Category: Language Acquisition

Children who play with puzzles between ages 2 and 4 later develop better spatial skills, a study by University of Chicago researchers has found. Puzzle play was found to be a significant predictor of spatial skill after controlling for differences in parents' income, education and the overall amount of parent language input.

In examining video recordings of parents interacting with children during everyday activities at home, researchers found children who play with puzzles between 26 and 46 months of age have better spatial skills when assessed at 54 months of age.

"The children who played with puzzles performed better than those who did not, on tasks that assessed their ability to rotate and translate shapes," said psychologist Susan Levine, a leading expert on mathematics development in young children.

The ability to mentally transform shapes is an important predictor of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course-taking, degrees and careers in older children. Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for the development of this ability, the study found.

Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology at UChicago, is lead author on a paper, "Early Puzzle Play: A Predictor of Preschoolers' Spatial Transformation Skill," published in the current early view issue of Developmental Science.

The study, published February 17, is the first to look at puzzle play in a naturalistic setting. For the research, 53 child-parent pairs from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds participated in a longitudinal study, in which researchers video-recorded parent-child interactions for 90-minute sessions that occurred every four months between 26 and 46 months of age.

The parents were asked to interact with their children as they normally would, and about half of the children in the study were observed playing with puzzles at least once. Higher-income parents tended to engage children with puzzles more frequently. Both boys and girls who played with puzzles had better spatial skills, but boys played with more complicated puzzles than girls, and the parents of boys provided more spatial language during puzzle play and were more engaged in play than the parents of girls.

Boys also performed better than girls on a mental transformation task given at 54 months of age.

"Further study is needed to determine if the puzzle play and the language children hear about spatial concepts is causally related to the development of spatial skills — and to examine why there is a sex difference in the difficulty of the puzzles played with and in the parents' interactions with boys and girls." Levine explained. "We are currently conducting a laboratory study in which parents are asked to play with puzzles with their preschool sons and daughters, and the same puzzles are provided to all participants.

"We want to see whether parents provide the same input to boys and girls when the puzzles are of the same difficulty," Levine said. "In the naturalistic study, parents of boys may have used more spatial language in order to scaffold their performance."

Alternatively, the difference in parent spatial language and engagement may be related to a societal stereotype that males have better spatial skills. "Our findings suggest that engaging both boys and girls in puzzle play can support the development of an aspect of cognition that has been implicated in success in the STEM disciplines," Levine said.

Levine was joined in writing the paper by Kristin R. Ratliff, project director for research and development at WPS Publishing; Janellen Huttenlocher, the William S. Gray Professor Emeritus in Psychology at UChicago, and Joanna Cannon, New York City Department of Education.

The research on puzzle play is part of a series of studies based on observations in naturalistic settings Levine has led. In previous papers, she and colleagues have shown the importance of using words related to mathematics and spatial concepts in advancing children's knowledge.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center)and by the the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words.

The study, conducted by Joan Lee for her master's thesis in linguistics, revealed that those who texted more were less accepting of new words. On the other hand, those who read more traditional print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers were more accepting of the same words.

The study asked university students about their reading habits, including text messaging, and presented them with a range of words both real and fictitious.

"Our assumption about text messaging is that it encourages unconstrained language. But the study found this to be a myth," says Lee. "The people who accepted more words did so because they were better able to interpret the meaning of the word, or tolerate the word, even if they didn't recognize the word. Students who reported texting more rejected more words instead of acknowledging them as possible words."

Lee suggests that reading traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in the colloquial peer-to-peer text messaging used among youth or 'generation text'. She says reading encourages flexibility in language use and tolerance of different words. It helps readers to develop skills that allow them to generate interpretable readings of new or unusual words.

"In contrast, texting is associated with rigid linguistic constraints which caused students to reject many of the words in the study," says Lee. "This was surprising because there are many unusual spellings or "textisms" such as "LOL" in text messaging language."

Lee says that for texters, word frequency is an important factor in the acceptability of words.

"Textisms represent real words which are commonly known among people who text," she says. "Many of the words presented in the study are not commonly known and were not acceptable to the participants in the study who texted more or read less traditional print media."

Most people learn to count when they are children. Yet surprisingly, not all languages have words for numbers. A recent study published in the journal of Cognitive Science shows that a few tongues lack number words and as a result, people in these cultures have a difficult time performing common quantitative tasks. The findings add new insight to the way people acquire knowledge, perception and reasoning.

The Piraha people of the Amazon are a group of about 700 semi-nomadic people living in small villages of about 10-15 adults, along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon. According to University of Miami (UM) anthropological linguist Caleb Everett, the Piraha are surprisingly unable to represent exact amounts. Their language contains just three imprecise words for quantities: Hòi means "small size or amount," hoì, means "somewhat larger amount," and baàgiso indicates to "cause to come together, or many." Linguists refer to languages that do not have number specific words as anumeric.

"The Piraha is a really fascinating group because they are really only one or two groups in the world that are totally anumeric," says Everett, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the UM College of Arts and Sciences. "This is maybe one of the most extreme cases of language actually restricting how people think."

His study "Quantity Recognition Among speakers of an Anumeric Language" demonstrates that number words are essential tools of thought required to solve even the simplest quantitative problems, such as one-to-one correspondence.

"I'm interested in how the language you speak affects the way that you think," says Everett. "The question here is what tools like number words really allows us to do and how they change the way we think about the world."

The work was motivated by contradictory results on the numerical performance of the Piraha. An earlier article reported the people incapable of performing simple numeric tasks with quantities greater than three, while another other showed they were capable of accomplishing such tasks.

Everett repeated all the field experiments of these two previous studies. The results indicated that the Piraha could not consistently perform simple mathematical tasks. For example, one test involved 14 adults in one village that were presented with lines of spools of thread and were asked to create a matching line of empty rubber balloons. The people were not able to do the one-to-one correspondence, when the numbers were greater than two or three.

The study provides a simple explanation for the controversy. Unbeknown to other researchers, the villagers that participated in one of the previous studies had received basic numerical training by Keren Madora, an American missionary that has worked with the indigenous people of the Amazon for 33 years, and co-author of this study. "Her knowledge of what had happened in that village was crucial. I understood then why they got the results that they did," Everett says.

Madora used the Piraha language to create number words. For instance she used the words "all the sons of the hand," to indicate the number four. The introduction of number words into the village provides a reasonable explanation for the disagreement in the previous studies.

The findings support the idea that language is a key component in processes of the mind. "When they've been introduced to those words, their performance improved, so it's clearly a linguistic effect, rather than a generally cultural factor," Everett says. The study highlights the unique insight we gain about people and society by studying mother languages.

"Preservation of mother tongues is important because languages can tell us about aspects of human history, human cognition, and human culture that we would not have access to if the languages are gone," he says. "From a scientific perspective I think it's important, but it's most important from the perspective of the people, because they lose a lot of their cultural heritage when their languages die."

— Research failing to find evidence for the existence of psychic ability has been published, following a year of industry debate. The report is a response by a group of independent researchers to the 2011 study from social psychologist Daryl Bem, purporting the existence of precognition — an ability to perceive future events.

Professor Chris French (Goldsmiths, University of London), Stuart Ritchie (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) collaborated to accurately replicate Bem's final experiment, and found no evidence for precognition. Their negative results have now been published by open access journal PLoS ONE.

Their report was rejected by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), which originally published Bem's findings along with his appeal to independent researchers to attempt replications.

"Our submission was rejected without being sent for peer review on the basis that the journal has a policy of not publishing replications," said Professor Chris French. "Our paper has opened up the debate on the proper place of replication in the scientific literature."

In Bem's experiment, after completing a memory test on a list of words, participants were then shown a random selection of half the words from the original list. Results showed that participants were better at remembering the words they were about to be shown, indicating they had reached forward in time to 'practice' those words in the future.

Within parapsychology, there is a tendency to accept any positive replications but to dismiss failures to replicate if the procedures followed have not been exactly duplicated.

"We went to great pains to ensure we followed the same procedures as Bem," said Stuart Ritchie. "Using Bem's own computer programme and stats methods, we replicated his experiment three times, at each of our respective campuses, with the same number of participants as the original study."

"By having our paper published, we hope academic journals and popular media alike will offer the same weight to negative results as given to eye-catching positive results," said Professor Richard Wiseman.

Being reminded of the concept of God can decrease people's motivation to pursue personal goals but can help them resist temptation, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"More than 90 percent of people in the world agree that God or a similar spiritual power exists or may exist," said the study's lead author, Kristin Laurin, PhD, of the University of Waterloo in Canada. "This is the first empirical evidence that simple reminders of God can diminish some types of self-regulation, such as pursuing one's goals, yet can improve others, such as resisting temptation."

A total of 353 college students, with an average age 19 and 186 of whom were women, participated in six experiments to determine how the idea of God can indirectly influence people's motivations, even among those who said they were not religious. The students did not have to have an opinion on the existence of a god or any other spiritual power. The findings were reported in the online version of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology^®.

In one experiment, engineering students completed a "warm-up" word task. They were asked to form grammatically correct sentences using four words from sets of five. Some students were provided either God or God-related words (divine, sacred, spirit and prophet), while the control group used more neutral words (ball, desk, sky, track and box). Next, each student had to form as many words as they could in five minutes, using any combination of specific letters. The researchers determined the students' motivation level by the number of words they produced. The more motivated they were, the more words they produced. They were told that a good performance could help predict if they would succeed in an engineering career.

Several weeks before this experiment, the students had been asked if they believed outside factors (other people, beings, forces beyond their control) had an influence on their careers. Among participants who said outside factors such as God might influence their career success, those who did the God-related word task performed worse than those who used neutral words. There was no difference in performance among the participants who did not believe outside factors influenced their career success.

Researchers also measured the importance participants placed on a number of values, including achievement. Participants reminded of God placed the same value on achievement as did participants primed with the more neutral words. "This suggests that our findings did not emerge because the participants reminded of God devalued achievement," said Laurin.

A second set of experiments looked at participants' ability to resist temptation after being reminded about God. In one study, participants who said eating healthy food was important to them ate fewer cookies after reading a short passage about God than those who read a passage unrelated to God.

Participants who read a short God-related passage reported greater willingness to resist temptations to achieve a major goal, such as maintaining a healthy weight, finding a long-term relationship or having a successful career. This effect was found only among participants who had previously said they believe an omniscient entity watches over them and notices when they misbehave.

The level of participants' religious devotion had no impact on the outcomes in any of the experiments, according to the researchers.

Journal Reference:

1. Kristin Laurin, Aaron C. Kay, Gráinne M. Fitzsimons. Divergent effects of activating thoughts of god on self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011; DOI: 10.1037/a0025971

 alking with doctors about cancer and cancer treatments can feel like learning a new language, and people facing cancer diagnoses often need help to understand their treatment options, and the risks and benefits of each choice.

"People are making life and death decisions that may affect their survival and they need to know what they're getting themselves into. Cancer treatments and tests can be serious. Patients need to know what kind of side effects they might experience as a result of the treatment they undergo," says Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D, associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and a U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher.

Fagerlin and colleagues have published a commentary in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that outlines 10 things health care professionals can do to improve the way they communicate information about treatment risks to patients. Here, they explain how patients can tap into these same best practices to become fluent in the language of cancer care and better understand their options.

1. Insist on plain language. If you don't understand something your doctor says, ask him or her to explain it better. "Doctors don't know when patients don't understand them. They want patients to stop them and ask questions," says Fagerlin, who is also a research scientist at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare Center.

2. Focus on the absolute risk. The most important statistic to consider is the chance that something will happen to you. "It's important that patients and doctors know how to communicate these numbers, and patients need to have the courage to ask their doctor to present it so they can understand," Fagerlin says.

Sometimes, the effect of cancer treatments is described using language like, "This drug will cut your risk in half." But, such relative risk statements don't tell you anything about how likely this is. Research has shown that using relative risk makes both patients and doctors more likely to favor a treatment, because they believe it to be more beneficial than it actually may be.

If, instead, your doctor told you that, "The drug will lower your risk of cancer from 4 percent to 2 percent," now you know that most people won't get cancer regardless. And it will give you the exact benefit you would get from taking the drug. Fagerlin suggests asking doctors for this absolute risk information for a truer picture.

3. Visualize your risk. Instead of just thinking about risk numbers, try drawing out 100 boxes and coloring in one box for each percentage point of risk. So, if your risk of a side effect is 10 percent, you would color in 10 boxes. This kind of visual representation, called a pictograph, can help people understand the meaning behind the numbers. Ask your doctor to draw it out for you, or do it yourself.

4. Consider risk as a frequency rather than as percentages. What does it mean to say 60 percent of men who have a radical prostatectomy will experience impotence? Imagine a roomful of 100 people: 60 of them will have this side effect and 40 will not. Thinking of risk in terms of groups of people can help make statistics easier to understand.

5. Focus on the additional risk. You may be told the risk of a certain side effect occurring is 7 percent. But if you didn't take the drug, is there a chance you'd still experience that? Ask what the additional or incremental risk of a treatment is. "You want to make sure the risk number you're being presented is the risk due to the treatment and not a risk you would face no matter what," Fagerlin says.

6. The order of information matters. Studies have shown that the last thing you hear is most likely to stick. When making a treatment decision, don't forget to consider all of the information and statistics you've learned.

7. Write it down. You may be presented with a lot of information. At the end of the discussion, ask your doctor if a written summary of the risks and benefits is available. Or ask your doctor to help you summarize all the information in writing.

8. Don't get hung up on averages. Some studies have found that learning the average risk of a disease does not help patients make good decisions about what's best for them. Your risk is what matters — not anyone else's. Focus on the information that applies specifically to you.

9. Less may be more. Don't get overwhelmed by too much information. In some cases, there may be many different treatment options but only a few may be relevant to you. Ask your doctor to narrow it down and only discuss with you the options and facts most relevant for you.

10. Consider your risk over time. Your risk may change over time. "What seems like a small risk over the next year or two may look a lot larger when considered over your lifetime," says study author Brian Zikmund-Fisher, Ph.D, assistant professor of health behavior and health education at the U-M School of Public Health.

If you're told the five-year risk of your cancer returning after a certain treatment, ask what the 10-year or 20-year risk is. In some cases, this data might not be available, but always be aware of the timeframe involved.

Journal Reference:

1. A. Fagerlin, B. J. Zikmund-Fisher, P. A. Ubel. Helping Patients Decide: Ten Steps to Better Risk Communication. JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2011; DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djr318

Word recognition behavior can be fine-tuned by experience and practice, according to a new study by Ian Hargreaves and colleagues from the University of Calgary in Canada. Their work shows, for the first time, that it is possible to develop visual word recognition ability in adulthood, beyond what researchers thought was achievable. Competitive Scrabble players provide the proof.

The study is published online in Springer's journal Memory & Cognition.

Competitive Scrabble involves extraordinary word recognition experience. Expert players typically dedicate large amounts of time to studying the 180,000 words listed in The Official Tournament and Club Word List. Hargreaves and colleagues wanted to establish the effects of experience on visual word recognition. They compared the visual word recognition behaviors of competitive Scrabble players and non-expert participants using a version of the classic word recognition model — the lexical decision task — where subjects need to make a quick decision about whether the word shown to them is a real word.

In a series of two experiments, the authors showed participants words presented both vertically and horizontally, as well as common concrete (e.g. truck) and abstract (e.g. truth) words and measured how quickly, and how, they made judgements about those words. The first experiment among 23 undergraduate students established a baseline i.e. what we might typically observe in individuals. The second experiment compared the performances of 23 competitive Scrabble players and 23 non-expert controls of the same age, to account for the effects of age i.e. older adults are likely to have a larger vocabulary and have had greater exposure to printed material over the years.

Competitive Scrabble players' visual word recognition behavior differed significantly from non-experts' for letter-prompted verbal fluency (coming up with words beginning with a specific letter) and anagramming accuracy, two Scrabble-specific skills. Competitive players were faster to judge whether or not a word was real. They also judged the validity of vertical words faster than non-experts and were quicker at picking up abstract words than non-competitive players. These findings indicate that Scrabble players are less reliant on the meaning of words to judge whether or not they are real, and more flexible at word recognition using orthographic information.

The authors conclude: "Our results suggest that visual word recognition is shaped by experience and, that with experience, there are efficiencies to be had even in the adult world recognition system. Competitive Scrabble players are visual word recognition experts and their skill pushes the bounds of what we previously considered the end-point of development of the word recognition system."

Journal Reference:

1. Ian S. Hargreaves, Penny M. Pexman, Lenka Zdrazilova, Peter Sargious. How a hobby can shape cognition: visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players. Memory & Cognition, 2011; DOI: 10.3758/s13421-011-0137-5

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but clueless copycatting comes at a cost. As anyone who has been subjected to the mocking playground game knows, parroting can be annoying. Yet gentle mimicry can act as a kind of "social glue" in human relationships. It fosters rapport and trust. It signals cohesion. Two people who like each other will often unconsciously mirror each other's mannerisms in subtle ways — leaning forward in close synchrony, for example — and that strengthens their bond.

The benefits of body-language mimicry have been confirmed by numerous psychological studies. And in popular culture, mirroring is frequently urged on people as a strategy — for flirting or having a successful date, for closing a sale or acing a job interview. But new research suggests that mirroring may not always lead to positive social outcomes. In fact, sometimes the smarter thing to do is to refrain.

In a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, Piotr Winkielman and Liam Kavanagh of the psychology department at the University of California, San Diego, along with philosophers Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland, also of UC San Diego, note that in real-life situations there are often observers to the mirroring that takes place between two people. This led them to wonder whether mimicry sometimes comes at a reputational cost. Are there cases in which an observer might actually think less of a person for mirroring the behavior of another?

Results of three experiments suggest that mimicry is more nuanced than previously thought and not, the authors write, "uniformly beneficial to the mimicker."

"Mimicry is a crucial part of social intelligence," said Winkielman, UC San Diego professor of psychology. "But it is not enough to simply know how to mimic. It's also important to know when and when not to. The success of mirroring depends on mirroring the right people at the right time for the right reasons. Sometimes the socially intelligent thing to do is not to imitate."

Participants in the study were asked to watch several staged and videotaped interviews. Some saw videos in which the interviewer was cordial and others saw videos in which the (same) interviewer was unfriendly. The people being interviewed in the videos either mirrored the interviewer's simple mannerisms, such as chin-touching or leg-crossing, or they did not. After watching each video, participants evaluated the interviewee on general competence, trustworthiness and likability.

Despite the fact that the participants were not instructed to watch for mimicry and reported no awareness of it, it still influenced their evaluations: Interviewees who mimicked the unfriendly interlocutor were judged to be less competent than those who didn't. That is to say, in the eyes of the outside observers, the imitators of the undesirable model incurred reputational costs — their unconsciously observed mirroring registered as a kind of error.

In a second corollary experiment, participants were exposed to the same videos but with the interviewer obscured. In other words, they couldn't see any evidence of mimicry, and the results support the researchers' hypothesis: It is not merely interacting with negatively perceived people that has a social cost; you pay a price for aligning with them through body language.

Interestingly, an additional experiment showed that the reputational cost of mimicking an unfriendly interviewer disappeared when participants read positive information about that interviewer — i.e., that he was engaged in humanitarian work — before watching the video. "It's almost as though mimicry of a condescending interviewer was forgiven when he was judged to be good at heart," Winkielman said.

Our social lives are incredibly complex, said Winkielman, and in order to build or maintain relationships we have to keep in mind a variety of factors. "It's good to have the capacity to mimic," he said, "but an important part of social intelligence is knowing how to deploy this capacity in a selective, intelligent, context-dependent manner, and understanding, even implicitly, when mirroring can reflect badly on you."

NewsPsychology (July 10, 2011) — Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language, helps regulate the wiring of neurons in the brain, according to a study which will be published on July 7th in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. The researchers identified this functional link by first identifying the major targets of Foxp2 in developing brain tissue and then analysing the function of relevant neurons.

Foxp2 codes for a regulatory protein that provides a window into unusual aspects of brain function. In 2001, scientists discovered that mutations of the human gene cause a rare form of speech and language disorder. The finding triggered a decade of intense research into the human gene and corresponding versions found in other species — for example, it has been shown to affect vocal imitation in songbirds, and learning of rapid movement sequences in mice.

In the PLoS Genetics study, the researchers, led by Dr. Sonja C. Vernes and Dr. Simon E. Fisher (The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford), gained insights into the functions of Foxp2 within the developing brain by exploiting its role as a genetic dimmer switch, turning up or down the amount of product made by other genes. In their large-scale screening of embryonic brain tissue, they identified many novel targets regulated by Foxp2. Remarkably, many of these targets were known to be important for connectivity of the central nervous system. The team went on to show that changing Foxp2 levels in neurons impacted on the length and branching of neuronal projections, a key route for modulating the wiring of the developing brain.

“Studies like this are crucial for building bridges between genes and complex aspects of brain function” says Dr. Fisher, who is also director of a newly established Language and Genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands. The research was carried out with mouse models, since they can be used to comprehensively analyse genetic networks in a way that remains difficult in the human brain. However, “the current study provides the most thorough characterisation of Foxp2 target pathways to date,” notes Dr. Fisher. “It offers a number of compelling new candidate genes that could be investigated in people with language problems.”

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by newsPsychology staff) from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

1. Sonja C. Vernes, Peter L. Oliver, Elizabeth Spiteri, Helen E. Lockstone, Rathi Puliyadi, Jennifer M. Taylor, Joses Ho, Cedric Mombereau, Ariel Brewer, Ernesto Lowy, Jérôme Nicod, Matthias Groszer, Dilair Baban, Natasha Sahgal, Jean-Baptiste Cazier, Jiannis Ragoussis, Kay E. Davies, Daniel H. Geschwind, Simon E. Fisher. Foxp2 Regulates Gene Networks Implicated in Neurite Outgrowth in the Developing Brain. PLoS Genetics, 2011; 7 (7): e1002145 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1002145

NewsPsychology (July 5, 2011) — An international research group, including of the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid’s Facultad de Informatica, has concluded that collaboration and interaction are essential elements in the evolution of language. They also have shown that the most effective forms of communication can propagate in a community in a similar way to a virus.

The results of this research were published in the academic journal Cognitive Science.

This work provides evidence that supports a collaborative theory of the evolution of language, one in which language evolves out of the coordinated activity of communicators. It also offers evidence for an alternative to present theories that explain the evolution of language based upon the passing of language from one generation to another much as genes are passed from a parent to her offspring.

New experiment on communication

In this work, researchers from the University of Western Australia, the University of Glasgow and the UPM used a novel communication experiment, one that prohibited participants from using their existing language, to create a context in which human subjects could develop simple communication systems in a laboratory setting.

The participants were grouped in communities of eight people, or micro-societies, and participated in a graphical communication game similar to “Pictionary.” The representations that subjects created and used to communicate evolved from simple iconic representations to more symbolic and abstract representations, like words in today’s spoken languages.

The main result of this work is evidence that supports one of the alternative theories explaining the evolution of language, in which collaboration and interaction are critical. Also, it was shown that the most effective ways of communicating can spread through a community like a virus from person to person.

New light on an old debate

At present, very little is known regarding how spoken language evolved. This is largely due to the lack of evidence regarding how early humans communicated. Written language does give some clues regarding how language developed, but our earliest written texts date from thousands of years ago, while it is believed that humans have had linguistic capacities for more than a hundred thousand years.

Thus, despite a great deal of philosophical speculation regarding the evolution of spoken languages, very few facts exist to validate these accounts. This research sheds new light on this old debate.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by newsPsychology staff) from materials provided by Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Journal Reference:

1. Nicolas Fay, Simon Garrod, Leo Roberts, Nik Swoboda. The Interactive Evolution of Human Communication Systems. Cognitive Science, 2010; 34 (3): 351 DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01090.x