semantic memory

An imaging study of 10 illiterates, 22 people who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children, has confirmed that the visual word form area (involved in linking sounds with written symbols) showed more activation in better readers, although everyone had similar levels of activation in that area when listening to spoken sentences. More importantly, it also revealed that this area was much less active among the better readers when they were looking at pictures of faces.

Many genes have been implicated in autism; one of them is the CNTNAP2 gene. This gene (which is also implicated in specific language disorder) is most active during brain development in the frontal lobe. An imaging study involving 32 children, half of whom had autism, has revealed that regardless of their diagnosis, the children carrying the risk variant showed communication problems within and with the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe was over-connected to itself and poorly connected to the rest of the brain, particularly the back of the brain.

The role of sleep in consolidating memory is now well-established, but recent research suggests that sleep also reorganizes memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas. In an experiment in which participants were shown scenes of negative or neutral objects at either 9am or 9pm and tested 12 hours later, those tested on the same day tended to forget the negative scenes entirely, while those who had a night’s sleep tended to remember the negative objects but not their neutral backgrounds.

A study involving 120 toddlers, tested at 14, 24, and 36 months, has assessed language skills (spoken vocabulary and talkativeness) and the development of self-regulation. Self-regulation is an important skill that predicts later academic and social success. Previous research has found that language skills (and vocabulary in particular) help children regulate their emotions and behavior. Boys have also been shown to lag behind girls in both language and self-regulation.

Reports on cognitive decline with age have, over the years, come out with two general findings: older adults do significantly worse than younger adults; older adults are just as good as younger adults. Part of the problem is that there are two different approaches to studying this, each with their own specific bias. You can keep testing the same group of people as they get older — the problem with this is that they get more and more practiced, which mitigates the effects of age.

The study involved 13 patients and 14 controls, who listened to either spoken lyrics or lyrics sung with full musical accompaniment while reading the printed lyrics on a screen. The 40 lyrics were four-line excerpts of children’s songs, all characterized by having simple, unrepeated lyrics, repetitive melodies, and a perfect end-rhyme scheme for the four lines. The participants were then given these 40 lyrics mixed in with 40 other similar lyrics, and asked whether they had heard it earlier.

An imaging study reveals that different brain regions are involved in learning nouns and verbs. Nouns activate the left fusiform gyrus, while learning verbs activates instead the left inferior frontal gyrus and part of the left posterior medial temporal gyrus. The latter two regions are associated with grammatical and semantic information, respectively, while the former is associated with visual and object processing.

While most foreign language courses try hard to provide native speakers, a new study shows that adults find it easier when the teacher speaks it in the same accent as the student.

Because Nicaraguan Sign Language is only about 35 years old, and still evolving rapidly, the language used by the younger generation is more complex than that used by the older generation. This enables researchers to compare the effects of language ability on other abilities. A recent study found that younger signers (in their 20s) performed better than older signers (in their 30s) on two spatial cognition tasks that involved finding a hidden object. The findings provide more support for the theory that language shapes how we think and perceive.

Like human faces, infants are predisposed to pay attention to words. Now a new study shows that they learn concepts from them from a very early age. In the study, in which 46 three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired either with words (e.g., "Look at the toma!") or beeps (carefully matched to the words for tone and duration), those who heard the words subsequently showed signs of having formed the category “fish”, while those who heard the tones did not.