Skxawng!, The New York Times, 4/12/2009

When James Cameron’s science-fiction opus “Avatar” comes to the screen this month, audiences will witness meticulously conceived alien characters — speaking a meticulously conceived alien language. To lend extra authenticity to the Na’vi — the tall, blue-skinned, vaguely feline humanoids living on the distant world of Pandora — Cameron enlisted the help of a linguist to construct a full-fledged language, with its own peculiar phonetics, lexicon and syntax. From the mind of Paul Frommer, a professor at the University of Southern California, was born a Na’vi language, with mellifluous vowel clusters, popping ejectives and a grammatical system elaborate enough to make a polyglot blush.

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Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature, New York Times 12/11/2009

Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech.

All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.

FOXP2 came to light in a large London family, half of whose members have severe problems in articulating and understanding speech. All turned out to have a mutation that disrupted this vital gene.

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Study shows unborn babies cry in their mother tongue, The Times 6/11/2009

Newborn babies mimic the intonation of their native tongue when they cry, indicating that they begin to pick up the first elements of language in the womb, a study suggests.

Scientists were already aware that babies are able to recognise certain sounds from birth, such as their parents’ voices, but they believed that infants were only able to imitate them from the age of about 12 weeks.

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People Hear with Their Skin, As Well As Their Ears, Scientific American 26/11/2009

A new study shows that the skin could help us hear by ‘feeling’ sounds

By Carina Storrs

The act of hearing is a group effort for the human body’s organs, involving the ears, the eyes and also, according to the results of a new study, the skin.

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