How Children Learn Language
Children learn language for the first time in a cool way, and the good news is that adults can, too. Find out how.
Read MoreCategory: Linguistics
Children Create Foundation for New Language in Minutes
By Shelby Nilsen (@shellbeegrace) Human language is unlike any other form of natural communication. It is the fundamental mechanism that we as a society use to exchange information. Using oral sounds and written characters, we express our needs and ask questions. We describe our thoughts and opinions, tell stories, and teach one another new things. Through language, we connect and share common ideas. What humans can communicate through the spoken word is limitless. But how did language come to exist? Researchers at the Leipzig Research Centre for Early Childhood Development…
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How Some Words Get Forgetted
Get ready for a dive into linguistic history! Our friend Dr. Joe Hanson from It’s Okay to Be Smart (PBS Digital Studios) goes full science nerd on the English language–and irregular verbs. Why are irregular verbs so common in English? Where do they come from? English is a confusing language for many reasons. But the irregular verbs might be the most confusing part. Why is “told” the past tense of “tell” but “smold” isn’t the past tense of “smell”? It turns out that the study of irregular verbs can teach…
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Language Detectives
Where did the Uto-Aztecan language originate? An interdisciplinary research project looked at a set of 100 words to understand the sound sequences of this language. Watch this video to see how an anthropologist and a computational biologist carried out this research. This is another in the Shelf Life series from the American Museum of Natural History. Museum curators Peter Whiteley, an anthropologist, and Ward Wheeler, a computational biologist, joined forces to trace the evolution of Native American languages by applying gene-sequencing methods to historical linguistics. I became fascinated by the idea…
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