linguistics

Food for thought: Your brain is wired to consider various possible meanings for a word before you've even heard the final sound of a word uttered. It's a conclusion scientists at the University of Rochester reached and also proved for the first time using a functional MRI (fMRI)—a tool for brain imaging—to see split-second activity. In the past, scientists postulated that listeners could only follow up to five syllables per second in spoken language by drawing from a small subset of words already known by the listener.

It's a well-accepted notion that if you want to master multiple languages, you should learn them at a young age. But new research reveals that learning young can have some serious downsides. According to a study released this week in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, children who are bilingual before age five have a higher chance of developing a stutter than those who learned only one language.

If I told you my house were the only blue one on the block, you'd know how to find it. Whether it were powder or navy blue, our shared understanding of "blue" means we can communicate about color. Paul Kay, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to know exactly what that means to our brains. Are we thinking about the color blue or the word we use to represent it? Do the words we use influence the way we see the colors themselves? According to Kay, those two ideas may by inextricably connected inside our heads.