By Scicurious Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in children, and is becoming a big deal in adults as well. ADHD is a pile of related symptoms, most of them dealing with motivation, impulsivity, inattention, and, you know hyperactivity (they call it ADHD for a reason). Right now, we treat ADHD with stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, which in low doses and when they act over a long period of time can increase focus and help people with ADHD function better. But the question remains as to what CAUSES ADHD, what abnormalities are going on in the brain that cause the symptoms. There are several hypotheses as to what’s going on. One of them is the dopamine hypothesis, that dysfunctions in dopamine systems are responsible some of the symptoms. But in order to prove this, we have to find evidence for it in humans. There is some evidence that dopamine dysfunction contributes, and now we have a little bit more. Volkow et al. “Motivation deficit in ADHD is associated with dysfunction of the dopamine reward pathway” Molecular Psychiatry, 2011. (I should note here that Dr. Nora Volkow is the current head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and is also one of the foremost researchers on ADHD in humans). In this case, the authors wanted to look at how dopamine system function was related to scores of motivation in adults with ADHD. The problem with this is how to measure “motivation”. In this case, they looked at people’s ADHD scores (compared to non-ADHD controls), and looked at scores on personality tests, particularly those related to “achivement”. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 16145 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Lindsey Tanner CHICAGO—Ritalin and other drugs used to treat attention deficit disorder are safe for adults' hearts, even though they can increase blood pressure and heart rate, according to the largest study of these medicines in adults. The results echo findings in a study of children with ADHD, by the same researchers, published last month. The review of health records for more than 440,000 adults aged 25 to 64 showed those taking ADHD drugs had about the same number of heart attacks, strokes and sudden heart-related deaths as adults who didn't use those drugs. Although attention deficit disorder is usually thought of as a condition in childhood, many continue to have symptoms as adults, including impulsive, fidgety behavior and difficulty focusing or paying attention. ADHD affects about 4 percent of U.S. adults, roughly 9 million. About 8 percent of U.S. children aged 3 to 17, or 5 million kids, have ever been diagnosed with the disorder, government statistics show. More than 1.5 million U.S. adults were taking stimulants used for ADHD in 2005, and use of ADHD drugs increased more rapidly in adults than in kids over the past decade, the study said. The research will be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Dec. 28 print edition, but was released online Monday because of its public health importance, journal editors said. © Copyright 2011 Associated Press.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 16144 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Larry Greenemeier Promising treatments for those blinded by an often-hereditary, retina-damaging disease are expanding throughout Europe and making their way across the pond, offering a ray of hope for the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. left in the dark by retinitis pigmentosa. The disease—which affects about one in 4,000 people in the U.S. and about 1.5 million people worldwide—kills the retina's photoreceptors, the rod and cone cells that convert light into electrical signals, which are transmitted via the optic nerve to the brain's visual cortex for processing. There is no effective treatment for the condition, but researchers are making great strides to remedy this through implants that stimulate still-active nerves in the retina, the layer of tissue at the back of the inner eye. In mid-November Retina Implant, AG, got approval to extend the yearlong phase II human clinical trial of its retinal implant outside its native Tübingen, Germany, to five new sites—Oxford, London and Budapest, along with two additional locations in Germany. The company's implant is a three- by three-millimeter microelectronic chip (0.1-millimeter thick), containing about 1,500 light-sensitive photodiodes, amplifiers and electrodes surgically inserted beneath the fovea (which contains the cone cells) in the retina's macula region. The fovea enables the clarity of vision that people rely on to read, watch TV and drive. The chip helps generate at least partial vision by stimulating intact nerve cells in the retina. The nervous impulses from these cells are then led via the optic nerve to the visual cortex where they finally lead to impressions of sight. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 16143 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Tom Fields-Meyer, My son Ezra was 4 or 5 when he began asking people their birthdays. At first it seemed like a typical child’s question. But then months later he would encounter acquaintances — or even whole families — and reel off the birth months with perfect recall as he pointed at each person. “Steve, April. Janice, November. Shayna, August.” Driving him to school one morning, I heard him in the back seat reciting what at first sounded like random dates and names. Then I realized what he was doing: listing the months in calendar order, each followed by the names of everyone he had encountered whose birthday fell in that month. It was an early glimpse of what I came to realize was an extraordinary — even superhuman — memory. Ezra, now 15, has high-functioning autism. Experts will tell you that the disorder’s most significant characteristic is difficulty communicating and forming relationships. Ezra knows he has autism, but to him one of its primary characteristics is that he can remember things better than most people. Of course, autism is a spectrum disorder; not every person with the condition has an uncanny memory. Researchers aren’t certain what proportion of people with autism possess powerful recall, nor can they pinpoint exactly what about the brain wiring of people such as Ezra gives them this ability. But many, like Ezra, display remarkable recall that can leave mere mortals floored. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Autism; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16142 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Bruce Bower Culturally speaking, ancient East Africans were a stone’s throw away from southern Arabia. Stone tools collected at several sites along a plateau in Oman, which date to roughly 106,000 years ago, match elongated cutting implements previously found at East African sites from around the same time, say archaeologist Jeffrey Rose of the University of Birmingham, England, and his colleagues. New finds also include cores — or rocks from which tools were pounded off with a hammer stone — that correspond to East African specimens, the researchers report online November 30 in PLoS ONE. East African sites that have yielded these distinctive stone artifacts extend southward along the Nile River to the Horn of Africa. “In the mountain of papers speculating about human dispersal out of Africa, a link between southern Arabia and the Nile Valley has never been considered,” Rose says. Either Africans crossed the Red Sea and trekked into southern Arabia well before an African exodus around 60,000 years ago, or ancient people from Arabia influenced African toolmaking, the scientists suggest. “The finds in Oman are rather spectacular,” comments archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the University of Oxford, England. “They have a date that is earlier than similar African artifacts, which could imply a migration back to Africa, or at least a flow between African and Arabian populations.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16141 - Posted: 12.13.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou IT'S true - sex does change things, including the structure of rats' brains. And another thing - it really is different for males and females. There are several brain regions linked to sexual behaviour that differ in size between the sexes in humans and other mammals. To find out whether a region known to be bigger in males was altered by sex, Shinji Tsukahara and his colleagues at Saitama University near Tokyo, Japan, compared the brains of male rats who had never had sex before with their more experienced counterparts. They found that the number of spiny structures located at the neuronal synapses was significantly lower in rats that had copulated. Tsukahara, who presented the findings at the recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC, thinks that the decrease in spines may have been caused by hormonal changes triggered by the presence of the female, as well as sensory inputs from the penis. These regions may serve as "a one-way road to learn how to mate", he suggests. Once they have been activated for the first time, they may be lost as they are no longer needed. The spines also play a part in the sexual behaviour of female rats. In a separate study, Paul Micevych and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, investigated the effect on the brain of the female rat's sexual cycle - characterised by an increase in oestradiol production every four days. To control the cycle, the team removed the rats' ovaries and injected them with oestradiol. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16140 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Jennifer Welsh Many explanations for the gender gap in math skills don't hold up, suggests new research on math skills and gender in 86 countries. Math has traditionally been seen as a man's game, and the statistics often indicate that there are differences between males and females in their math skills, participation in math activities and performance on tests — called the gender gap in math. Some researchers have proposed this gap is natural — that men are just better at math than women — while others say it's a cultural difference, whereby society somehow keeps girls from pursuing or excelling in math. The new research points to culture as the culprit, finding that certain countries showed less of a gap between males and females in math. Specifically, these female-math friendly countries have more gender equality, better teachers and fewer students living in poverty. In many countries, there isn't a gender gap in mathematics performance, the researchers said. As for the United States, they say the gap has greatly narrowed in recent decades as more females are considered "highly gifted mathematicians" (3 to 1 now, instead of 13 to 1 in the 1970s) and more women are getting graduate degrees in math, though 70 percent are still men. "This is not a matter of biology: None of our findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance," study researcher Janet Mertz, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. The study suggests that "the math-gender gap, where it occurs, is due to sociocultural factors that differ among countries, and that these factors can be changed." © 2011 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16139 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Bella English Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality. Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords. Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume. Once, when Wyatt appeared in a sequin shirt and his mother’s heels, his father said: “You don’t want to wear that.’’ “Yes, I do,’’ Wyatt replied. “Dad, you might as well face it,’’ Wayne recalls Jonas saying. “You have a son and a daughter.’’ That early declaration marked, as much as any one moment could, the beginning of a journey that few have taken, one the Maineses themselves couldn’t have imagined until it was theirs. The process of remaking a family of identical twin boys into a family with one boy and one girl has been heartbreaking and harrowing and, in the end, inspiring — a lesson in the courage of a child, a child who led them, and in the transformational power of love. Wayne and Kelly Maines have struggled to know whether they are doing the right things for their children, especially for Wyatt, who now goes by the name Nicole. Was he merely expressing a softer side of his personality, or was he really what he kept saying: a girl in a boy’s body? Was he exhibiting early signs that he might be gay? Was it even possible, at such a young age, to determine what exactly was going on? © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16138 - Posted: 12.13.2011

by Jesse Emspak Controlling computers –- or anything else -– with the brain has been done using electroencephalograms (EEGs) but they require a skullcap on the head. Now a small company in North Carolina says it has a way around that, and in the process created an tool for training people to stay alert when involved in important tasks. Freer Logic (named for its founder and CEO Peter Freer) came up with a system called BodyWave. It’s not dissimilar to an ordinary EEG, except it works with sensors that can be put around an arm rather than the head. While it is harder to pick up signals from further away form the head, Freer told Discovery News that the signal strength per se isn’t too much of a problem. “You wouldn’t use this for clinical applications,” he said. So this wouldn’t be any good for a scientist or doctor trying to get a picture of brain activity. But it is fine when trying to detect the activity, called beta waves, that indicates attention. BodyWave can detect when someone is paying attention to something. Freer noted that the system was used to train nuclear power plant workers as well as help understand the best way to design control systems. (For example: knowing what grabs a person’s attention can tell you where to put an alarm display). Connected to a computer, BodyWave can tell when someone is paying attention and sound an alarm when they aren’t. Something like this can also be used in cars -– for instance sounding an alarm if a drivers’ attention drifts. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Attention; Robotics
Link ID: 16137 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By SCOTT SAYARE PARIS — In 33 years on pharmacy shelves here, the diabetes drug Mediator was prescribed to an estimated five million French patients, many of them diabetics, many others hoping simply to lose weight. When French authorities ordered the drug off the market in 2009, alerted to possible cardiovascular risks, there were 300,000 active prescriptions. Mediator and its enigmatic French manufacturer, Laboratoires Servier, a privately held company with a troubled past, find themselves at the center of France’s largest public-health scandal in at least a decade. Health officials estimate that as many as 2,000 people died, with thousands more hospitalized, victims of cardiac valve damage and pulmonary hypertension apparently linked to the drug. Politicians and the press have pilloried Servier, charging that it concealed the dangers of Mediator for decades and insisting that the company has a wider history of disregarding health concerns about its products. Many have noted that two Servier weight-loss products, both closely related to Mediator, were at the center of the fen-phen scandal of the late 1990s in the United States. In France, government investigators have accused Servier of licensing Mediator as a diabetes drug to avoid scrutiny, but urging doctors to prescribe the pills as a diet aid to bolster sales — a practice that greatly expanded the pool of those potentially harmed by the drug. Magistrates are investigating the company on charges of consumer fraud and manslaughter, and a public prosecutor has charged Servier with defrauding the French health care system. Trials are expected next year. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16136 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS What happens inside the skull of a soccer player who repeatedly heads a soccer ball? That question motivated a provocative new study of the brains of experienced players that has prompted discussion and debate in the soccer community, and some anxiety among those of us with soccer-playing offspring. For the study, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York recruited 34 adults, men and women. All of the volunteers had played soccer since childhood and now competed year-round in adult soccer leagues. Each filled out a detailed questionnaire developed especially for this study to determine how many times they had headed a soccer ball in the previous year, as well as whether they had experienced any known concussions in the past. Then the players completed computerized tests of their memory and other cognitive skills and had their brains scanned, using a sophisticated new M.R.I. technique known as diffusion tensor imaging, which can find structural changes in the brain that would not be visible during most scans. The researchers found, according to data they presented at a Radiological Society of North America meeting last month, that the players who had headed the ball more than about 1,100 times in the previous 12 months showed significant loss of white matter in parts of their brains involved with memory, attention and the processing of visual information, compared with players who had headed the ball fewer times. (White matter is the brain’s communication wiring, the axons and other structures that relay messages between neurons.) © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16135 - Posted: 12.10.2011

A rare genetic variant which causes reduced levels of vitamin D appears to be directly linked to multiple sclerosis, says an Oxford University study. UK and Canadian scientists identified the mutated gene in 35 parents of a child with MS and, in each case, the child inherited it. Researchers say this adds weight to suggestions of a link between vitamin D deficiency and MS. The study is in Annals of Neurology. Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). Although the cause of MS is not yet conclusively known, both genetic and environmental factors and their interactions are known to be important. Oxford University researchers, along with Canadian colleagues at the University of Ottawa, University of British Columbia and McGill University, set out to look for rare genetic changes that could explain strong clustering of MS cases in some families in an existing Canadian study. They sequenced all the gene-coding regions in the genomes of 43 individuals selected from families with four or more members with MS. The team compared the DNA changes they found against existing databases, and identified a change in the gene CYP27B1 as being important. When people inherit two copies of this gene they develop a genetic form of rickets - a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16134 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By Susan Milius Nothing but fear itself can actually be dangerous for nesting birds. Song sparrows protected from attack but subjected to recordings of predator yowls and leaf-crunching approach noises raised 40 percent fewer offspring in a year compared with neighbors living amid innocuous noises, says population ecologist Liana Zanette of the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Predators do not need to kill a single prey to have a big effect, she says. Scary noises, broadcast where the sparrows nested in the wild, took a toll throughout the breeding season, Zanette and her colleagues report in the Dec. 9 Science. The alarmed sparrows laid fewer eggs to begin with, and they proved such skittish and cautious parents that they reared a smaller percentage of hatchlings than neighbors did. Biologists have tended to focus on the direct effects of predators killing prey, says evolutionary ecologist Thomas Martin of the U.S. Geological Survey in Missoula, Mont., who was not part of the sparrow research. This new study, he says, suggests theorists have underestimated the impact of predators. “Predators shape everything,” Zanette says. Wolves that eat elk give more plants a chance to survive, which in turn changes which other creatures thrive. Previous work, including Zanette’s, suggested that fear of predators could change bird egg number or size. Yet separating the effects of fear from those of actual predator attacks took years of preparation, she says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16133 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey DENVER — The action of tiny hair-like appendages on cells can mean the difference between fat and thin. Now scientists have a better idea of how the little hairs, called primary cilia, control appetite. Primary cilia — single, hairlike projections that all cells in vertebrates usually have — seem to sequester a protein that senses and responds to an appetite-stimulating hormone, Nicolas Berbari of the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported December 6 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. In people and mice that lack primary cilia, the appetite stimulant works overtime, leading to overeating and obesity, Berbari said. These findings may lead to new ways to control appetite and prevent or reverse obesity. And the study may help scientists better understand the process of eating, said Kirk Mykytyn, a cell biologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. “This work is important because it’s more thoroughly clarifying the molecular mechanism involved in obesity associated with the loss of cilia,” he said. access People with Bardet-Biedl syndrome have defects in genes responsible for building primary cilia. A prominent consequence of the disease is obesity. Working with mice that also lack primary cilia due to defects in the same genes, Berbari and his colleagues tried to figure out exactly how the cellular appendages are involved in appetite. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16132 - Posted: 12.10.2011

by Robert Kowalski What is the relationship between language and thought? The quest to create artificial intelligence may have come up with some unexpected answers THE idea of machines that think and act as intelligently as humans can generate strong emotions. This may explain why one of the most important accomplishments in the field of artificial intelligence has gone largely unnoticed: that some of the advances in AI can be used by ordinary people to improve their own natural intelligence and communication skills. Chief among these advances is a form of logic called computational logic. This builds and improves on traditional logic, and can be used both for the original purpose of logic - to improve the way we think - and, crucially, to improve the way we communicate in natural languages, such as English. Arguably, it is the missing link that connects language and thought. According to one school of philosophy, our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language: this is what students of language call the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. According to the LOT hypothesis, it is because human thoughts already have a linguistic structure that the emergence of common, natural languages was possible in the first place. The LOT hypothesis contrasts with the mildly contrary view that human thinking is actually conducted in natural language, and thus we could not think intelligently without it. It also contradicts the ultra-contrary view that human thinking does not have a language-like structure at all, implying that our ability to communicate in natural language is nothing short of a miracle. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 16131 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By Shaun Nichols It seems obvious to me that I have free will. When I have just made a decision, say, to go to a concert, I feel that I could have chosen to do something else. Yet many philosophers say this instinct is wrong. According to their view, free will is a figment of our imagination. No one has it or ever will. Rather our choices are either determined—necessary outcomes of the events that have happened in the past—or they are ­random. Our intuitions about free will, however, challenge this nihilistic view. We could, of course, simply dismiss our intuitions as wrong. But psychology suggests that doing so would be premature: our hunches often track the truth pretty well [see “The Powers and Perils of Intuition,” by David G. Myers; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2007]. For example, if you do not know the answer to a question on a test, your first guess is more likely to be right. In both philosophy and science, we may feel there is something fishy about an argument or an experiment before we can identify exactly what the problem is. The debate over free will is one example in which our intuitions conflict with scientific and philosophical arguments. Something similar holds for intuitions about consciousness, morality, and a host of other existential concerns. Typically philosophers deal with these issues through careful thought and discourse with other theorists. In the past decade, however, a small group of philosophers have adopted more data-driven methods to illuminate some of these confounding questions. These so-called experimental philosophers administer surveys, measure reaction times and image brains to understand the sources of our instincts. If we can figure out why we feel we have free will, for example, or why we think that consciousness consists of something more than patterns of neural activity in our brain, we might know whether to give credence to those feelings. That is, if we can show that our intuitions about free will emerge from an untrustworthy process, we may decide not to trust those beliefs. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16130 - Posted: 12.10.2011

Virginia Gewin Rats, often anthropomorphized as greedy and selfish, may not be the callous, cartoon villains they are sometimes made out to be. A paper published today in Science demonstrates that the rodents will liberate trapped cage-mates — even when they have nothing to gain1. There is a growing body of research showing that animals respond to the emotions of others. But it wasn't certain whether rats could suppress their own distress in order to aid another rat. Lead author Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, thinks her work is a significant step towards settling this question. “This finding is the big kahuna — evidence that empathy motivates one individual to help another,” she says. Following a two-week introduction period, pairs of rats were put inside an arena. One was trapped inside a central restrainer, while the other roamed free in the larger space. By day six or seven, on average, the roaming rat learned to free the trapped rat. The free rats seldom opened empty containers or those containing a toy rat. Although fewer in number, all the female rats tested became door openers; whereas 30% of males never became door openers. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 16129 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By PAMELA PAUL IF you believe men think about sex all day long, you’re wrong. According to a study to be published in the January issue of The Journal of Sex Research, the statistic oft-cited by the sex-obsessed or those critical of the sex-obsessed — that men think about sex every seven seconds — is way off. “The story about this paper that’s been reported in the press has been ‘Men think about sex 19 times a day!’ ” said Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State University at Mansfield, and the study’s lead author. But that isn’t all that much when you consider the study’s participants were college students, those repositories of raging hormones and unfettered urges. “The more interesting finding is that male college students think just as much about food and sleep as they do about sex,” Dr. Fisher said. To determine how much time people devoted to such thoughts, the researchers asked 283 students age 18 to 25 to use clickers (golf score counters), whenever they contemplated one of life’s three basic needs. Previous studies on the subject were overwhelming retroactively self-reported; researchers asked people after the fact to recollect how often they thought about sex, a method fraught with error. Of course, all kinds of caveats still apply. Did they worry about clicking too often, or too infrequently, and self-adjust accordingly? What kind of thoughts were they having? Was it, “I’d really like to sleep with my boss’s new assistant” or “I wonder whether squirrels mate in the spring?” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 16128 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By Jonah Lehrer Email Author The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me. The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and perfect strangers. Most of the time, this approach works well enough. If I notice someone squinting their eyes and clenching their jaw, I automatically conclude that he must be angry; if she flexes the zygomatic major – that’s what happens during a smile – then I assume she’s happy. The point is that a few cues of body language are instantly translated into a rich mental image. We can’t help but think about what other people are thinking about. But this intricate connection between mind theorizing and sensory perception can also prove problematic. For instance, when people glance at strangers who look “different” – perhaps they dress funny, or belong to a different ethic group – they endow these strangers with less agency, a fancy term for the ability to plan, act and exert self-control. Or consider a 2010 fMRI experiment that found that when men glance at “sexualized” women they exhibit reduced activation in parts of the brain typically associated with the attribution of mental states. These are obviously terrible habits – a hint of cleavage shouldn’t make us care less about someone’s feelings, nor should a different skin tone – but we mostly can’t help it. We judge books by the cover and minds by their appearance. We are a superficial species. © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16127 - Posted: 12.10.2011

by Robert Krulwich Here's something you should know about yourself. Vowels control your brain. "I"s make you see things differently than "O"s. Here's how. Say these words out loud: Bean Mint Slim These "I" and "E" vowels are formed by putting your tongue forward in the mouth. That's why they're called "front" vowels. Now, say: Large Pod Or Ought With these words, your tongue depresses and folds back a bit. So "O", "A" and "U" are called "back" of the throat vowels. OK, here's the weird part. When comparing words across language groups, says Stanford linguistics professor Dan Jurafsky, a curious pattern shows up: Words with front vowels ("I" and "E") tend to represent small, thin, light things. Back vowels ("O" "U" and some "A"s ) show up in fat, heavy things. It's not always true, but it's a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little, teeny or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels) versus humongous or gargantuan (back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish chico (front vowel meaning small) versus gordo (back vowel meaning fat). Or French petit (front vowel) versus grand (back vowel). Copyright 2011 NPR

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 16126 - Posted: 12.10.2011