Language Acquisition

Stuttering John’s Lost Language

In the 10th century, an envoy named John of Gorze adopted a radical language-learning strategy: two years of total silence…

5 days ago

The Forbidden Experiment: Feral Children

From an Egyptian pharaoh to a Holy Roman Emperor, history is dotted with cruel attempts to discover humanity's "natural" language…

5 days ago

The First Family of Esperanto

L. L. Zamenhof may have invented Esperanto, but he didn't bring it to life alone. This is the story of…

5 days ago

The Dad Who Taped 90,000 Hours of Baby Talk

What if you could record every moment of your child's life to understand how they learn to talk? MIT researcher…

5 days ago

Gradual vs. Abrupt Creolization

How are new languages born from scratch? This article explores the fascinating debate over creolization, contrasting the "abrupt" theory, where…

5 days ago

Syntactic Priming: The Echo

Ever found yourself accidentally copying the sentence structure of the person you're talking to? This isn't a coincidence; it's a…

5 days ago

The ‘Gavagai’ Problem: How We Map Words to Reality

Imagine a speaker in a new language points to a rabbit and says "gavagai." How do you know if it…

1 month ago

Kitchen-Table Creole: A Child’s Private Language

Ever heard a bilingual child say something that isn't quite one language or the other? This isn't a mistake, but…

1 month ago

The Reduplication Spectrum: From ‘Bye-Bye’ to ‘Chit-Chat’

Reduplication isn't just baby talk like 'bye-bye' or 'choo-choo'. This surprisingly common linguistic tool is used across the world's languages…

1 month ago

How Do Babies Learn to Hear Word Breaks?

Ever wonder how babies find individual words in the continuous stream of speech they hear? It turns out their brains…

5 months ago

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