This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American When Emperor Akihito stepped down from the ...

Forget language genes or innate linguistic universals; language is not only learned, it's also powerfully shaped by the culture we live in.... There's no language gene. There's no innate language ...

As the United States celebrates its the second year with Juneteenth as a federal holiday, many articles will be written about race relations. But I’d like to broach one topic that often falls under ...

“SHAPE: The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages,” encompasses the way that shape figures into the learning of 44 different languages — systematically sampled ...

You spend almost all of your waking hours—and even some of your non-waking hours—using language. Even when you’re not talking with other people, you’re still running a monologue in your head much of ...

Why does “bouba” sound round and “kiki” sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world. For at least a century scientists have considered this ...