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Even though these patients could hear and speak perfectly fine, a disease had crept into a portion of their brain that kept them from processing auditory words while still allowing them to process visual ones. Patients in the study had primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a rare type of dementia that destroys language and currently has no treatment.
The study, published March 21 in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, allowed the scientists to identify a previously little-studied area in the left brain that seems specialized to process auditory words.
If a patient in the study saw the word "hippopotamus" written on a piece of paper, they could identify a hippopotamus in flashcards. But when that patient heard someone say "hippopotamus," they could not point to the picture of the animal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01 2019, @01:24PM (9 children)
They do in highly phonemic languages. It's why Rome's Latin and Greece's Greek speakers couldn't read without pointing their finger on the paper and slowly articulate the words. For them, the letters were a direct transcription of the sounds.
The closest modern languages to be this phonemic are the recently reformed ones. Best example is how Russian native speakers generally score the highest literacy ratings world-wide irregardless of the fewer hours they spend at schools or whether they're also speaking a 2nd native language as many ex-Soviet block countries do.
Simply put, we're wasting a lot of brain cells and time learning what is essentially a 2nd dialect. And now there's a paper proving just how much effort the brain is putting into this.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday April 01 2019, @02:30PM (6 children)
We should make English more phonetic and without many of the odd rules and exceptions.
This calls for A Plan [plainlanguage.gov].
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01 2019, @03:37PM
Just leave the "c", "y" and "x" out and it'd be good.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 01 2019, @04:47PM (1 child)
The problem with setting a new spelling is that many words are pronounced differently in different dialects. The reason for a phonetics-breaking spelling is often that it isn't phonetics-breaking in other dialects. In fact, that was originally why English has such irregular spelling. Spelling was often determined by the first printer that printed that word in a book; English had so many regional dialect that English spelling became a chimera of dialects.
In any case, the Roman alphabet doesn't really have enough vowels for even one dialect.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 01 2019, @07:02PM
I suppose that as we transition to using only the Unicode Emoji characters for messages and replies, the pronunciation problems will disappear within a generation.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Monday April 01 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
In other words, someone read Mark Twain, and ended up making L33T SP3AK, and kthx bai. Someone must have forgotten to teach them about Sarcasm, Wit, and Satire.
On a side note, I learned something new, yesterday. I kept seeing gz spammed in a chat and the person I was asking about it didn't have a clue as to it's actual meaning. I ended up sleuthing it out, gz is short for gratz, which is short for congratulations. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but "chat speak"/texting abbreviations, to that extent seem to make your messages vulnerable to misinterpretation. I can understand a few cut down abbreviations, but lots of them, just causes confusion. Not just for the adults, either.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02 2019, @12:31AM
gz is also used as a suffix to mark a gzip compressed file. Maybe gzipping your text messages is a new thing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02 2019, @05:12AM
Mark Twain was famous for being one of the the first writer if not the very first to negotiate his own copyrights and to trademark all sorts of idioms he made up so when authors used them he'll be able to claim royalties.
To that end he wrote against all manners of reforms during his journalist career. It's why he's so wildly popular with school programs. With the exception of his defense of African Americans, he was one of the most conservative writers of his day but managed to present himself as a progressive thinker by taking a few left-wing stances with regards to labor and civil rights. e.g. One of his fictions has an American going back in time to King Arthur's court and fucking everything up trying to introduce progressive ideas and technologies to their society. That's to say, his core belief was conservative rather than progressive. He only had a few progressive thoughts because he was working and living in a certain environment.
Basically he was what we call today a California Republican: A person growing up in a very liberal coastal city but with a relatively traditional mindset. So, they give the impression of being progressive because they're advocating agendas that the rest of the nation considered modern. But in fact they're just maintaining their own way of life and have no desire to improve on anything beyond their familiar experience.
A true American.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01 2019, @05:02PM
You do because that's how you're taught to read. Or more to the point, it's how elementary school teachers know that you're reading. It's not necessarily natural and deaf students are able to learn to read, even in cases where they were never able to hear in the first place and as such the sound association is completely meaningless. As a result, this finding shouldn't be particularly surprising. But, it is interesting to know about it and I'm sure there will be some medical use for the information at some point.
This is also one of the reasons why the Chinese are able to read so quickly compared with say English speakers. Just look at how long the subtitles are up on the screen with Chinese characters versus how long they're up in English.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Monday April 01 2019, @07:37PM
>They do in highly phonemic languages. It's why Rome's Latin and Greece's Greek speakers couldn't read without pointing their finger on the paper and slowly articulate the words.
Well, I'm no expert but I saw Roman or early medieval lapides written
ALLCAPSWITHBAR
ELYADOTORRASM
ALLSPACEBETWEE
NWORDSWORDWR
APPINGDEPENDED
ONTHESIZEOFTHE
MEDIUMANDSOME
TIMESTHEYFORGO
TLETTERSWHICH
THEYCARVEDINSM
ALLWHERETHEYC
OULDPLUSTHEY
USEDLOTSOFABBR.
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