Prosodic and phonological structures form the bedrock of spoken language, orchestrating the rhythm, stress, and intonation that accompany linguistic utterances. These structures are not merely ...

Language feels simple when we use it. We talk, we text, we listen, and words seem to appear naturally from thought. But the study of linguistics tells a more complicated story, one where language ...

The Program in Linguistics, while small, has experienced a dramatic increase in interest from students representing departments across campus. The field appeals to students who like unraveling ...

Lenition, a pervasive phonetic phenomenon, involves the systematic weakening or alteration of consonant sounds in contextual speech environments. This process, which may result in fully articulated ...

This post is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 here. Although speech and language ability is relatively new in our evolutionary history—our ape cousins can’t speak—it may be built on a foundation that ...

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, ...

A team of researchers, including psycholinguist Jutta Mueller from the University of Vienna, has discovered that newborns are capable of learning complex sound sequences that follow language-like ...

Sifting through two-thirds of the world’s languages, scientists have discovered a strange pattern: Words with the same meanings in different languages often seem to share the same sounds — even when ...