🚀 New Corpus to Study Stuttering in Brazilian Portuguese

🇧🇷 A new database is being built to collect and analyze the speech of individuals who stutter in Brazilian Portuguese, aiming to fill a significant gap in current research. This corpus will include children, adolescents, and adults, covering various stuttering types and severities.

🗣️ The project utilizes the Dynamic Model of Speech Rhythm to analyze how stuttering impacts speech flow, treating stuttered and fluent speech as a continuous process rather than separate events.

📈 The corpus design integrates clinical and acoustic data, enabling detailed investigations into speech rhythm and the effects of stuttering. Preliminary analysis shows differences in disfluency occurrences after phrasal stresses.

👥 Fifteen participants have already agreed to join the project, which will collect speech samples through conversations, monologues, and reading tasks. Data analysis will involve both speech-language pathology assessments and acoustic phonetics.

#StutteringResearch #Linguistics #SpeechTherapy

🌍 Tens of thousands of languages may have existed between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, a period described as a linguistic "golden age."

📈 Language diversity increased alongside human population growth for most of the Holocene, peaking between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, before a rapid decline.

🏛️ The decline in linguistic diversity began with the expansion of large states and empires, well before modern European colonialism.

surviving languages are a small, historically biased sample of past linguistic diversity.

#LanguageDiversity #Linguistics #History

🎤 **Synthetic vs. Human Voices: New Study Reveals Key Differences in Intonation**

* 🗣️ A recent study comparing human and synthetic voices in Venezuelan Spanish found that while synthetic voices can mimic general patterns of statements and questions, they produce smoother, more regular pitch changes. Human voices, conversely, exhibit more detailed pitch variations, especially towards the end of sentences, where crucial intonation cues often lie.

* 🔬 The research focused on how pitch changes over time within sentences, rather than just overall pitch levels. This detailed analysis of speech melody as a dynamic pattern is crucial for understanding how natural synthetic voices sound compared to human speech.

* 📈 Findings suggest that synthetic speech may sound similar to human speech in broad acoustic aspects, but significant differences exist in the timing and shape of pitch movements. These distinctions are particularly important for how we perceive authenticity in voices.

#VoiceTech #AI #Linguistics

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🧠 New research in PNAS Nexus proposes "survival of the wittiest" as a driver of human cognitive and linguistic evolution, suggesting verbal agility and humor replaced physical competition for mates and social status.

🗣️ Linguist Ljiljana Progovac argues that early grammar, seen in simple verb-noun compounds (like "killjoy"), facilitated verbal contests and sexual selection, explaining the unique expansion of human cognition beyond physical strength or friendliness.

🧠 Neuroimaging experiments support this by showing ancient verb-noun combinations activate brain regions involved in face perception, suggesting early language was tied to naming individuals, while more complex language evolved denser brain networks.

😂 This theory connects wit and humor to reduced aggression and stress, acting as a form of self-domestication, where societies favored individuals skilled in verbal de-escalation and dominance.

#HumanEvolution #Linguistics #CognitiveScience