Cracking the Code Before Words: The Infant’s Amazing Ability to Find Word Boundaries
To an infant, spoken language is a continuous, unbroken river of sound. So how do they learn where one word ends and the next begins? This amazing feat of "speech…
Language Acquisition
The Girl Who Couldn’t Speak: Genie and the Tragic Limits of the Critical Period for Language
The tragic case of "Genie," a feral child discovered in 1970 after a decade of silent isolation, offers a harrowing look into the "critical period" for language acquisition. While she…
The “Wug” Test: How a Fake Bird Revealed the Secrets of Child Language Acquisition
In 1958, a fictional bird called a "wug" helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of the human mind: how children learn language. The groundbreaking "Wug Test" revealed that kids…
Are There Any Native Esperanto Speakers?
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language, designed by L. L. Zamenhof in the late 19th century. Zamenhof had the noble ambition to facilitate communication...
The Age Factor in Language Learning: Myth or Reality?
Learning a new language can be an exhilarating yet challenging task. Across different societies, a common perception exists that language learning ability is strongly correlated...