language

One characteristic that is considered distinctive of human language is its capacity to combine elements and form more complex and meaningful structures, which is known as compositionality. Its most complex form, in which meaning is not simply the result of the sum of words, has not been found in any other animal species. Now, an international team claims to have observed it for the first time in bonobos. The results, published in Science, call into question assumptions about the uniqueness of human language and open up new avenues for understanding the evolution of communication, according to the journal.

An artificial intelligence (AI) model led by the company Meta is capable of translating speech and text, including direct speech-to-speech translations, from up to 101 languages in some cases. According to the research team, this model - called SEAMLESSM4T - can pave the way for fast universal translations ‘with resources to be made publicly available for non-commercial use’. The work is published in the journal Nature.

Some animal species, such as parrots or dolphins, appear to address each other by imitating sounds from the receiver. However, animals addressing each other by individual names has only been observed in humans. Now, an international team of researchers says that African elephants can communicate through name-like calls and do not appear to rely on imitation to do so. According to the authors, who publish their results in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the finding would imply that they have some degree of symbolic thinking. 

10 % of people are left-handed, which occurs when the right cerebral hemisphere is more dominant for the control of that hand - whereas it is the left hemisphere in the case of right-handed people. To investigate the genetic basis of this laterality, scientists in the Netherlands have analysed genome data from 350,000 people in the UK biobank for rare genetic variants associated with this phenomenon. The heritability of left-handedness due to rare coding variants was low, at less than 1%. The research, published in Nature Communications, suggests that one gene - TUBB4B - is 2.7 times more likely to contain rare coding variants in left-handed people. 

The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced last night at the welcome dinner of the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2024, the construction of a foundational model of artificial intelligence language, trained in Spanish and co-official languages, in open and transparent code, and with the intention of incorporating Latin American countries. For its development, the Government will work with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Spanish Supercomputing Network, together with the Spanish Academy of Language and the Association of Spanish Language Academies.

Babies' brains specialise in their native language from pregnancy, according to a study carried out in France. The research team used encephalograms to measure the brain activity of 33 infants born to French-speaking mothers while listening to a story in French, English or Spanish. The results provide "the most compelling evidence to date that language experience already shapes the functional organization of the infant brain, even before birth," the authors write in Science Advances.

A study led by the University of the Balearic Islands proposes a mathematical model to understand quantitatively the impact of ideologies on the coexistence of various languages. The more groups of people with different linguistic preferences mix, the more challenging it becomes for different languages to coexist within the same society, say the authors, whose study is published in the scientific journal Chaos. The team says this model could be useful to design policies aimed at preserving minority languages.

A US team has developed a non-invasive language decoder: a brain-computer interface that aims to reconstruct whole sentences from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This is not the first attempt to create such a decoder; some of the existing ones are invasive - requiring neurosurgery; others are non-invasive, but only identify words or short phrases. In this case, as reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team recorded brain responses - captured with fMRI - of three participants as they listened to 16 hours of stories. The authors used this data to train the model, which was then able to decode other fMRI data from the same person listening to new stories. The team argues that the model trained on one person's data does not decode another person's data well, suggesting that cooperation from the subject is required for the model to work properly.

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Network Open examines whether there is an association between newborn exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and impaired neurodevelopment compared to those born before the pandemic. Neurodevelopment in the first year of life was not modified by being born or growing up during the covid-19 pandemic or by gestational exposure to SARS-CoV-2. However, the authors appreciated that, regardless of whether maternal infection was present, the pandemic was associated with a risk of delayed communication in these infants.

A study of more than 630 billion words (mostly in English) used on 3 billion web pages concludes that the term 'people' is not gender-neutral: its meaning is biased towards the concept 'men'. The authors write in Science Advances that they see this as "a fundamental bias in the collective view of our species", relevant because the concept 'people' is "in almost all societal decisions and policies".