The Takeover of Specialists

By Maryna Mullerman ‘20 A conventional view that humans acquired language skills solely through biological evolution was challenged by Bart de Boer and Bill Thompson, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. Their study proposed a mathematical model in which biology and culture played important roles in language acquisition within finite populations. This alternative view argued that biological adaptation changes varied … Continue reading Biological and Cultural Co-Evolution: The Takeover of Specialists

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