Brain part may afftect foreign laguage skills

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Brain part may affect foreign language skills

                               
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/08/arts/snvital.php

                               
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Just can't manage to nail down the subjunctive tense in French or the difference between the Spanish verbs for "to be"? Blame your Heschl's gyrus - or at least your left one, anyway.

That is a tiny part of the brain that appears to play an important role in how well adults can learn another language, a new study finds.

Writing online in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researchers said people who had a larger left Heschl's gyrus seemed to have an easier time picking up foreign languages.

For this study, the researchers, led by Patrick Wong of Northwestern University in Illinois, were focusing on the ability to discern pitch, a key element of tonal languages, not vocabulary.

In tonal languages like Chinese, which are spoken by most of the world's population, the same word can have different meanings, depending on how it is inflected.

                               
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The researchers made up 18 words in their own tonal language - six sounds with three intonations each - and tried to teach them to 17 volunteers. The students, ages 18 to 26, were English speakers who had never studied tonal languages. The students with the smallest Heschl's gyri, especially in terms of gray matter, were the least successful, the study said.
Reading and Healthy Brains It is not surprising that when doctors examined people who had worked at a lead smelter for years, they found no lack of neurological problems associated with lead.

But not every worker was affected equally, a new study says, especially when it came to those who were good readers. While those workers had the same sorts of motor skill losses as their colleagues, they had retained much more of their thinking skills.

People who are good readers, generally a sign of better education, have been found in earlier studies to have better health. The presumption has been that this is because they can take better care of themselves or afford better food, housing and medical care.

But writing in the July 31 issue of Neurology, researchers said that in this case some smelter employees were protected not as a direct result of their reading but an indirect one. The years of reading, the study said, may have helped their brains develop more of what doctors call cognitive reserve.
So as the lead exposure robbed their coworkers of skills involving attention, memory, mental calculations and decision making, the good readers retained much of their skills, even as they, too, were suffering damage to their nervous systems.
The lead author of the study, Dr. Margit Bleecker, said the findings supported the argument that reading level gives more insight into health than how much schooling a person has had.
Hip fractures versus protectors A new study raises questions about the effectiveness of padded hip protectors worn by older people to help prevent fractures if they fall.

The researchers monitored the health of more than 1,000 nursing home residents with an average age of 85. The residents were asked to wear the pads on just one hip, for comparison purposes.

After 20 months, the study was ended when no difference was found in the fracture rate between the protected and unprotected hip. The study appeared in the July 25 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. It was led by Dr. Douglas Kiel of Hebrew SeniorLife, a health care organization, and Harvard.

Hip fractures are especially dangerous for older people.
Counseling and Alcoholism Experience has shown that even a few short discussions with a health professional can help a problem drinker. Now, a new study has found that counseling by telephone can be equally effective in curbing excessive drinking.

Writing in the August issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, researchers suggested such counseling could be good for hard-to-reach patients. It also uses fewer resources than face-to-face meetings.
The researchers, led by Dr. Richard Brown of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, worked with almost 900 patients at 18 Wisconsin clinics, half of whom were given just pamphlets and the remainder receiving counseling.