People are great at describing colours, but smells? Not so much.
Could that be because of the language we speak? Just how does language influence our perception?
Linguist Daniel Midgley takes us into a great debate on this episode of …
Category: cognition (page 5 of 6)
Why is language the way it is? Is it in our genes? Or does culture play a role?
Linguists have supposed that we have a language instinct that sets the boundaries on what a possible language is. But the language …
Linguist Daniel Everett has worked with the Pirahã people of the Amazon for decades.
They have an unusual language with no words for numbers or colours. And this language is finding itself at the centre of some explosive claims about …
What’s it like to be a dog?
It’s difficult to say, because they can’t tell us. But recent experiments have shown something about the way dogs group objects into categories, and it’s different from the way human children do it. …
Do you have trouble processing sentences?
Blame your brain. New research shows that we don’t evaluate every word when processing language — and this leads us into problems when confronted by ‘semantic illusions’.
Linguist Daniel Midgley reveals all on this …
Mother, father, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, and cousin.
Our words for family relations are so familiar to us that it’s hard to imagine them any other way. But other languages have some surprising …
What would life be like without numbers?
The Pirahã people of the Amazon don’t have them in their language, and have difficulty learning them. What does this tell us about the human mind?
Linguist Caleb Everett spent some time among …
Japanese researchers have developed a “speech-jamming gun”.
It works without maiming or killing you, but it does mess with your mind. Will it be a boon to movie-goers, or a free-speech killer? And how does it work?
Linguist Daniel Midgley…
A team of scientists has developed a technique for turning brain activity into words.
Soon, it may be possible to reconstruct conversations — in effect, to read minds. How does it work? Do we even think in words?
Linguist Daniel …
Not every language uses the same words for colours.
English has about 11 colour terms, while other languages get by with two or three. And it seems that people whose language uses different colour terms are able to easily tell …
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