Here's an interesting and artistic explanation of syesthesia by Terry Timely.

Indus Valley script: UW update

A couple months ago I posted on some new research aimed at cracking the Indus Valley script. Well, some modest progress has been made:

Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language. The authors said the presence of such distinct rules for sequencing symbols provides further support for the group's previous findings, reported earlier this year in the journal Science, that the unknown script might represent a language.

For more, check out the story at the University of Washington news site.

Max Planck Society: Computer language recognition

Researchers at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have now developed a mathematical model which could significantly improve the automatic recognition and processing of spoken language..

Scientists hypothesize that the brain is continuously using the environment as an indicator of what will happen next, linguistically speaking. To test this, they constructed a model which worked with a very simplified 'language' (comprised of only 4 vowels and no consonants).

The model succeeded in processing speech; it recognised individual speech sounds and syllables. In contrast to other artificial speech recognition devices, it was able to process sped-up speech sequences. Furthermore it had the brain’s ability to 'predict' the next speech sound. If a prediction turned out to be wrong because the researchers made an unfamiliar syllable out of the familiar sounds, the model was able to detect the error.

Read the full press release here.

Linguistics news roundup

It's been busy lately, so thought I'd just post a few interesting articles which I've come across in the past few days:

Human brain has neurons with a preference for whole real words [link]

Early brain activity may explain neural basis of reading [link]

Songbird study sheds light on the cultural impact of biology [link]

Cracking the code of the Indus script

Even today the Indus script has remains indecipherable, though that may change soon. A computer scientist at the University of Washington is doing a very interesting study which seems to be making progress towards cracking this code. 

For more information, check out this website about Harappa. They even have a Facebook page.

An interesting follow-up and analyis was posted here on LanguageLog.

How Does the Brain Form Sentences?

An article in Scientific American addresses the question above with an interesting experiment with amnesiacs.

[Link]

On the universality of language

There's an interesting study published in the 19 March edition of Current Biology which claims, according to Fritz of the MPI, to explain why "Western music has been so successful in global music distribution, even in music cultures that do not as strongly emphasize the role of emotional expression in their music." This explains why Fritz traveled to remote Cameroon to work with the Mafa ethnic group. "Their studies showed that both Western and Mafa listeners, who had never before heard Western music, could recognize emotional expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear in the music more often than would be expected by chance." Having not read the article, it is a bit difficult to extrapolate the details, but the research indicates that the mode of the music pieces was also significant. "Both Westerners and Mafas classified the majority of major pieces as happy, the majority of pieces with indefinite mode as sad, and most of the pieces in minor as scared ... The universal capacity to identify emotional expressions in Western music is presumably at least partly due to the universal capability to recognize nonverbal patterns of emotional expressiveness."

Link e! Science News