CategoryLanguage
Can Chimpanzees Help Us Understand How Human Language Started?
If the capacity for a human mind was present before humans and chimps diverged (if they did), why did no chimpanzee develop one?
Study: Great Apes Point to How Human Language May Have Evolved
What’s revealing in these types of studies is not what the researchers find but what the science media choose to make of them
Do We Need Language To Think? Some Researchers Say No
At one time, it was strictly a philosophical issue but then neuroscientists got involvedA controversy about whether we need language to think pits two MIT scholars against each other: Noam Chomsky (yes) vs. Evelina Fedorenko (no). For a long time, it was only a philosophical issue: Plato saw thinking as a conversation with oneself. If you don’t form concepts into words are you really thinking? Chomsky agreed. But later, neuroscientists like Fedorenko got involved, offering some research findings. Last summer at the New York Times, science writer Carl Zimmer reported, When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic. But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part Read More ›
Can Brain Structure Alone Explain Why We Have Language?
How human languages came to exist is an unsolved mystery within science
The Difference Smartphones Make to People With Hearing Loss
Engineering is not an arm-chair exercise. Engineers mut get their prototypes out in the field where people they don't know will use them in ways they can't imagine
Unborn Child Learns the Accents, Rhythms of Mom’s Native Language
There is, however, a dark, little-told tale about how we learned much of what we know about unborn children today
President Biden Is Not a Yam; Don’t Call Him a “Vegetable”
Using the V-word to describe him — or any human being — is just wrong, and, if I may say, cruel, to people with cognitive disabilities and their loved ones.
Written by Human or Bot? Researchers Have a New Way to Tell
After the use of chatbots surged in 2023, some common words appeared much more often in the abstracts of journal papers, hinting at AI origin
Woke Gobbledygook Now Passes for Erudition in Medical Journals
When science publications run policy bafflegab about healthcare reform instead of statements of hard facts about it— however dense they may be — science is the big loserThis article is reprinted from National Review with the permission of the author. Our most august medical journals are in danger of becoming more woke ideological-advocacy publications than disseminators of learned scientific studies. This is particularly true of the New England Journal of Medicine, which regularly publishes progressive gibberish pushing “equity” that is often nearly impossible to understand. Here’s the latest example. From “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — Focusing on Health Care Equity”: We believe that health care–centric goals — equity in patient experience and clinical outcomes — should be the primary equity-related targets for clinicians, health care administrators, health plans, and payers. The health care sector is best positioned to improve the effectiveness and equity of the care it Read More ›
Are Chatbots Biased? The Research Results Are In
The results are obvious and dramatic. Inject the preferred training materials and the chatbot will “believe” whatever the post-trainer intendedPeople have noticed political biases in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot systems like ChatGPT, but researcher David Rozado studied 24 large language model (LLM) chatbots to find out. Rozado’s (preprint) paper, “The Political Preferences of LLMs,” delivers open access findings from very recent research, and declares: When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. The Chatbots’ Landslide of Opinion As reported in the New York Times, the paper restates that “most modern conversational LLMs when probed with questions with political connotations tend to generate answers that are … left-leaning viewpoints.” Using the verb “tend to” makes the conclusion appear tepid. The Read More ›
What If We Lost the Power to Think Abstractly?
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges depicts a character whose total recall prevents him from using abstractions, though he recognizes their existence
Origin of Language: Still a Mystery, Despite All We Know Now
We aren’t even sure which is the world’s oldest spoken language, though Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese have impressively long histories
Why Animals Don’t Really Have Anything Much to Say
Chicken Whisperers? Humans Learn to Interpret Chicken-ese Quickly
Do People Who Speak Different Languages Think Differently?
For centuries, linguists found that an intriguing, attractive idea but there is no clear evidence for it
Human Brain Tries Immediately to Compensate for Language Loss
Neurosurgeons recently had a unique opportunity to observe brains undergoing the loss of the speech area and compensating in real time
Study: Babies Start Learning Their Home Language Before Birth
Neuroscience researchers found that newborns responded better to a folk tale in French than in Spanish or English — when French was their mothers’ native language
Do Cool Floor Buttons Really Cause Dogs To Talk?
The latest fad in “Talk to the animals” appears to be a classic in confirmation bias