This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American When Emperor Akihito stepped down from the ...

Forget language genes or innate linguistic universals; language is not only learned, it's also powerfully shaped by the culture we live in.... There's no language gene. There's no innate language ...

As the United States celebrates its the second year with Juneteenth as a federal holiday, many articles will be written about race relations. But I’d like to broach one topic that often falls under ...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

A team of international researchers, led by Colorado State University's Michael Gavin, have taken a first step in answering fundamental questions about human diversity. Humans collectively speak ...

When we speak, our sentences emerge as a flowing stream of sound. Unless we are really annoyed, We. Don’t. Speak. One. Word. At. A. Time. But this property of speech is not how language itself is ...

In the aftermath of the recent U.S. military strikes on Iran, one truth stands out above all: language is not just a means of communication—it is the lens through which we interpret, react to, and ...

“SHAPE: The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages,” encompasses the way that shape figures into the learning of 44 different languages — systematically sampled ...

Co-authored with Sayuri Hayakawa, Ph.D. As Japan's Emperor Akihito stepped down from the Chrysanthemum Throne in the country's first abdication in 200 years, Naruhito officially became the new Emperor ...