linguists not in the news

The BBC is reporting an interesting study under the title "Linguists 'have different brains'." It's actually about language learners, not linguists, I feel I should point out though. I doubt my Heschl's gyrus would be very different from yours, all my, ahem, years of linguistics notwithstanding.

Never mind - there was one piece of linguistics there - they talk about the difference between the "d"-sound that you get in French by your tongue making contact with the ridge behind your teeth, versus one of the "d"-sounds in Hindi, where the tongue is curled back on itself and makes contact further back in your mouth. The study was looking at how quickly native speakers of French could pick up on this difference, and looked at the structure of their brains at a place called Heschl's gyrus, which is known to be important for processing sounds. They found that the size and shape of Heschl's gyrus in the fast learners differed from its size and shape in the slower learners. Now isn't that interesting.