One of the most daunting tasks when traveling abroad is attempting to understand the language. To most people, a different language can sound like complete gibberish as speech patterns, inflection and ...

Why is it so easy to hear individual words in your native language, but in a foreign language they run together in one long stream of sound? Researchers from UC San Francisco have begun to answer that ...

In the icy tundra of Siberia, people speak in tightly wound sounds with consonants packed like frozen gravel. A few thousand miles to the south, under the humid canopy of Papua New Guinea, speech ...

The English language has at least half a million words, depending on what dictionary you’re looking at. English consists of letters running from the left side of the page to the right, while other ...

We live in a sea of constant sounds and noises. Some are meaningful and some are not. However, it seems as though we have a remarkable ability to discriminate human speech from all of those other ...

Rachel Feltman: If you stubbed your toe right now, what sound would you make? According to linguists, the chances are pretty good that your answer would be surprisingly similar to the one given by ...

LINGUISTS TEND to say that all languages are valuable, expressive and complex. They usually attribute negative attitudes to prejudice and politics. That is probably why no one has carefully studied ...