Researchers from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain worked with Russian doctors to address the differences between the symptoms of post-stroke aphasia and aphasia caused by glioma surgery. Post-surgery patients demonstrate moderately severe speech disorders that impact all aspects of language processing simultaneously. Understanding these differences will help doctors develop more effective therapies for speech disorders caused by surgical removal of gliomas. The results of the study were published in Brain and Language.

November 25, 2021 marked the publishing of a corpus of Soqotri folklore texts. Translated into Classical Arabic, the texts are accompanied by a brief introduction explaining the basic principles of the Soqotri writing system, which is based on the Arabic orthography. The authors of the book are Soqotri native speakers Ahmed Isa al-Daarhi, Isa Gumaan al-Daarhi, and Maysoon Mohammed Aldarhi. It was published by Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan under the editorship of Prof. Vitaly Naumkin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The publication was supported by the UAE Embassy in Moscow.

How can a small Russian research group become a world-famous scientific centre in less than a decade? A special edition of the Frontiers in Psychologyjournal devoted to increasing public awareness of neuroscience features an article about the HSE University Center for Language and Brain, including the successes and challenges of its early years.

Using 3D-modelling, researchers of HSE and the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) have restored and deciphered an ancient literary monument of North-Eastern Ancient Rus — inscriptions about the murder of Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky written in 1175–1176 on a wall of the cathedral in Pereslavl-Zalessky. The study was published in Slověne = Словѣне. International Journal of Slavic Studies.

Psycholinguists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain found that when reading, people are not only able to predict specific words, but also words’ grammatical properties, which helps them to read faster. Researchers have also discovered that predictability of words and grammatical features can be successfully modelled with the use of neural networks. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Until four years ago there was no simple tool for linguists to mark a set of points on a map with different colors. A point corresponded to a language, and its color corresponded to a linguistic feature of the language. This inspired George Moroz, of HSE’s Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and School of Linguistics, to create a new software product that turned out to be very popular: lingtypology.

The coronavirus pandemic is transforming modern society, reviving old social practices and formulas such as the Russian ‘flat-car-dacha’ principle, while opening new technological frontiers and creating new cultural skills. Professor Vitaly Kurennoy, Head of HSE’s School of Cultural Studies, discusses these issues in an op-ed for Izvestiia. Read the full translation of the article below.

From a northern village to an academic article, or How many linguists do you need to describe variation in Russian dialect?

There has been published a new monograph by Olga A. Zhukova, chief research fellow at the IL for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue.

The Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and the School of Linguistics are organizing an International Summer School on Areal Linguistics and Languages of Russia.

Language Science Press has published a book on the Mehweb language, edited by Michael Daniel and Nina Dobrushina of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and Dmitry Ganenkov of the Laboratory of Caucasian languages.

Alexander Piperski, Lecturer at the HSE School of Philology, has received an award for Russian young literature and languages researchers for his book <em>Constructing Languages: From Esperanto to Dothraki</em>.

New article by Elena Penskaya, the head of the School of Philolohy, in the Italian academic journal "Enthymema".