News

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…

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 researchnews of academic awards or prizesnews of large funding grants.If you…