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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-called fluency-increasing (FI) condition in stutterers and reduces stuttering by more than 90%. Some of the few, subtle acoustic differences between song and ...
9
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 were the length of the word and the predictability of the word due to contextual constraints. Both cases apply on the word 'the', because it is short and ...
9
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 age. Essentially they may start as slower readers but become faster readers when they are older. See the evidence I found below:
Conrad, Richard. "The reading ...
8
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 something apparently rather difficult more easily than expected. However, the difficulty will be greater for second language learners at earlier stages of study.
...
8
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 on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text.
Because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but as a whole, it would work for any ...
7
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-priming where a target word is primed with a briefly presented stimulus (usually a mix of target's letters). This lead to a model of word recognition that ...
6
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 not enough.
Longer answer:
We do think with our emotional reactions, and we also think with words. When we think with emotions, these are our 'instincts' ...
6
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, our brain undergoes "synaptic pruning", which lasts from childhood into puberty. Basically, the brain gets rid of "unused" synapses to make space for more ...
6
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 conscious effort)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language
2. Learning a second-language
Nearly all babies learn a natural language and some may learn more than ...
5
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 model assumes words were previously encoded with relations between them according to lived experience. Consequently, the words are represented as N-dimensional ...
3
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 ability to articulate language audibly for communication appeared much later. Chomsky claims that the rather sudden emergence of language as communication points ...
3
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 impact of grammatical gender on the attributes assigned to the nouns that have a specific grammatical gender--that is, grammatically male nouns are rated ...
3
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
In 1986, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson drew attention to the central importance of relevance decisions in reasoning and communication. They proposed an ...
3
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 the brain obviously has the ability to invariantly represent different stimuli as being the same abstract concept, not even from stimuli in the same domain (such ...
2
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 study of mirror reading." Cerebral Cortex 8.1 (1998): 1-10.
APA
What are the underlying mechanisms hypothesized by the quoted papers in processing such text?
...
2
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 terms of their sense and reference. You can think of reference as the thing that the word/phrase 'points to' in the world, and sense as additional meaning ...
2
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 al. 2013. Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus
This study (in mice) involved creating a false sense of fear associated with a particular context. This ...
2
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 English is one example of a natural language understanding system that relies on discourse representation theories.
Similarly, there are several implementations of ...
2
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 processes (representations about basic or fundamental characteristics or parameters of the (Vs, representations of related characteristics).
Automatic vs. ...
2
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 perception theories are grouped into two:
Passive (or non-mediated) theories. These theories mostly focus on finding the identity of certain constant perceptual cues ...
2
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 general term for disorders that affect some language modalities and not others, when the cause is psychological rather than physical (ie, not deafness, muscle ...
1
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 complex physics is relating many deep concepts.
Your mind tries to make sense of new information by associating it with your background understanding of ...
1
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, as information is encoded extensively in tone. They are almost complete opposites. There are also various phonemes that occur more often in one language than the ...
1
"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 context of blue-ness (the experience at 10 fathoms below the surface of the sea), and the complexity of expressions incorporating blue-ness is Wittgenstein's ...
1
pretty simple: through direct electromagnetic stimulation of photoreceptors in the retina in patterns corresponding to letter shapes, transduced through layers of processing there, passed through the optic nerve to the lgn of the thalamus and from there to visual cortex, eventually you get a complete neural representation of the text. alternatively, you ...
1
I think you asked a couple of very interesting questions.
Here is my thought to the first question you mentioned.
People have different levels of knowledge/capability on things.
For example, for a toddler who is showing off his/her color recognition skills, it is probably all right to use 'red' for a range of colors from pink to magenta. However, for a ...
1
Another explanation for this is that the centers for speech and singing, respectively, are located in different parts of the brain. People with speech impediments, and even severe brain damage from trauma such as Aphasia or Tourette Syndrome, tend to exhibit damage in the speech areas of the left hemisphere of the brain. The parts of the brain that are ...
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