Scientific American - Language & Linguistics

The Advantages of Being Helpless

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can amble across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its wide-eyed human counterpart takes months to make her first step, and years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope, let alone prepare a three-course meal. Yet, in the cognitive race, human babies turn out to be much like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable: emerging triumphant after a slow and steady climb to the finish. As adults, we drive fancy sports cars, leap nimbly across football fields and ballet stages, write lengthy dissertations on every conceivable subject, and launch rockets into space. We have a mastery over our selves and our environments that is peculiar to our species.

Yet, this victory seems puzzling. In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless . They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival even if they tried. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?

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Better Broadband: New Regulatory Rules Could Change the Way Americans Get Online

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. had some of the best broadband access in the world. It reached more homes, and at a lower price, than most every other industrial country. Ten years later the U.S. is a solid C-minus student, ranking slightly below average on nearly every metric.

Just how the U.S. lost its edge and how it plans to get it back are the issues before the Federal Communications Commission as it prepares to launch the most significant overhaul of network policy since the birth of the Web. As part of last year’s stimulus package, Congress provided $7.2 billion to expand broadband access to every American. It also required the FCC to outline a plan for how to make that happen. The outcome of the FCC’s deliberations, due February 17, could determine not just control over the broadband infrastructure but also the nature of the Internet itself.*

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Listening While Driving Is, What'd Ya Say?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:33:08 EST

We all know that talking on a cell phone can impair our ability to drive (although too many of us do it anyway). Now a study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review shows that the reverse is also true: driving makes it hard to keep track of what we’re talking about.

Previous studies had found that motorists are able to converse just fine. But to Gary Dell of the University of Illinois that finding just didn’t make sense. Because comprehending speech requires attention, as does steering the family sedan. So Dell did a study in a driving simulator.

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How a Lack of Control Leads to Superstition

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

Imagine a time in your life when you felt out of control--anything from getting lost to losing a job. Now look at the top illustration on this page. What do you see? Such a scenario was presented to subjects in a 2008 experiment by Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleague Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University. Their study, entitled “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” was published in Science .

Defining “illusory pattern perception” (what I call “patternicity”) as “the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli ... (such as the tendency to perceive false correlations, see imaginary figures, form superstitious rituals, and embrace conspiracy beliefs, among others),” the researchers’ thesis was that “when individuals are unable to gain a sense of control objectively, they will try to gain it perceptually.” As Whitson explained the psychology to me, “Feelings of control are essential for our well-being--we think clearer and make better decisions when we feel we are in control. Lacking control is highly aversive, so we instinctively seek out patterns to regain control--even if those patterns are illusory.”

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The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts--their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues. A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second language--even one learned in adolescence--affects how people read in their native tongue. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again.

Eva Van Assche, a bilingual psychologist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and her colleagues recruited 45 native Dutch-speaking students from their university who had learned English at age 14 or 15. The researchers asked the participants to read a collection of Dutch sentences, some of which included cognates--words that look similar and have equivalent meanings in both languages (such as “sport,” which means the same thing in both Dutch and English). They also read other sentences containing only noncognate words in Dutch.

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Are Our Brains Wired for Categorization?

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

Picture a living thing--say, a dog. Now imagine a hammer. You just activated two different areas of your visual cortex, the brain region that processes eyesight. Thinking of a dog activates an area that deals with animate objects, whereas a hammer excites one that processes inanimate things. Now a new study shows something surprising: the same thing would have happened even if you had never seen a dog or a hammer before.

Psychologist Alfonso Caramazza of Harvard University and his team found that the visual cortex’s organization around these categories of knowledge is similar in sighted people and in individuals who were born blind. The finding challenges the long-held notion that the two separate processing areas exist solely as the result of learning to recognize the differences in the visual appearance between living and nonliving things, says cognitive neuroscientist Marius Peelen of Princeton University, who was not involved in the study.

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Should Parents Spank Their Kids?

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

Corporal punishment has long been a hotly debated subject, with conflicting study results and opposing ideologies feeding the fire. Now the results of a five-year effort to review the scientific literature are in: a task force appointed by the family services division of the American Psychological Association (APA) concludes that “parents and caregivers should reduce and potentially eliminate their use of any physical punishment as a disciplinary measure.”

Psychologist Sandra A. Graham-Bermann of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who chairs the task force, announced the recommendation in August at the APA’s annual meeting. In a presentation, she explained that the group of 15 experts in child development and psychology found correlations between physical punishment and an increase in childhood anxiety and depression, an increase in behavioral problems, including aggression, and impaired cognitive development--even when the child’s prepunishment behavior and development were taken into consideration.

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How Effective Are Misinformation Campaigns to Manipulate Public Opinion?

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

The assassination of Iranian physicist Masoud Ali-Mohammadi on Tuesday prompted a number of questionable accusations from the Iranian government and media about who was behind the killing, claims that have been countered by sources who knew the victim. [More]

Head Lines: Handwriting Reveals Liars

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:00:00 EST

Murder, She Wrote Handwriting analysis may reveal dishonesty [More]

MIND Reviews: The United States of Tara

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

The United States of Tara Showtime [More]

Do All Animals Sound the Same?

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:45:08 EST

What do a whale and a frog have in common? According to a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, pound for pound, they sound the same. Sounds fishy? I mean, if you’ve ever heard the eerie song of the humpback whale [whale song], you know that it don’t sound like no spring peeper [frog sound]. [More]

Calendar: MIND events in January and February

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:30:00 EST

JANUARY

8 Most Holocaust survivors spend their lives trying to forget the horrors of the era, but neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel , who fled Austria in 1939 to escape the Nazis, went on to investigate how we remember. His groundbreaking research led to a new understanding of how memories are formed, eventually winning Kandel the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work. Now German filmmaker Petra Seeger has profiled Kandel’s life in an eloquent film called In Search of Memory . [More]

Looking for Change in the Beltway: The Need for Open Process

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

When President Barack Obama promised change, he put two kinds on the agenda. The first was substantive change: reforms to key sectors of the economy, such as health care, climate change, financial markets and arms procurement.

The second was process change: improvements to how public policies are shaped and how decisions over public funding are made. Against the odds, the Obama administration is making some progress on the first--but at the sacrifice of the second.

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Alan Alda's Human Spark

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:25:08 EST

Alan Alda, star of stage, screen and science, talks with podcast host Steve Mirsky [ pictured at left ] about his new PBS science series The Human Spark as well as his strong interest in science and long association with Scientific American . [More]

In the Swiss Army knife of the brain, the ability to recognize faces may be a specialized tool

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:01:00 EST

Some people seem to have it all, mentally speaking--strong math and verbal skills, a keen memory and good spatial sense. This gift could be chalked up to good "generalist genes," or genes that affect many cognitive abilities and, broadly speaking, determine intelligence . The downside of generalist genes is that, because their functions overlap, someone who falters at understanding algebra may also be more likely to have trouble learning a foreign language. [More]

Eye Movement May Be Key to Retrieve Unconscious Memories

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

Do you remember how your breakfast plate was arranged this morning? Even if you don’t, your hippocampus might--and growing evidence suggests that there is a way to retrieve this unconscious memory: through your eye movements.

The latest study comes from the University of California, Davis, where neuroscientist Deborah Hannula and her team showed participants photographs of faces superimposed on scenes. Later the volunteers saw the individual scenes again and had to pick the matching faces. By tracking their eye movements, Hannula and her co-workers saw that even when volunteers picked the wrong face, their eyes were drawn for a longer time to the correct one.

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The Next 20 Years of Microchips: Pushing Performance Boundaries (preview)

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

In 1975 electronics pioneer Gordon Moore famously predicted that the complexity of integrated-circuit chips would double every two years. Manufacturing advances would allow the chip’s transistors to shrink and shrink, so electrical signals would have to travel less distance to process information. To the electronics industry and to consumers, Moore’s Law, as it became known, meant computerized devices would relentlessly become smaller, faster and cheaper. Thanks to ceaseless innovation in semiconductor design and fabrication, chips have followed remarkably close to that trajectory for 35 years.

Engineers knew, however, they would hit a wall at some point. Transistors would become only tens of atoms thick. At that scale, basic laws of physics would impose limits. Even before the wall was hit, two practical problems were likely to arise. Placing transistors so small and close together while still getting a high yield--usable chips versus defective ones--could become overly expensive. And the heat generated by the thicket of transistors switching on and off could climb enough to start cooking the elements themselves.

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Alan Alda Looks for "The Human Spark"

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:05:08 EST

“For 11 years, I was the host of the public television series Scientific American Frontiers. ” That’s the familiar voice of Alan Alda, star of stage, screen and science. Now Alda is hosting a three-part public TV series about you. And me, and all of us. “We’ll be trying to get to the bottom of what makes us human. Trying to find that thing we’re calling the ‘human spark’.”

One way to examine us is by looking at what’s almost us. “We’ll be checking in with our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, to find out how the tiny difference in our genes, just 1 percent, makes such a huge difference to who we are and what we can do. Chimps are smart as a whip, but they’re not us. Why aren’t they?”

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Loopy Hearing Aid Idea Brings In Speech Loud and Clear

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

Standard hearing aids capture sound via a microphone and then send an amplified version to an earpiece. They work well in relatively quiet, intimate settings, but in public spaces filled with background noise, most users find them of little use. A simple technology that sidesteps the problem, long available in Europe, has finally begun entering the U.S. market. Advocates hope that with the success of pilot projects, the hearing impaired will be able to find public address announcements and other kinds of speech more intelligible.

The technology is an induction-loop system (known as a hearing loop), whereby electromagnetic waves produced by a microphone, public address system or telephone receiver induce an analogous current in the loop. The loop can broadcast the signals directly to a hearing aid equipped with an appropriate detector--specifically, a tiny copper telecoil wire, which picks up the signal (also via induction) and then sends it for amplification and transmission out of the earpiece. (Hearing loops can also broadcast signals to cochlear implants, which are surgically implanted devices that directly stimulate the auditory nerve.)

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Readers Respond to "The Social Cure"--And More...

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST

Social Exhaustion In “ The Social Cure ,” Jolanda Jetten, Catherine Haslam, S. Alexander Haslam and Nyla R. Branscombe state: “Membership in lots of groups--at home, work, the gym--makes us healthier and more resilient.” But we are not all the same. For extroverts that formula makes sense, but for introverts it does not. Unlike extroverts, who are energized by social mingling, introverts typically find the experience at the least uncomfortable and, more often than not, downright exhausting. [More]