Tag: Speech

  • Nation & World

    Coming to grips with planetary existential threat

    Environmental Science and Public Policy takes multidisciplinary approach to complex existential threat.

    10 minutes
    Pariroo Rattan.
  • Nation & World

    Raised voices

    Tara K. Menon discusses her research and writing and how the author and cartoonist Alison Bechdel influenced her work.

    7 minutes
    Tara Menon.
  • Nation & World

    Sounding out speech

    A new study demonstrates that infants as young as 6 months can solve the invariance problem in speech perception.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Polly want a vocabulary?

    Irene Pepperberg, best known for her work with an African grey parrot named Alex — whose intelligence was estimated as equal to that of a 6-year-old child — recently relocated her lab to Harvard, where she continues to explore the origins of intelligence by working with birds.

    3 minutes
    grey parrot
  • Nation & World

    Listening for clues

    Baby songbirds learn to sing by imitation, just as human babies do. So researchers at Harvard and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, have been studying the brains of zebra finches — red-beaked, white-breasted songbirds — for clues to how young birds and human infants learn vocalization on a neuronal level.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Theater’s new frontiers

    Offbeat Director John Tiffany, whose company stages productions in unlikely locales, is using a fellowship year at Radcliffe to explore the ways that people communicate, complete with tics.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Losing the ‘likes’ and ‘ums’ but finding a community

    From the boardroom to the classroom and beyond, public speaking is an unavoidable — and often feared — fact of life for some Harvard faculty and staff. The Crimson Toastmasters are there to help, and maybe even make the learning fun.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    JFK’s legacy at 50

    To honor the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the Harvard Kennedy School and the Institute of Politics are planning a year of events designed to update the former president’s call to public service for the modern age.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    In Milliseconds, Brain Zips From Thought To Speech

    An unusual experiment is offering some tantalizing clues about what goes on in the brain before we speak. The study found that it takes about half a second to transform something we think into something we say. And three very different kinds of processing needed for speech are all happening in a small part of…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Divinity School student to deliver opening sermon at UUA conference

    Harvard Divinity School (HDS) student Angela Herrera ‘10 has been chosen by the Rev. William G. Sinkford of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) to deliver the sermon for opening worship at the denomination’s annual general convention in Salt Lake City in June.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Yes, it was a magical talk

    Call it magic, but the rain held off while Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling delivered the keynote address this afternoon (June 5) at Harvard University’s annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The first word on nouns and verbs

    Since humans learned to speak, they have put their words into two basic categories, nouns and verbs. Nouns denote objects; verbs refer to actions. Dictionaries of specialized words have been added by bankers, lawyers, scientists, and clergy, but this core distinction remains.

    4 minutes