Mother tongue by Andrea Valentino in New Scientist 26 November 2022
We will never know how and when language emerged but we are getting closer. You’ll have heard of...
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Category: LANGUAGE
Tortoise talk proves a turtle surprise by Kaya Burgess in The Times 22 November 2022
The ancestors of language look to be very widespread. Researchers have been considering the sounds...
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Dozens of turtle species use vocal sounds to communicate by Christa Leste-Lasserre in New Scientist 29 October 2022
The origins of language go back 400 million years. Recent research has established that many...
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Internal affairs by Caroline Williams in New Scientist 9 July 2022
Inner speech and consciousness are not the same thing. We are (almost) all familiar with the voice...
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Playing with fire by Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater in New Scientist 26 March 2022
Strange how we still cannot agree on the origins of language. The authors have just brought out a...
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Chimpanzees seem to speak in sentences of three or more calls by Michael Marshall in New Scientist 20 February 2021
We are learning more and more about animal communications. Recent research with chimpanzees shows...
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Talk to the animals by Edd Gent in New Scientist 19 December 2020
AI is well suited to interpreting animal communications. It is surprising that nobody thought of...
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Concepts in a Probabilistic Language of Thought by Noah D. Goodman et al, 14 June 2014
An elegant explanation of language and thought and how they relate to each other. This is the sort...
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Concepts in a probabilistic language of thought by Noah Goodman et al in CBMM 14 June 2014
An elegant explanation of language and thought and how they relate to each other. This is the sort...
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Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension by Z Harmon & V Kapatsinski in Cognitive Psychology 19 August 2017
The growth of language is a shared endeavour. It almost goes without saying that the evolution of...
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Who invented the ABCs? by Colin Barras in NewScientist 8 February 2020
It’s an accident that we use the alphabet. John Darnell et al published a landmark paper in 2006....
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Animal languages by Eva Meijer 2016
Dr Doolittle lives again. This is a truly wide-ranging canter through the ways in which many types...
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Chimp signals a bit like human speech in NewScientist 23 February 2019
Maybe human language is not as distinctive as previously thought. Researchers have been looking at...
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The kingdom of speech by Tom Wolfe 2016
Asks the right question. Not sure about the answer. Wolfe starts by nailing the key question. We...
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The Shallowness of Google Translate by Douglas Hofstadter in The Antlantic 30 January 2018
Understanding the point about understanding the point. We are all familiar with the point that...
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Synopsis of Language, consciousness, culture by Ray Jackendoff 2007
Brilliantly insightful on the connections between language and consciousness. The book comprises a...
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How language began by Daniel Everett 2017
Language begins with Homo erectus. There are two types of linguist: those who believe it’s all in...
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Language Re-Entrance and the ‘Inner Voice’ by Luc Steels 2003
The brain’s re-entrant connectivity turns lexical language into grammatical language. This paper...
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Give evolution enough time in Johnson in The Economist 7 October 2017
Everett and Chomsky bracket the debate around the beginnings of language. On the face of it, the...
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Spoken rules by FJ Brown and N Hooper in New Scientist 3 June 2017
This is an excellent and succinct article on the history of ideas in the realm of how humans...
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