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Now we’re talking: Helping young refugees and asylum-seekers build a new life in Britain

25 November 2019

For five weeks over the summer of 2019, a group of Cambridgeshire teenagers took part in an experimental programme aimed at developing communication skills, building confidence and fostering a sense of belonging. The project took its name from an ‘untranslatable’ Welsh word Hiraeth which conveys a deep longing for a home...

2019 Postdoc Business Plan Competition winners: Simon Baker of Versed AI and project leads from Univursa and Cambridge Bioelectronics

Versed AI wins the 2019 Postdoc Business Plan Competition

5 November 2019

Congratulations to Cambridge Language Sciences network members, Simon Baker and Gamal Crichton on winning first prize in the 2019 Cambridge Enterprise Postdoc Business Plan Competition for their early-stage startup, Versed AI . Versed AI, which uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically map...

Museum of Languages Cambridge October 2019

Discovering a world of languages

21 October 2019

A Cambridge-led team seeks to revitalise languages in the UK with a series of interactive pop-up exhibitions designed to set tongues wagging. An Alice in ‘Language Wonderland’ adventure; a ‘Lost in Translation’ untranslatable word challenge; a pool of creatures carrying words loaned to English like emoji, rucksack and...

Mechanisms of real-time speech interpretation in the human brain revealed

1 October 2019

Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how we’re able to understand spoken language so rapidly, and it involves a huge and complex set of computations in the brain. The way our brain enables us to understand what someone is saying, as they’re saying it, is remarkable. By looking at the real-time flow of...

Teaching kitchens

16 July 2019

Thanks to funding from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, a chance meeting with nutrition education charity NNEdPro in Cambridge has enabled Professor Ianthi Tsimpli to take her research out of the classroom and into the teaching kitchens of Kolkata’s slums. It’s food for thought. At first glance, a nutrition education...

A tough linguistic choice for parents of autistic children

29 March 2019

Katie Howard , University of Cambridge ; Jenny Gibson , University of Cambridge , and Napoleon Katsos , University of Cambridge Bilingual or multilingual families have difficult choices to make if their child is diagnosed with autism. While it is certainly possible to be bilingual if you are autistic, many parents are...

Research at the chalk face: connecting academia and schools

25 March 2019

Researchers in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education are working with teachers to improve the experience of learning in the East of England – and boost pupils’ life chances. The projects work because schools in our region, which is very diverse, want to work with us. This is not just pie in the sky, ivory tower stuff: it is...

AI system may accelerate search for cancer discoveries

27 November 2018

Searching through the mountains of published cancer research could be made easier for scientists, thanks to a new AI system. As a cancer researcher, even if you knew what you were looking for, there are literally thousands of papers appearing every day Anna Korhonen The system, called LION LBD and developed by computer...

How could multilingualism benefit India’s poorest schoolchildren?

20 November 2018

Multilingualism is the norm in India. But rather than enjoying the cognitive and learning advantages seen in multilingual children in the Global North, Indian children show low levels of learning basic school skills. Professor Ianthi Tsimpli is trying to disentangle the causes of this paradox. The trick may be to bridge...

painting of Joseph Priestley: theologian, scientist, clergyman and stammerer, about 1797 from National Portrait Gallery, London

Study unearths Britain’s first speech therapists

22 October 2018

On International Stammering Awareness Day (22 October), a new study reveals that Britain’s first speech therapists emerged at least a century earlier than previously thought. It is tempting to think that sympathy for stammering is a very recent phenomenon but a significant change in attitudes took hold in the eighteenth...

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