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 ...

A new study suggests that everyday multilingual habits—from chatting with neighbors to revisiting a childhood language—may help preserve memory, attention, and brain flexibility as we age. An ...

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 their classic 1998 textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Michael Gazzaniga, Richard Ivry, and George Mangun made a sobering observation: there was no clear mapping between how we process language and ...

Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” ...

Marlee Matlin has won an Oscar, and she’s appeared in countless films and television shows. Yet she, too, has faced a common Deaf dilemma: how to claim equitable access to information, when one lives ...

My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him ...

Lots of people say they want to learn a language, but the task itself can be daunting if you don’t know where to start. I remember approaching college eager to learn Italian. Fortunately, Stanford ...

I have long remembered a conversation I had 20 years ago with one of my professors, an expert in what we then called artificial intelligence, which, in many ways, is wildly different to what we now ...

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

Google’s experiment attempts to solve this problem using AI to help personalize language learning. “Learning a new spoken language… often happens in a vacuum—through textbooks or exercises that feel ...

Google introduced “Little Language Lessons,” a set of generative AI-powered features designed to help users learn vocabulary and phrases in real-world contexts. ‘Tiny Lesson,’ ‘Slang Hang,’ and ‘Word ...