News

Linguists working at Cambridge and Newcastle have discovered that a certain combination of words is impossible in all languages, despite it being quite easy to understand what it would mean.Linguists have known for many years that, among the world’s languages, roughly half are like English in that they put the object of the verb after the verb in a…

Research by Dr. Bert Vaux (Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) into regional variations in American English as part of the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey has been used as the basis for a short film called Soda Pop Coke. Find out more here.http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2013/11/soda-vs-pop-vs-coke-mapping-how-americans-talk/281808/Y…

A film based on a 2003 survey of U.S. dialects by Dr. Bert Vaux in the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics has just been published. The film uses heat maps to show the distribution of regional variants in pronounciation and vocabulary (for example, the differnt ways to prounce the word 'pecan'; 'soda' versus 'pop').

Cambridge English Centenary ConferenceEnglish language learning is experiencing one of its most dramatic periods of growth, and English is now one of the primary curriculum subjects for many children around the world. It is vital that the assessment community understands this landscape so that it can develop the right strategies, content and assess…

Professor Geoffrey Khan in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies is celebrating the publication of the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, for which he was Editor-in-Chief. This is now the most authoritative and comprehensive reference tool for research on the Hebrew language.http://www.brill.com/encyclopedia-hebrew-language-…

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 the Department of Enginee…

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 was one of the co-developer…

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 about the listening skills …

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 developments within the field.Althou…

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 Anatolian hypothesis suggested that…

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 of heavily-accented speech…

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 in Cardiff to take part in …

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 given neuroscientists a new und…

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 familiar words to predict wha…

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 approaches to enable a computer to g…