News

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 which you can never return t…

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 supply chains, has won £20,000…

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 graffiti; a ‘language family’ s…

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 information in the brain we’ve sh…

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 charity’s work appears to h…

Katie Howard, University of Cambridge; Jenny Gibson, University of Cambridge, and Napoleon Katsos, University of CambridgeBilingual 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 advised that one language may be eas…

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 practical, and real, and of us…

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 dayAnna KorhonenThe system, called LION LBD and developed by computer scientists and cancer researche…

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 school skills with life skill…

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 centuryElizabeth FoysterUntil…

Congratulations to Professor Phil Woodland on being elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Phil Woodland, Professor of Information Engineering, University of Cambridge has carried out pioneering work in the development of large vocabulary speech recognition, both in academia and industry. His contributions include the invention of a te…

To coincide with the European Day of Languages, a major new research project on multilingualism launches its website today (26 September).MEITS (Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies) will seek to "transform the health of the discipline of Modern Languages in the UK, attitudes towards multilingualism, and language policy a…

Researchers from across the University have been recognised for the impact of their work on society, and engagement with research in the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards and Public Engagement with Research Awards.Research at the University of Cambridge has had profound effects on society – it is a formal part of the University’s mission. T…

Researchers at the University of Cambridge are to explore how India can provide a high-quality multilingual education system to primary school pupils.The importance of improving learning outcomes in primary school education has been in focus in India following the Right to Education Act (RTE) in 1 April 2010. One of the primary aims of the educatio…

The University of Cambridge is to launch a major new research project to study the benefits of multilingualism to individuals and society, and transform attitudes to languages in the UK, as part of the AHRC’s Open World Research Initiative.                At a time when more than half the world’s population speaks more than one language in their da…