Category: Hearing and Language

Last Tuesday‚Äôs Independent carried a feature by Lucy Cavendish, mother of one-year-old Jerry, on ‚Äòbaby signing‚Äô: the idea that teaching and communicating with your (hearing) pre-linguistic child via sign language speeds their language development, enhances their IQ and allows them to communicate with you before they can talk. The UK launch of leading baby-signer Joseph Garcia‚Äôs new book also spawned a similar feature in the Guardian, in July, by Lucy Atkins, who also happens to have a baby. The baby signing idea has apparently taken the US by storm, and now, in time-houroured fashion, has come over here to Britain where we’ve got over 100 baby signing classes of our own.

From reading the movement’s UK website, I gather the idea is that babies have some latent linguistic ability before their vocal chords have developed, which they can tap into using sign.

In the spirit of the Guardian’s Bad Science column I did some database searches on Joseph Garcia and he doesn’t seem to have published any research on baby signing, at least not since 1985.

However, the baby signing website says there’s masses of research and cites a load of articles in support of its claims. Most of the peer-reviewed research that’s directly relevant (for example see free PDF here) seems to have been conducted by California based psychologists Drs Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn. Have they got a vested interest? Well, they’ve published over 10 popular books on the subject between them!

In 2003 the Royal College of Speech and Language therapists issued a statement that read ‚Äúit is not necessary for parents to learn formal signing such as British Sign Language for children with no identified risk of speech and language development‚Ķ The College is concerned that the use of signing does not replace/take priority over the need for parents to talk to their children”.

Psychiatrist Victor Aziz has suggested that some iPod users are experiencing musical hallucinations owing to the constant repetition of favourite songs.

Dr Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times article discussing musical hallucinations. This story was touted as ‘brain becomes an iPod’ because musical hallucinations can take the form of complete songs or melodies.

In an interesting twist, however, Aziz suggests the use of personal music players may lead to musical hallucinations in some people.

This is not as far fetched as it sounds. A recent brain scanning study used a technique where songs were silenced for short intervals when played, and showed that the auditory cortex remained active when people continued ‘hearing’ the silenced tune.

The constant repetition of the same music may produce a similar effect, perhaps leading to the hallucinations.

In July’s issue of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry Aziz and colleague Nick Warner reviewed 30 cases of musical hallucinations in older people and found the hallucinations could be very specific and distinct:

The hymn ‘Abide with me’ was clearly the most frequent music heard. In 2/3 of cases religious music predominated, with Christmas music also common. In most cases the music took the form of solo voice (male or female) with instrumental backing. Two people could identify the singer (George Formby and Luciano Pavarotti).

Link to story ‘IPod hallucinations face acid test’.
Link to story ‘iPods could make you hallucinate’ from the London Evening Standard.
Link to New York times article ‘Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod’.

A collaboration between the English department of St Andrews University and psychologists from Dundee has discovered that reading poetry involves deeper thought than prose.

Psychologist Martin Fischer led a team that used an infra-red eyetracking device to measure how often the eyes moved across the page and within sentences, when people were reading poetry or prose.

The poems were in their original format, and the prose was created by taking the poems and removing the line breaks and formatting, while leaving the words intact. This was so any differences could not be attributed to the words themselves.

Among the poems were Shelley’s Ozymandias and parts of Lord Byron’s Beppo.

The team found that the poems took more time to read, involved far more recapping of words and sentences, and less jumping forward, suggesting poetry had to be analysed and considered more deeply than prose to be understood.

The team plan to use brain imaging to discover which areas of the brain are involved in understanding different these different forms of text.

Link to write-up of research from Scotland on Sunday.

The film starts. It’s a calm day at sea and there’s nothing for miles around except for a lone fisherman, relaxing and hoping for a catch. Deep below the water, something stirs. Urgent music starts, your adrenaline starts pumping and you know something terrible is about to occur. Your heart is racing, and according to recent research, so are your temporal lobes.

Neuropsychologist Nathalie Gosselin and her colleagues have been studying the brain’s response to scary music, and has recently published an intriguing study on a series of patients who have had parts of their temporal lobes and amygdala surgically removed, to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy.

Gosselin’s team played the patients various pieces of music and found that although they could recognise peaceful, happy and sad music, their perception of scary music was impaired.

This wasn’t a problem with sensory monitoring of the music, as the patients performed normally when asked to detect subtle timing errors which had been implanted into some of the pieces.

It has been known for a while that the amygdala (which are located in the inner temporal lobes) are involved in the perception of emotion in other people’s faces, and this study shows that these areas may be essential in understanding fearful emotions in music, and perhaps other abstract aspects of the world.

Link to study summary.

A new connection has been found between two of most important language areas in the brain. Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area have been linked to speech production and language comprehension respectively. They were some of the first discoveries that linked particular brain areas to specific mental abilities and are known to be joined by a bundle of neural fibres called the arcuate fasciculus.

Reseachers from London have now discovered that another parallel pathway connects the two areas, although it does not develop until about 5-7 years of age, suggesting that even quite major connections in the brain do not develop until well into childhood.

The pathway runs through an area they have named Geschwind’s territory after Norman Geshwind, the famous American neurologist who theorised that such a connection might exist.

Understanding the connectivity of the language areas is the brain is essential to the understanding and treatment of language problems after brain damage. These sorts of impairments are a common result of serious stroke or traumatic brain injury.

Link to story on newscientist.com.
Link to abstract from the Annals of Neurology.