Oh Hey There

matthen:

What would happen if you lit a candle in space?  (Provided the oxygen concentration in your spaceship wasn’t so high it just blew up..)  Well gravity on Earth actually helps flames burn. The gravity gradient causes convective currents, lifting light soot to the tip of the flame and drawing in oxygen.  But no such currents occur in space; a helium balloon wouldn’t float in any particular direction.  As soot isn’t being taken away from the wick and oxygen isn’t being pulled in towards it, it burns colder, more slowly, and in an almost invisible blue colour. [more]

HEY #SCIENCE EDITORS, FEATURE THIS TUMBLR

self-drawings by stutterers

Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information Within Broca’s Area

Evidence for modular computation of language! [Reference via loscheiner]

Fig. 2. (A) Main results: sequential processing of lexical, grammatical, and phonological information in overlapping circuits. (Top) Neural activity recorded from several channels in Broca’s area (patient A, Brodmann area 45) shows three LFP components that were consistently evoked by the task (~200, ~320, and ~450 ms). (Bottom) The ~200-ms component is sensitive to word frequency but not word length, suggesting that it indexes a cognitive process such as lexical identification, not simply perception. Stacked waveforms (top and bottom) adopt the axes noted on the first waveform. (B) At ~320 ms, the LFP pattern suggests inflectional processing. (C) At ~450 ms, in a channel 5 mm distant, the complementary pattern suggests phonological processing. (Inset) MRI slices from this patient, annotated with the anatomical location of A4, the contact in common to the two channels reported here. Statistical significance: **** (P < .0001), *** (P < .001), ** (P < .01) (t test, one tail, two-sample, equal variance). Box arrows (bottom) indicate linguistic processing stages, which may be interposed among other stages not addressed here.

Emphasis mine, because it’s those gaps/”interfaces” between major language modules that we theoretical linguists need to investigate.

Scientific American - llusions: What’s in a face?:

The Illusion of Sex, by Harvard psychologist Richard Russell, won Third Prize at the 2009 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. The two side-by-side faces are perceived as male (right) and female (left). However, both of them are versions of the same androgynous face. The two images are exactly identical, except that the contrast between the eyes and mouth and the rest of the face is higher for the face on the left than for the face on the right. This illusion shows that contrast is an important cue for determining the sex of a face, with low-contrast faces appearing male and high-contrast faces appearing female. And it may also explain why females in many cultures darken their eyes and mouths with make-up. A made-up face looks more feminine than a fresh face.

loscheiner:

Gratuitous picture of myself.  Wednesday is my clinic day, which means two things: i get dressed up fancy and i drink an extra cup of coffee so that I don’t miss a thing. My own clinic was cancelled for today, which is a bummer, but it means I get to observe my first adult language client.

Adult language? That means that the adult has had some kind of brain damage resulting in changes to his/her ability to use language, which is called aphasia.  People with aphasia represent the population i most want to study.

Some things I’m currently interested in researching:

-Do aphasic people continue to show preserved ERPs (N400 to violation of semantic relationships e.g., “I like my coffee with sugar and dog”, and  P600 to violations of syntax, e.g., “The boy throw the toy”) to stimuli they hear/read?

People without brain damage show predictable patterns of brain activation miliseconds after hearing a funky sentence like one of the ones I just wrote.  this includes you.  You read those sentences and had a N400 and a P600.  Normal brains just can’t help it, it’s what they do.  But what about people with aphasia?  Their brains are not fully normal, and they often have difficulty with comprehension (especially of complex sentences), and often produce agrammatic phrases.

Is the problem that they have reduced cortical responses to incorrect semantics/syntax?  OR-Do some patients have over-active ERPs, perhaps causing them to second guess every utterance they make because they perceive their own output as incorrect, resulting in halting, nonfluent aphasic speech.

Anyway… some things to think about.

Very cool research topic.