News

Cambridge to launch new institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA)

18 April 2013

Following on from the English Profile programme, Cambridge English Language Assessment will fund a new institute to undertake research on Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA), to be launched in October 2013. The institute will be administered by the Computer Laboratory but includes principal investigators from...

John Trim, 1924 - 2013

25 January 2013

John Trim, the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and its first Director from 1958-1978, died peacefully on 19 January at the age of 88. Among the many achievements in a long and distinguished career he was Director of the Centre for Information on Language Teaching from 1978-1987, and...

Listen up! at the Science Museum

21 January 2013

Being able to hear small acoustic differences between spoken words is vital for comprehension. Although this may be effortless in your native language it can be very difficult to hear similar differences between spoken words in a second language, particularly if you learn that language in adulthood. In order to learn more...

Voiceprints aren't fingerprints

13 December 2012

Professor Francis Nolan and Dr Kirsty McDougall from the Phonetics Laboratory (DTAL) and other forensic speech experts discuss their research on speaker characteristics in a recent BBC Radio 4 programme. The programme considers the increasing role played by forensic phonetics in the digital age, and looks at new...

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...

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