cognition

Mirror Neurons: The Brain’s Imitation Engine

Discover how a serendipitous discovery involving monkeys and peanuts revolutionized our understanding of linguistics. We dive into the science of…

2 weeks ago

Zombie Nouns: The Plague of Nominalization

Nominalization occurs when strong verbs are transformed into static, heavy nouns (like changing "utilize" to "utilization"), creating what linguists call…

2 weeks ago

Dyslexia in Logograms: Reading Differences in Chinese

While Western dyslexia is primarily a phonological challenge involving sound-letter mapping, research shows that dyslexia in Chinese functions differently, impacting…

2 weeks ago

The Hierarchy of Color: Why ‘Red’ Always Beats ‘Blue’

Why do almost all languages develop a word for "Red" before they create a word for "Blue"? This post explores…

2 weeks ago

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…

2 months 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…

2 months ago

The Fairy Tale Behind ‘Serendipity’

The delightful word 'serendipity' wasn't a happy accident itself, but a deliberate creation by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole. Inspired by…

2 months ago

The Keyboard That Looked Like a Piano

Before QWERTY conquered the world, the first typewriter prototype had keys arranged in two simple rows like a piano. This…

2 months 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…

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

This website uses cookies.