Changing the #Language of #Addiction

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/mobile/article.aspx?articleid=2565298

Words matter. In the scientific arena, the routine vocabulary of health care professionals and researchers frames illness1 and shapes medical judgments. When these terms then enter the public arena, they convey social norms and attitudes. As part of their professional duty, clinicians strive to use language that accurately reflects science, promotes evidence-based treatment, and demonstrates respect for patients.

Human #Information Processing Shapes #Language Change
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617728726

Human languages exhibit both striking diversity and abstract commonalities. Whether these commonalities are shaped by potentially universal principles of human information processing has been of central interest in the language and psychological sciences.

Research has identified one such abstract property in the domain of word order: Although sentence word-order preferences vary across languages, the superficially different orders result in short grammatical dependencies between words. Because dependencies are easier to process when they are short rather than long, these findings raise the possibility that languages are shaped by biases of human information processing. In the current study, we directly tested the hypothesized causal link.

We found that learners exposed to novel miniature artificial languages that had unnecessarily long dependencies did not follow the surface preference of their native language but rather systematically restructured the input to reduce dependency lengths. These results provide direct evidence for a causal link between processing preferences in individual speakers and patterns in linguistic diversity

Primate auditory prototype in the evolution of the arcuate fasciculus
https://2medical.news/2020/04/24/primate-auditory-prototype-in-the-evolution-of-the-arcuate-fasciculus/

The human arcuate fasciculus pathway is crucial for #language, interconnecting posterior temporal and inferior frontal areas. Whether a monkey homolog exists is controversial and the nature of human-specific specialization unclear. Using monkey, ape and human auditory functional fields and diffusion-weighted MRI, we identified homologous pathways originating from the auditory cortex. This discovery establishes a primate auditory prototype for the arcuate fasciculus, reveals an earlier phylogenetic …

#Language comprehension in the social #brain: Electrophysiological brain signals of social presence effects during syntactic and semantic sentence processing
https://2medical.news/2020/09/29/language-comprehension-in-the-social-brain-electrophysiological-brain-signals-of-social-presence-effects-during-syntactic-and-semantic-sentence-processing/

Although, evolutionarily, language emerged predominantly for social purposes, much has yet to be uncovered regarding how language processing is affected by social context. Social presence research studies the ways in which the presence of a conspecific affects processing, but has yet to be thoroughly applied to language processes. The principal aim of this study was to see how syntactic and semantic language processing might be …

Predicting #language treatment response in bilingual #aphasia using neural network-based patient models

https://2medical.news/2021/06/06/predicting-language-treatment-response-in-bilingual-aphasia-using-neural-network-based-patient-models/