̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - linguistics

Why animals talk

lkm37 — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:51:54 +0000

Dr Arik Kershenbaum listens to wolves, gibbons and dolphins to reveal the messages they send one another. His work challenges our assumptions about what animals are capable of, and affirms what makes humans truly unique.

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

jg533 — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:00:00 +0000

In a study published today in the journal PNAS, researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge developed novel computational models of the meanings of words, and tested these directly against real-time brain activity in volunteers.

“Our ability to put words into context, depending on the other words around them, is an immediate process and it’s thanks to the best computer we’ve ever known: the brain in our head. It’s something we haven’t yet managed to fully replicate in computers because it is still so poorly understood,” said Lorraine Tyler, Director of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which ran the study.

Central to understanding speech are the processes involved in what is known as ‘semantic composition’ – in which the brain combines the meaning of words in a sentence as they are heard, so that they make sense in the context of what has already been said. This new study has revealed the detailed real-time processes going on inside the brain that make this possible.

By saying the phrase: “the elderly man ate the apple” and watching how the volunteers’ brains responded, the researchers could track the dynamic patterns of information flow between critical language regions in the brain.

As the word ‘eat’ is heard, it primes the brain to put constraints on how it interprets the next word in the sentence: ‘eat’ is likely to be something to do with food. ̽��ֱ��study shows how these constraints directly affect how the meaning of the next word in the sentence is understood, revealing the neural mechanisms underpinning this essential property of spoken language – our ability to combine sequences of words into meaningful expressions, millisecond by millisecond as the speech is heard.

“ ̽��ֱ��way our brain enables us to understand what someone is saying, as they’re saying it, is remarkable,” said Professor Tyler. “By looking at the real-time flow of information in the brain we’ve shown how word meanings are being rapidly interpreted and put into context.”

This research is funded by the European Research Council.

Reference
Lyu, B. et al; Neural dynamics of semantic composition. PNAS (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1903402116

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.

̽��ֱ��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 shown how word meanings are being rapidly interpreted and put into context.

Lorraine Tyler

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AI system may accelerate search for cancer discoveries

sc604 — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 12:09:25 +0000

̽��ֱ��system, called LION LBD and developed by computer scientists and cancer researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has been designed to assist scientists in the search for cancer-related discoveries. It is the first literature-based discovery system aimed at supporting cancer research. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Bioinformatics.

Global cancer research attracts massive amounts of funding worldwide, and the scientific literature is now so huge that researchers are struggling to keep up with it: critical hypothesis-generating evidence is now often discovered long after it was published.

Cancer is a complex class of diseases that are not completely understood and are the second-leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer development involves changes in numerous chemical and biochemical molecules, reactions and pathways, and cancer research is being conducted across a wide variety of scientific fields, which have variability in the way that they describe similar concepts.

“As a cancer researcher, even if you knew what you were looking for, there are literally thousands of papers appearing every day,” said Professor Anna Korhonen, Co-Director of Cambridge’s Language Technology Lab who led the development of LION LBD in collaboration with Dr Masashi Narita at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Professor Ulla Stenius at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. “LION LBD uses AI to help scientists keep up-to-date with published discoveries in their field, but could also help them make new discoveries by combining what is already known in the literature by making connections between sources that may appear to be unrelated.”

̽��ֱ��‘LBD’ in LION LBD stands for Literature-Based Discovery, a concept developed in the 1980s which seeks to make new discoveries by combing pieces of information from disconnected sources. ̽��ֱ��key idea behind the original version of LBD is that concepts that are never explicitly linked in the literature may be indirectly linked through intermediate concepts.

̽��ֱ��design of the LION LBD system allows real-time search to discover indirect associations between entities in a database of tens of millions of publications while preserving the ability of users to explore each mention in its original context.

“For example, you may know that a cancer drug affects the behaviour of a certain pathway, but with LION LBD, you may find that a drug developed for a totally different disease affects the same pathway,” said Korhonen.

LION LBD is the first system developed specifically for the needs of cancer research. It has a particular focus on the molecular biology of cancer and uses state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques, in order to detect references to the hallmarks of cancer in the text. Evaluations of the system have demonstrated its ability to identify undiscovered links and to rank relevant concepts highly among potential connections.

̽��ֱ��system is built using open data, open source and open standards, and is available as an interactive web-based interface or a programmable API.

̽��ֱ��researchers are currently working on extending the scope of LION-LBD to include further concepts and relations. They are also working closely with cancer researchers to help and improve the technology for end users.

̽��ֱ��system was developed in collaboration with ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Language Technology Lab, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and was funded by the Medical Research Council.

Reference:
Sampo Pyysalo et al. ‘LION LBD: a Literature-Based Discovery System for Cancer Biology.’ Bioinformatics (2018). DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty845

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

NIH Image Gallery

Skin cancer cells from a mouse show how cells attach at contact points

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Study unearths Britain’s first speech therapists

ta385 — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 08:15:00 +0000

Until now, historians had assumed that John Thelwall became Britain’s first speech therapist in the early nineteenth century.*

But Cambridge historian Elizabeth Foyster has discovered that James Ford was advertising his services in London as early as 1703, and that many other speech therapists emerged over the course of the eighteenth century.

Ford’s advert (pictured), published in the Post Man newspaper on 23 October 1703, states that "he removes Stammering, and other impediments in Speech", as well as teaching "Foreigners to pronounce English like Natives".

Ford had previously worked with the deaf and dumb but realised that there was more money to be made by offering other speech improvement services as a branch of education for wealthy children.

“In the eighteenth century, speaking well was crucial to being accepted in polite society and to succeeding in a profession,” said Foyster. “Speech impediments posed a major obstacle and the stress this caused often made a sufferer’s speech even worse. At the same time, wealthy parents were made to feel guilty and they started spending increasingly large sums to try to “cure” their children.”

By 1703, Ford was based in Newington Green, in the suburbs of London, but twice a week he waited near the city’s Royal Exchange and Temple Bar to secure business from merchants, financiers and lawyers desperate to improve their children’s life chances.

By 1714, some of these families were seeking out the help of Jacob Wane, a therapist who drew on a 33-year personal struggle with the condition. And by the 1760s, several practitioners were competing for business in London.

“We have lost sight of these origins of speech therapy because historians have been looking to identify a profession which had agreed qualifications for entry, an organising body, scientific methods and standards, as we have today,” said Foyster. “In the eighteenth century, speech therapy was regarded as an art not a science. But with its attention to the individual, and the psychological as well as physiological causes of speech defects, we can see the roots of today's speech therapy.”

Art and business

Foyster’s study, published in the journal Cultural and Social History, shows that speech specialists emerged in the early eighteenth century as new attention was given to the role of the nerves, emotions and psychological origins of speech impediments.

Prior to this, in the seventeenth century, the main cure on offer had involved painful physical intervention including the cutting of tongues. But as speech defects came to be understood as resulting from nervous disorders, entrepreneurial therapists stepped in to end the monopoly of the surgeons.

“These men, and some women, made no claim to medical knowledge,” Foyster says. “In fact, some were very keen to emphasise that they were nothing like the surgeons who had caused so much unnecessary pain. They described themselves as ‘Artists’ and their gentler methods were much more attractive to wealthy clients.”

These speech ‘artists’ jealously guarded their trade secrets but gave away some clues to their methods in print. Close attention was paid to the position of the lips, tongue and mouth; clients were given breathing and voice exercises to practise; and practitioners emphasised the importance of speaking slowly so that every sound could be articulated.

By the 1750s, London’s speech therapists had become masters of publicity publishing books, placing advertisements in newspapers and giving lectures in universities and other venues. In 1752, Samuel Angier achieved the remarkable feat of lecturing to Cambridge academics on four occasions about speech impediments and the ‘art of pronunciation’, despite having never attended university himself.

Foyster has identified several successful speech therapy businesses, some of which were passed down from one generation to the next. Most of these were based in London but practitioners would often follow their clientele to fashionable resort towns such as Bath and Margate.

In 1761, Charles Angier became the third generation to take over his family’s business; and by the 1780s, he claimed to be able to remove all speech impediments within six to eight months if his pupils were ‘attentive’. By then, he was reported to be charging fifty guineas ‘for the Cure’ at a time when many Londoners were earning less than ten guineas a year.

To be successful, these entrepreneurs had to separate themselves from quackery. Some heightened their credibility by securing accreditation from respected physicians while others printed testimonials from satisfied clients beneath their newspaper advertisements.

Suffering and determination

Foyster’s study also sheds light on the appalling suffering and inspirational determination of stammerers in the eighteenth century, including some well-known figures.

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the theologian, scientist and clergyman (pictured), recalled that his worsening stammer made ‘preaching very painful, and took from me all chance of recommending myself to any better place’.

His fellow scientist, Erasmus Darwin, also suffered from a stammer, as did Darwin’s daughter, Violetta, and eldest son, Charles. In 1775, Darwin compiled detailed instructions to help his daughter overcome her stammer which involved sounding out each letter and practising problematic words for weeks on end.

“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 century,” said Foyster. “While stammerers continued to be mocked and cruelly treated, polite society became increasingly compassionate, especially when someone demonstrated a willingness to seek specialist help.”

References:

Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Fear of Giving Offence Makes Me Give the More Offence’: Politeness, Speech and Its Impediments in British Society, c.1660–1800.' Cultural and Social History (2018). DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2018.1518565

* Denyse Rockey, ' ̽��ֱ��Logopaedic thought of John Thelwall, 1764-1834: First British Speech Therapist', British Journal of Disorders of Communication (1977). DOI: 10.3109/13682827709011313

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 century

Elizabeth Foyster

National Portrait Gallery, London

Joseph Priestley: theologian, scientist, clergyman and stammerer. Pastel by Ellen Sharples, probably after James Sharples, c.1797

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Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #3

ta385 — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:59:47 +0000

Third in the series is Draško Kašćelan, a linguistics researcher hoping to help children with language development.

My research sets out to

I’m investigating figurative language understanding in bilingual children. Nowadays, speaking more than one language is becoming a norm worldwide. Similarly, using metaphors in everyday speech is more frequent than one might assume. This frequency of use helps the development of figurative language comprehension but since bilinguals don’t have equal exposure to both of their languages as corresponding monolinguals, there is a question of whether this lack of input affects how they understand metaphors.

I am also looking into the level of autistic traits in children, since these traits are often related to the difficulties in figurative language comprehension. Hopefully, this research will give insight into how language understanding develops in bilinguals, but also offer directions for future investigation of language development in clinical populations.

Day-to-Day

My work is split between office work and data collection. At the moment, I spend most of the time in my department but I sometimes prepare experimental tasks in a cafe. But when I’m collecting data that involves visiting primary schools outside of Cambridge which gives me a really interesting change of scene. This would typically include a session with a student in which he or she does a series of computer-based cognitive or language tasks designed to look like games. Some of the sessions also include act-out tasks with toys, which makes the whole data collection quite fun.

My best days

̽��ֱ��most interesting day I’ve had so far was during the pilot of my study when I got to talk to several children about the work that I do. Explaining to primary school kids what linguistics actually is ended up being quite a challenge, especially when I was asked how long it takes to learn a language and why I don’t speak Elvish.

I hope my work will lead to

̽��ֱ��improvement of support that bilingual children get when it comes to maintaining the use of their languages. Together with other experimental work in the field, I expect to make an impact on educational policies regarding foreign language learning, which is currently far from optimal in the UK. I also hope that the findings of my investigation will offer directions for future research of language development in both typically and atypically developing individuals.

It had to be Cambridge because

Apart from academic and financial support that Cambridge offers, one of the most valuable parts of this experience is the student community. Specifically, the college system offers opportunities to socialise with people from other academic fields and from various backgrounds. This is quite different from my undergraduate experience outside of Cambridge where I would mostly only interact mostly with people from my field, which sometimes makes engaging with other areas of interest harder.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 Nov), we introduce five PhD students who are already making waves at Cambridge.

I was asked how long it takes to learn a language and why I don’t speak Elvish.

Draško Kašćelan

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

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Talk with Your Hands: a Cambridge Shorts film

amb206 — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 09:10:00 +0000

Talk with Your Hands: Communicating across the Sensory Spectrum opens with Hayden Dahmm speaking to camera. He is studying engineering and he’s blind. One of the benefits of being blind, he suggests, is that he is not distracted by physical appearance. ̽��ֱ��words people use, and how they use them, gives him “a genuine impression of the speaker”.

Louise Stern is a writer and artist. She is deaf and explains that her native tongue is American Sign Language. Speaking with her hands, she says: “ ̽��ֱ��body is eloquent and conveys layers of emotion and meaning.” When she describes how eye contact is, for a deaf person, an especially beautiful thing, she hesitates – and then says “it makes me feel like they see me”.

In just ten minutes, Talk with Your Hands conveys the richness of verbal and non-verbal languages and explores how our senses overlap and merge. Through interviews with blind and deaf people, interwoven with insights from neuroscientists, the film demonstrates how we communicate with sounds and gestures – and how each mode of communication has its own characteristics.

Sign language is not a translation of, or substitute for, verbal language. While spoken language is linear (produced through the channels of our mouths one word at a time), sign language is flowing and simultaneous. Similarly, the spoken word is not just the written word spoken out loud. It’s much more than that, explains Hayden, rather as “poetry is the things that cannot be translated”.

̽��ֱ��capacity for language is what sets mankind apart from other animals. Years ago, scientists looking at brain damage identified the parts of the brain responsible for speaking and comprehension, for hearing and seeing. Now we know that this understanding of how the brain works is far too simplistic: language, and the different ways we use it, colonises most of the brain.

Talk with Your Hands is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. ̽��ֱ��scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Researchers Craig Pearson (Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute) and Julio Chenchen Song (Department of Linguistics) collaborated with filmmaker Toby Smith.

̽��ֱ��capacity for language is what sets us apart from other animals. Talk with Your Hands, the third of four Cambridge Shorts films, explores the richness of sensory perception in interviews with blind and deaf people together with insights from neuroscientists.

Talk With Your Hands

Cambridge Shorts 2016 (Talk with Your Hands)

Actress Nadia Nadarajah recites a poem using British Sign Language

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Easy as Alep, Bet, Gimel? Cambridge research explores social context of ancient writing

rcc40 — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 08:49:23 +0000

A new research project at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is set to shed light on the history of writing, revealing connections to our modern alphabet that cross cultures and go back thousands of years.

̽��ֱ��project, called Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS for short), is to focus on exploring how writing developed during the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and will investigate how different writing systems and the cultures that used them were related to each other.

̽��ֱ��project is led by Dr Philippa Steele of the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Classics. Described as an “innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the history of writing” the CREWS project aims to enrich our understanding of linguistic, cultural and social aspects of the use, borrowing and development of writing in the ancient world – which can uncover some often surprising links to our modern-day written culture.

For instance, today the notion of “alphabetical order” is used to arrange everything from dictionaries to telephone books, but why is the alphabet organised the way it is?

Alphabetical order as we would recognise it first appeared over three thousand years ago in Ugaritic, written in a cuneiform script made of wedge-shaped signs impressed on clay tablets. ̽��ֱ��Ugaritic alphabet was in use in the ancient city of Ugarit, uncovered at Ras Shamra in modern Syria. Some of the surviving tablets discovered by archaeologists are known as “abecedaria”, where the letters of the alphabet are written in order, possibly for teaching or as a training exercise for new scribes.

̽��ֱ��destruction of Ugarit in around 1200 BCE was not the end for alphabetical order. ̽��ֱ��Phoenicians, living in what is now modern Syria and Lebanon, used the same order for their own alphabet. While their language was related to Ugaritic, their writing system was not. Instead of cuneiform wedge-shapes, the Phoenicians used linear letters, which were much more similar to those we use in English today. ̽��ֱ��Phoenician alphabet began with the letters Alep, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, which are strikingly similar to our own A, B, C and D.

Dr Steele said: “ ̽��ֱ��links from the ancient past to our alphabet today are no coincidence. ̽��ֱ��Greeks borrowed the Phoenician writing system and they still kept the same order of signs: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. They transported the alphabet to Italy, where it was passed on to the Etruscans, and also to the Romans, who still kept the same order: A, B, C, D, which is why our modern alphabet is the way it is today.”

That such an apparently simple idea remained so stable and powerful over thousands of years of cultural change and movement is an historic mystery. “ ̽��ֱ��answer cannot be purely linguistic”, Dr Steele said. “There must have been considerable social importance attached to the idea of the alphabet having a particular order. It matters who was doing the writing and what they were using writing for.”

̽��ֱ��origin of the alphabet is just one of the areas that the CREWS project will explore, along with the social and political context of writing, and drivers of language change, literacy and communication. Because of the high level of interconnectedness in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, ideas could be spread widely as people moved, traded and interacted with different cultures.

“Globalisation is not a purely modern phenomenon”, Dr Steele commented. “We might have better technology to pursue it now, but essentially we are engaging in the same activities as our ancestors.”

̽��ֱ��CREWS project is the result of a long-term innovative programme of combined and comparative research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. It will run for five years and will involve a four-person team working on a variety of ancient cultures and writing systems. ̽��ֱ��CREWS project has been made possible thanks to the European Research Council, who describe their mission as being “to encourage the highest-quality research in Europe.”

Dr Steele, the Principal Investigator on the project and a Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, has worked on ancient languages and writing systems for over ten years and previously specialised in the languages of ancient Cyprus. She said: “Cyprus lies right in the middle of an area where ancient people were moving about by land and sea and swapping technologies and ideas. That was one of the inspirations of the CREWS project. By studying how and what ancient people were writing, we will be able to gain more insight into their interactions with each other in ways that have never been fully understood before.”

̽��ֱ��Contexts of and Relations Between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project will be based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Faculty of Classics, a world-leading centre for the study of the ancient world with a track record for innovative and interdisciplinary research. Running from April 2016, it will continue until 2021.

Follow the project blog online at https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/.

A new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge research project is set to shed light on the history of writing in the ancient world, and explore the longlasting relationship between society and writing that persists today.

̽��ֱ��links from the ancient past to our alphabet today are no coincidence...It matters who was doing the writing and what they were using writing for.

Philippa Steele

ouhos OU History of Science

Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet

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Linguistics study reveals our growing obsession with education

sjr81 — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 16:11:40 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, which compares spoken English today with recordings from the 1990s, allows researchers at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press and Lancaster ̽��ֱ�� to examine how the language we use indicates our changing attitudes to education.

They found that the topic of education is far more salient in conversations now, with the word cropping up 42 times per million words, compared with only 26 times per million in the 1990s dataset.

As well as talking about education more, there has also been a noticeable shift in the terms we use to describe it. Twenty years ago, the public used fact-based terms to talk about education, most often describing it as either full-time, or part-time.

Today, however, we’re more likely to use evaluative language about the standards of education and say that it’s good, bad or great. This could be due to the rise in the formal assessments of schools, for example, with the establishment of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED) in 1992. Indeed, Ofsted itself has made its debut as a verb in recent times, with the arrival of discussions on what it means for a school to be Ofsteded.

Dr Claire Dembry, Senior Language Research Manager at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press said: “It's fascinating to find out that, not only do we talk about education twice as much as we used to, but also that we are more concerned about the quality. It's great that we have these data sets to be able to find out these insights; without them we wouldn't be able to research how the language we use is changing, nor the topics we talk about most.”

̽��ֱ��research findings also indicate that we’re now expecting to get more out of our education than we used to. We’ve started talking about qualifications twice as much as we did in the 1990s, GCSEs five times as much and A levels 1.4 times as much.

Meanwhile, use of the word university has tripled. This is perhaps not surprising, as the proportion of young people going to university doubled between 1995 and 2008, going from 20 per cent to almost 40 per cent.

When the original data was collected in the 1990s, university fees had yet to be introduced, and so it is unsurprising that the terms university fees and tuition fees did not appear in the findings. However the recent data shows these terms to each occur roughly once per million words, as we’ve begun to talk about university in more commercialised terms.

However, while teachers may be happy to hear that education is of growing concern to the British public, it won’t come as good news to them that the adjective underpaid is most closely associated with their job.

These are only the initial findings from the first two million words of the project, named the ‘Spoken British National Corpus 2014,’ which is still seeking recorded submissions.

Professor Tony McEnery, from the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS) at Lancaster ̽��ֱ��, said: “We need to gather hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations to create a full spoken corpus so we can continue to analyse the way language has changed over the last 20 years.

“This is an ambitious project and we are calling for people to send us MP3 files of their everyday, informal conversations in exchange for a small payment to help me and my team to delve deeper into spoken language and to shed more light on the way our spoken language changes over time.”

People who wish to submit recordings to the research team should visit: http://languageresearch.cambridge.org/index.php/spoken-british-national-...

As children around the country go back to school, a new comparative study of spoken English reveals that we talk about education nearly twice as much as we did twenty years ago.

We talk about education twice as much as we used to.

Claire Dembry

Education by Got Credit via Flickr

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