Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital demonstrate how neurons in the human brain work together to allow people to think about what words they want to say and then produce them aloud through speech. The findings provide a detailed map of how speech sounds such as consonants and vowels are represented in the brain well before they are even spoken and how they are strung together during language production.

An international team of researchers have found that the main predictors of language development globally are age, clinical factors such as prematurity or dyslexia, and how much speech children receive from the world around them. No effects were found related to gender, multilingualism, or socioeconomics, contrasting with previous research.

Cognitive psychology researchers at Harvard University have discovered that creative writing involves the integration of semantically distant ideas with perceptually descriptive information. Furthermore, current large language models are able to generate short stories that are comparable in creativity to those written by humans.

Based on a 5-year longitudinal neuroimaging project starting in infancy, Xi Yu and Nadine Gaab share new research demonstrating that functional connectivity in infancy can predict subsequent individual differences in language and foundational literacy abilities at school-age. These results highlight the importance of the early brain function organization as a neural scaffold for long-term development of complex, high-order cognitive functions.

Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.