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Purpose: Chromosome 16p11.2 deletion syndrome (OMIM #611913) is a rare genetic condition resulting from the partial deletion of approximately 35 genes located at Chromosome 16. Affected people exhibit a variable clinical profile, featuring mild dysmorphisms, motor problems, developmental delay, mild intellectual disability (ID), socialization deficits and/or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) traits, and problems with language. Specifically, a precise characterization of the speech, language, and communication (dis)abilities of people with this condition is still pending. Method: We used standardized tests and samples of naturalistic speech to provide a longitudinal profile of the speech, language, and communication problems of a boy with Chromosome 16p11.2 deletion syndrome and without ID or ASD. Results: The proband shows impaired expressive abilities as well as problems with receptive language, dysprosody, and ASD-like communication deficits, such as impaired interactive skills, perseverative verbal behavior, overabundance of tangential responses, and lack of metapragmatic awareness and communicative use of gaze, meeting the criteria for social pragmatic communication disorder. Conclusions: Our results support the view that language and communication impairment should be regarded as one core symptom of Chromosome 16p11.2 deletion syndrome, even without a diagnosis of ASD or ID. Clinical implications of our results, with a focus on therapeutic interventions for children with 16p11.2 deletion syndrome and no ASD or ID, are also discussed.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Williams Syndrome (WS) are frequently characterized as mirror conditions in the socio-cognitive domain, with ASD entailing restrictive social interests and with WS exhibiting hypersociability. In this review paper, we examine in detail the strong points and deficits of people with ASD or WS in the socio-cognitive domain and show that both conditions also share some common features. Moreover, we explore the neurobiological basis of the social profile of ASD and WS and found a similar mixture of common affected areas and condition-specific impaired regions. We discuss these findings under the hypothesis of a continuum of the socio-cognitive abilities in humans.

Autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome exhibit quite opposite features in the social domain, but also share some common underlying behavioral and cognitive deficits. It is not clear, however, which genes account for the attested differences (and similarities) in the socio-cognitive domain. In this article, we adopted a comparative molecular approach and looked for genes that might be differentially (or similarly) regulated in the blood of subjects with these two conditions. We found a significant overlap between differentially expressed genes compared to neurotypical controls, with most of them exhibiting a similar trend in both conditions, but with genes being more dysregulated in Williams syndrome than in autism spectrum disorders. These genes are involved in aspects of brain development and function (particularly dendritogenesis) and are expressed in brain areas (particularly the cerebellum, the thalamus, and the striatum) of relevance for the autism spectrum disorder and the Williams syndrome etiopathogenesis.

This study aims to determine if there are differences in color–emotion association between monolingual speakers of Spanish and Mandarin, depending on how colors are presented (verbally or visually). We tested two groups of 25 speakers of these two languages in two different tasks using the Geneva Emotion Wheel, which encompasses 20 types of emotions. In Task 1, 13 colors were presented to participants as color terms in their native language, whereas in Task 2 the same colors were presented as color patches from the Munsell chart. Participants were then asked to associate color terms or color patches to the set of emotion concepts (and intensities of emotion) in the Geneva Emotion Wheel. Overall, differences between languages were not significant, regarding either the type of emotion or individual dimensions of emotion (valence, arousal or power), although significant differences were observed for specific colors. Also, Spanish speakers tended to attribute higher intensity values and higher numbers of emotion values to colors. At the same time, speakers of both languages reacted similarly to color presentation, with color terms being associated with the same emotions as color patches, but eliciting stronger reactions with respect to intensity and the number of emotion values. Finally, we found less variability in color–emotion associations within the Spanish-speaking group. Overall, our study points to a mixed pattern of universality and culture-specificity regarding how colors are used for conveying emotions by people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This paper provides proof of concept that neurolinguistic research on human language syntax would benefit greatly by expanding its scope to include evolutionary considerations, as well as non-propositional functions of language, including naming/nicknaming and verbal aggression. In particular, an evolutionary approach can help circumvent the so-called granularity problem in studying the processing of syntax in the brain, that is, the apparent mismatch between the abstract postulates of syntax (e.g. Tense Phrase (TP), Determiner Phrase (DP), etc.) and the concrete units of neurobiology (neurons, axons, etc.). Methods: First, we decompose syntax into its evolutionary primitives, identifying one of the earliest stages as a simple, flat combination of just one verb and one noun. Next, we identify proxies ("living fossils") of such a stage in present-day languages, including compounds and small clauses, lacking at least some layers of structure, e.g. TPs and DPs. These proxies of ancestral language have been subjected to fMRI neuroimaging experiments. Results: We discuss the finding that less hierarchical small clauses, in contrast to full sentences with TPs and DPs, show reduced activation in the left Broca's area (BA) 44 and the right basal ganglia, consistent with the hypothesis that more recent, more elaborate syntax requires more connectivity in the Broca's-basal ganglia network, whose neuronal density has been significantly enhanced in recent evolution, implicating mutations in FOXP2 and other genes. We also discuss the finding that the processing of ancestral verb-noun compounds, which are typically used for (derogatory) naming and nicknaming, shows enhanced activation in the right fusiform gyrus area (BA 37), the area that is implicated in the processing of metaphoricity and imageability, but also in naming and face recognition, opening up an intriguing possibility that the enhanced face recognition in humans was facilitated by the early emergence of a simple syntactic strategy for naming. Discussion: The considerations in this paper are consistent with the hypothesis of a gradual gene-culture co-evolution of syntax and the brain, targeting cortico-striatal brain networks. It is also of note that a sound grounding in neurobiology of language should in turn inform syntactic theories themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial "International Translation Day: a communication perspective" published in Frontiers in Communication highlights the significance of translation in fostering understanding and unity among diverse peoples. It emphasizes the role of translation in cultural exchange, education, and social integration within and between communities. The editorial also explores the evolving role of translation in society through various research topics, showcasing its complexities and nuances in different domains. The future of translation is seen as a synergy between human expertise and technological innovation, enhancing the capacity to connect and communicate across languages. [Extracted from the article]

There is a research programme in linguistics that is founded on describing language as an emergent phenomenon. This paper clarifies how the core concept of emergence is deployed in this emergentist programme. We show that if one adopts the weak understandings of the concept of language emergence, the emergentist programme is not fundamentally different from the other non‐emergentist research programmes in linguistics. On the other hand, if one adopts the stronger understandings of emergence then the programme would have a unique character, but at the cost of some corollaries (philosophical, but not only) which the emergentist linguists would seemingly want to avoid. We show that if the emergentists accept those corollaries, the resulting hypothetical emergentist programme would be totally different from the emergentist programme in its present shape. We conclude that the emergentist programme, as it stands, should be either abandoned or reshaped in both theory and methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociolinguistic typology studies have uncovered diverse social, cultural, and political factors that might account for aspects of the structural complexity of the world’s languages. Accordingly, the languages spoken by close-knit (or esoteric) societies tend to feature more complex phonologies and morphologies, as well as increased semantic opacity. By contrast, the languages spoken by open (or exoteric) societies usually exhibit more syntactic complexity together with greater semantic compositionality. In this paper, we support the view that classical (i.e. variationist) sociolinguistics would benefit from applying this typological approach to the study of intralinguistic variation. Specifically, we argue for relying on the concepts of esotericity and exotericity for achieving a better characterization and understanding of Spanish familects (i.e. the private language varieties used within families). We advance a specific protocol for studying this linguistic variety, as well as a tentative list of features characterizing Spanish familects, which we have posited under the view that familects are esoteric varieties of the standard language, although with some distinctive features compared to the oral vernacular, particularly to informal speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]