What exactly is a sandwich?
The question is tearing the internet apart. Is a hot dog a sandwich? What about a burrito? How do we even know what a sandwich is? Or anything else?
We have an answer, but it’s …
Category: cognition (page 3 of 6)
What can we learn about language from children who grew up without it?
People are fascinated by stories of “feral children”, raised apart from human contact. Can these children ever learn language, once they’re found? And what does this tell …
This episode going to love you are!
Here’s a linguistic puzzle: Why does “I like you” sound okay, but “Like you I” sounds weird and Yoda-ish? Well, that’s just how English rolls: subjects come first. But surprisingly, most other human …
The biggest idea in linguistics is back on the table.
Is there such a thing as the Universal Grammar? Do you have to have a human brain to learn language, or is learning a language just like learning anything else? …
One, two, three… Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
And yet different languages express numbers in very different ways. How are they handled in our brains? And how did –illion get to be the suffix for truly astronomical sums?
Linguist Daniel …
Can you hear colours? Or smell sounds?
We’re starting to understand synaesthesia — the blending of senses that some people experience. Now language researchers are using synaesthesia to understand how we process language, and even how language got started in …
Other animals don’t have language like we do, but some of them might be getting awfully close.
A recent experiment claims that some birds use a form of syntax — that they combine their signals in a way that’s always …
Are our vocabularies shrinking? Is bureaucratic double-talk a sinister form of code designed to short-circuit original thought?
Author Don Watson thinks so, and explains why in his latest book Worst Words. But how does his view stack up to language …
Why do words appear the way they do?
Why aren’t words the same in every language?
Sometimes it doesn’t seem to make any sense. But new research shows that maybe language is not as arbitrary as it seems.
Linguist Daniel …
Can computers detect sarcasm? Predict betrayal? Spot a drunk text?
Yes, all that and then some. A recent conference gave computational linguists a chance to show how sharp the cutting edge of language technology really is.
Linguist Daniel Midgley reads …
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- CBAA Awards 2018: Best Radio Program — Talk
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- Talkley Award 2018
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