According to the team, these findings suggest a dog’s ability to learn from overheard speech may rely on brain mechanisms shared across species, instead of being tied to human language. However, since GWL dogs are extremely rare, their abilities likely reflect a combination of nature and nurture.

Word learning in children represents a fundamental aspect of cognitive development and language acquisition. This area of research explores how young learners overcome the ambiguous nature of their environment to attach meaning to new words. Investigations ...

Sometimes life, with the aid of an unrelenting news cycle, can feel like an exercise in parsing out the particular kind of bad we are experiencing. Are we anxious or depressed, lonely or stressed? Tim Lomas, a lecturer in positive psychology at the ...

When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a new study that shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it.

A two-year-old can quickly link an object--whether a flashy rattle or a boring latch--to a word. Even a one-year-old can follow a parent's gaze to an object and match it with a word being spoken. But although anecdotal evidence seems to show that babies ...

As many educators and researchers will attest, there’s no exact science to choosing vocabulary words—no inherent reason the word “detest” is more important to teach than “despise,” or why “compassion” should be highlighted in a text before ...