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 ARTICLES
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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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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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 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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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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AI’s Language Problem by Will Knight in MIT Technology Review 2016
The article spells out in some detail why we have found it so difficult to build algorithms capable of … language …
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A social spin on language analysis by Carolyn Penstein Rosé in Nature 11 May 2017
The article reports on work presented to a recent web conference on the subject of ‘personal attacks …
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