“There is no influence like the influence of habit.”- Gilbert Parker My thought is that profanity has five salient influences in modern living. These influences delineate many of the current issues ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since ...

Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some similarities to ...

In this encore episode, Short Wave host Emily Kwong dissects the "critical period hypothesis," a theory which linguists have been debating for decades — with the help of Sarah Frances Phillips, a Ph.D ...

Brain-computer interfaces, AI and real-time censorship. Philip Seargeant tells us how modern tech is changing our language. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...