For decades, scholars believed children’s speech errors were the seeds of language change, but new research challenges that ...

A new study shows that genetic evidence of historical contact between populations reveals consistent patterns of language change.

The study of language evolution and learning addresses the complex interplay between cultural dynamics and biological predispositions in shaping human communication. Researchers employ experimental ...

For more than a century, scholars have repeated a powerful idea: that the mistakes children make when learning to speak are ...

If you have spent time with an infant, you might recognize the scene: A child is wailing, inconsolable, and you, the parent, have to go to the bathroom. Or eat. Or attend to a pot that’s boiling over.

The words "mama", "cookie", and "paper" might seem innocuous and common enough, but they share a linguistic quality that's statistically rare within the world's collective lexicon: They all contain a ...

Cognitive and computer scientists at the University of Toronto, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies have found child language development and the ...

Rearing our unusually underdeveloped young may account for the evolution of language. Michael Marshall is intrigued, but ...

Janina Brutt-Griffler says she's always been interested in the interaction of different cultures and languages. "I grew up in a bicultural context," says Brutt-Griffler who joined the UB faculty in ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is ...

Nature has two papers on language which I'll pass along (I don't know enough about this area to say anything non-tardish) for those who have an interest in such things. First, our old friend Martin ...