News

New evidence supports Anatolia hypothesis for origins of English

30 August 2012

A recent study published in Science , and reported by news agencies including the BBC, backs a hypothesis about the origins of the Indo-European languages (including English) first proposed by the distinguished Cambridge archaeologist Professor Colin Renfrew (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) in 1987. Professor Renfrew's...

Making sense of noisy speech

13 August 2012

Recent research by scientists at the MRC-CBU has shown how subtitles not only aid our understanding of speech, but also provide the illusion that the speech is actually clearer. We are all familiar with the huge benefit that television subtitles provide to hearing-impaired individuals, and their use in aiding comprehension...

Milton Keynes to Cardiff (via New Zealand)

13 July 2012

Research by David Willis in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics into syntactic variation in present-day Welsh has recently been in the spotlight in Wales. As part of a long-term collaboration with researchers at Newcastle University and the University of Essex, Dr. Willis has been seeking Welsh speakers...

Reading between the Lines

31 May 2012

Professor Usha Goswami , Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology, discusses her research into developmental dyslexia with the author Michael Morpurgo in the BBC Radio 4 programme Reading between the Lines which aired on Tues, 29 May. She describes how research has...

Predicting sounds helps the brain to recognise words

22 May 2012

New research on listening shows how the human brain uses its own form of predictive text. In a recent study published in the journal Current Biology , three Cambridge researchers at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit , Pierre Gagnepain, Rik Henson and Matt Davis, show that the brain is constantly using knowledge of...

Breaking new ground in Natural Language Processing

3 May 2012

An interdisciplinary research collaboration on computational semantics by the computer science departments of Cambridge, Oxford, Sussex, York and Edinburgh has just been awarded a three-year EPSRC grant of c. £1.5M from October 2012. The research will exploit the strengths of two different computational modelling...

News items wanted!

19 April 2012

Do you have some news that you'd like to share with colleagues at the University (and with the outside world) via the Language Sciences website? The kinds of items I'd like to feature on this page are: research breakthroughs, or exciting new developments in language science research news of academic awards or prizes news...

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