Language Acquisition

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…

2 months 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…

2 months 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…

2 months 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…

2 months 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…

3 months 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…

3 months 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…

3 months 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…

6 months ago

The Echo Chamber of the Mind

Echolalia, the repetition of heard phrases, is often dismissed as simple mimicry, particularly in autism. But what if these echoes…

6 months ago

Fossilized Errors: The Permanent Mistake

Why do some second-language errors become permanent, even for highly advanced speakers? This phenomenon is known as "fossilization", where certain…

6 months ago

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