13
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Why does the brain skip over repeated "the" words in sentences?
A study by Rainer et al. (2011) has shown that words are skipped and apparently filled in mentally quite often (in the order of 8 to 30% of times).
Two important factors that increased skipping rates ...
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13
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Why do people who stutter have less difficulty singing than speaking?
Short answer
Singing increases the duration of voiced intervals in stutterers.
Background
Singing is an example of one of the most effective methods to decrease stuttering* (Stager, 2003). It is a so-...
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9
votes
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Do the deaf read faster?
There doesn't seem to be much research on this, but based on my review of the research it appears that deaf people are generally slower readers than non-deaf readers - but that this may be affected by ...
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8
votes
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Is it easy in languages other than English to read a paragraph where all but the first and last letters of every word have been rearranged?
The scrambled words game is very useful in persuading the less sophisticated to take a passing interest in their own cognitive processes! it is intriguing and also rewarding as it shows we can do ...
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8
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Is it easy in languages other than English to read a paragraph where all but the first and last letters of every word have been rearranged?
The neologism used to describe this phenomenon is Typoglycemia.
It relates to the cognitive processes behind reading written text.
Randomising letters in the middle of words have little or no effect ...
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7
votes
Early foreign language experience and ease of learning foreign languages
This is an interesting question. Language development is a fascinating topic!
There are two types of language learning:
1. Learning a natural language (a language that is learned without any ...
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7
votes
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How does the brain generate answers to questions?
The task you're referring to is called the Verbal Fluency Test. In "A Biologically Constrained Model of Semantic Memory Search" by Kajic et al. wherein a neural model of this task is described.
The ...
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Is it easy in languages other than English to read a paragraph where all but the first and last letters of every word have been rearranged?
The ‘jumbled word effect’ is due to the special way in which the human brain encodes the positions of letters in printed words.
Psycholinguists investigate this effect with a procedure called masked-...
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6
votes
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Is thinking with language efficient?
Short answer We do think with 'both', and there is evidence to suggest that we need some sort of conscious representation of our thoughts in order to reason about our surroundings. Emotion itself is ...
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6
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Does language learning improve or worsen the ability to remember and process information?
What I do not quite understand is: What is (according to Syka) "useless information" and how should we "avoid" this kind of information?
Let me try and answer this as follows: During our lifetime, ...
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4
votes
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What are ERP components such as N400?
The semantic N400 and syntactic P600 are some of the most well established ERP components in the literature. They were discovered decades ago and the results have been replicated hundreds of times in ...
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4
votes
Is there any evidence that language is the limit of the world?
First some linguistic theory background.
Noam Chomsky has hypothesized that language developed internally to facilitate certain aspects of human cognition. According to Chomsky's hypothesis, human ...
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4
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Is there any evidence that language is the limit of the world?
This is not quite your question, but it's the closest thing I know of. There's a significant amount of work suggesting that purely morphological attributes can shape conceptualization: looking at the ...
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3
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What are the different theories about how the brain processes speech?
This question is quite broad and since it seems to be basically a reference request, I will suffice by giving some prominent theories of speech perception with sources and references.
Speech ...
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3
votes
What makes something relevant to an argument and how can people improve in determining relevance?
The Wikipedia article on relevance references a couple of books and a few journal articles.
The Wikipedia article says
Cognitive science and pragmatics
Further information: Relevance theory
...
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3
votes
Does the brain generate identical words in different languages similarly?
Here's an article talking about exactly what you are asking:
EEG decoding of spoken words in bilingual listeners: from words to language invariant semantic-conceptual representations
I can say that ...
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3
votes
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Is there such a thing as word synonyms?
Technically no two words are identical, especially between speakers, but the term is still useful. Here's my answer borrowing from a few disciplines:
Semantics:
It may be useful to think of words in ...
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votes
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Is language an abstract concept that is voiced out though a national tongue?
While there appears to be ongoing research and debate on the nature of language in the human mind, some pertinent theories relate to the question here.
At the earliest level of linguistic learning, ...
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2
votes
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Processing Inverted English Script
Are there any good experiments on the phenomenon of processing inverted text?
This is probably the place to start:
Poldrack, Russell A., et al. "The neural basis of visual skill learning: an fMRI ...
- 1,115
2
votes
Text-to-brain literature?
We don't have a well tested or accepted model of how specific items are encoded in the cortex, so text to brain is still far off. However, it is possible to send information to the brain.
Ramirez et ...
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votes
What is understanding of natural language and how can we test or measure it?
Natural language understanding systems can be based on discourse representation theories, which represent the meaning of English sentences as first-order logical predicates. Attempto Controlled ...
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2
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Is there any evidence that language is the limit of the world?
There is this quote from a cognitive linguistics book.
Evans & Green (2006) Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. p. 102
we introduced the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that language might
...
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What are the different theories about how the brain processes speech?
Factors to be considered in speech processing:
Serial versus parallel processing (ie, whether processes are carried out sequentially or processes occur simultaneously).
Ascending vs. descending ...
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2
votes
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Impaired verbal communication, but normal reading and writing skills?
Just a reminder that Stack Exchange is not an appropriate place to get a diagnosis; a vague description of symptoms may indicate a variety of possible outcomes. See a doctor instead. That said:
One ...
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2
votes
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What can be learned from a persistent typing or writing error that happens frequently?
Questions about typing or writing errors come up on the forum from time to time (see example provided in comments). Posters are usually interested in:
Term for describing the error.
Frequency of ...
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how does our brain know how to provide the right instructions to pronounce words?
Children experiment and practice. They produce sounds and then listen to their own sounds as well as those produced by others around them.
Part of this experiment and practice is the stage of language ...
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What are ERP components such as N400?
Just for reference, I'm an undergrad but I'm doing an N400 study currently.
As for your latter questions, since I think the former have been answered really nicely(it is kinda a harder concept, data ...
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vote
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Auditory Processing Speed
A concept has the property of depth, which is basically how much background understanding must be recruited to interpret it. The deeper the concept, the more understanding is required. Sheldon talking ...
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1
vote
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How am I able to distinguish between Chinese and Japanese when I don't speak either language?
Japanese is not very tonal, is spoken very fast, and has relatively few phonemes. Consonants are often followed by a vowel. Chinese on the other hand is highly tonal and is spoken relatively slowly, ...
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Is there any evidence that language is the limit of the world?
"Blue" exists in a context of blue. If the mind presented itself with the linguistic expression (word) "blue" at every perception of the colour blue, then the world is limited to the expression. The ...
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