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In the first few months of their lives, babies cry, babble, gurgle and make a variety of other peculiar sounds. It can be difficult to imagine that they are actually laying the foundations for later speech with these utterances. However, there is a determining element that proves that even their cries can be assigned to a particular language: the speech melody - or, more accurately: prosody. Every language is characterised by specific musical elements, which we call prosody, says Kathleen Wermke. Prosody, in simple terms, is the combination of intonation (melody) and rhythm. Earlier studies have shown that even newborns are able to distinguish different languages, like German or French, using prosodic cues, particularly melody. With the help of these musical elements, infants recognise the respective language long before they are able to perceive its special features such as consonants, vowels or syllables.
A new study from researchers at the University of Ottawa s School of Psychology has found that using negative emojis in text messages produces a negative perception of the sender regardless of their true intent.
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The ability to speak is one of the essential characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals. Many people would probably intuitively equate speech and language. However, cognitive science research on sign languages since the 1960s paints a different picture: Today it is clear, sign languages are fully autonomous languages and have a complex organization on several linguistic levels such as grammar and meaning. Previous studies on the processing of sign language in the human brain had already found some similarities and also differences between sign languages and spoken languages. Until now, however, it has been difficult to derive a consistent picture of how both forms of language are processed in the brain.
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PITTSBURGH The Queen s Gambit, the recent TV mini-series about a chess master, may have stirred increased interest in chess, but a word to the wise: social media talk about game-piece colors could lead to misunderstandings, at least for hate-speech detection software.
That s what a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers suspect happened to Antonio Radi?, or agadmator, a Croatian chess player who hosts a popular YouTube channel. Last June, his account was blocked for harmful and dangerous content.
YouTube never provided an explanation and reinstated the channel within 24 hours, said Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh a project scientist in CMU s Language Technologies Institute (LTI). It s nevertheless possible that black vs. white talk during Radi? s interview with Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura triggered software that automatically detects racist language, he suggested.