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 …
You’ve heard of Stonehenge, but have you heard of Manhattanhenge?
Perhaps Carhenge would be more your style.
Either way, all these henges give us a look at how words get created. How many words get made this way? More than …
Computers are terrible at learning language. Would they be any better if they learned it like humans have to?
A team of computer scientists has built a ‘robot baby’ that is interacting with people and learning to speak. Ground-breaking, or …
It’s official: bogan has made it into the Oxford dictionary.
It’s language’s highest bar to clear, and its inclusion means that by any definition, bogan is truly a word. How do words get into the dictionary, anyway? And what do …
Apes don’t have language, but they do gesture.
They’ve even been observed using a special form of gesture with their young. Could it be primate baby-talk? What can we learn from our nearest relatives about how our language started?
Linguist …
Are there secrets in your search history?
We sometimes submit search queries that we wouldn’t admit to friends. And by looking at our searches, researchers can unearth things we’d rather keep hidden, including covert racism and sexual predilections.
Linguist Daniel …
Even with the huge vocabulary of English, we still haven’t got all the words covered.
Other languages have words that we don’t have single-word equivalents for. Can they be mapped onto English? And why do we have gaps in our …
TW: sexual assault
Should we use the word rape when it’s not about actual rape?
What about retarded or gay?
The meanings of words can change, but sometimes this means conflict as we decide what’s okay and what’s not …
Archaeologists have found the oldest known art from our early ancestors.
These carvings are thousands of years older than the earliest cave paintings — also in southern France. Who carved them, and why? And what’s the link between art and …
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