Reading Right-to-Left: How Scripts Shape the Brain
Does the direction you read in change how you perceive the world? This article delves into the surprising science of how writing systems like English, Arabic, and Hebrew physically shape…
Tag: cognition
The Reader’s Leap: Why Your Eyes Skip Words
Reading feels like a smooth, continuous flow, but your eyes are actually performing a frantic, jerky dance across the page. We explore the science of saccades and fixations—the lightning-fast jumps…
Decoding the Antarctic Dialect
For scientists and staff "wintering-over" in Antarctica, months of profound isolation have forged a unique micro-dialect. This "Antarctic English" features specialized jargon for work, neologisms for psychological states like "The…
Decoding Dolphin Dialects
We know dolphins communicate with a complex symphony of clicks and whistles, but could they have regional accents, just like humans? Groundbreaking research using AI and acoustic analysis is beginning…
The Phishing Lure: Linguistics of Scam Emails
"Kindly update your details immediately". It's a phrase that feels slightly off, and for good reason. This article breaks down the linguistic fingerprints of phishing emails and text scams, from…
AI’s Word Boundary Problem
To a computer, what exactly is a "word"? This seemingly simple question opens up the "word boundary problem", a surprisingly complex challenge in AI and linguistics. From handling compound nouns…
Apraxia: The Brain’s Broken Speech Plan
Apraxia of speech is a mysterious neurological condition where the brain knows the perfect word but can't send the right instructions to the mouth. Unlike aphasia, where language is lost,…
The Verbal Compass: How Rivers Define Direction
Forget North and South. For speakers of some languages, the entire world is oriented not by a magnetic pole, but by the constant, unwavering flow of a river. This "verbal…
Five-Star Lies: The Linguistics of Fake Reviews
Ever wondered if that glowing five-star review is too good to be true? This article delves into the fascinating world of forensic linguistics to reveal the subtle linguistic clues—from pronoun…
How to Own Without ‘Have’: The Be-Languages
In languages like English, you 'have' a book. But in Russian, Irish, or Turkish, you would say "to me there is a book". This fundamental grammatical difference explores the world…
The Unspoken Tutor: How Games Teach Language
How do video games teach us to navigate new worlds and master complex actions without a single word of instruction? They use a powerful, unspoken language built from mechanics, level…
The Scribe’s Mistake: Errors in Medieval Texts
Before the printing press, every book was a handmade original, and every scribe made mistakes. Far from being mere blemishes, these scribal "bloopers" are a treasure trove for historians and…
The Child Who Forgot to Speak: Childhood L1 Attrition
We often worry about losing a second language, but what happens when a child starts to forget their first? First-language attrition is the poignant phenomenon where a child's mother tongue…
The Milliseconds Before You Speak
Before a single sound leaves your lips, your brain performs an incredible series of high-speed calculations. In just a few hundred milliseconds, it races from a vague idea to a…
10 Biases AI Learned From Our Writing
AI models learn language from us, warts and all. From reinforcing gender stereotypes in professions to assuming a Western-centric worldview, the vast library of our writing has baked subtle and…
10 UX Writing Rules from Linguistics
Every button, menu, and error message you read is a piece of micro-linguistics. This article reveals 10 crucial rules of UX writing, grounding them in core linguistic principles like Grice's…
Beyond Nominative: 10 Coolest Grammatical Cases
If you think cases are just for Latin or German, think again. This listicle dives into ten of the most fascinating grammatical cases from around the world, from Finnish's "Translative"…
Spot the Bot: 10 Cues of Deepfake Audio
As AI voice cloning masters the art of imitation, telling human from machine is becoming a crucial skill. This guide delves into 10 subtle linguistic and phonetic giveaways, from robotic…
Top 10 Linguistics Jobs for 2025
Think a linguistics degree only leads to a career in academia or translation? Think again. This article explores the top 10 booming careers for linguists in 2025, from designing AI…
The Brain’s Autocorrect: Error Repair in Speech
We constantly misspeak, yet our conversations flow with surprising smoothness. This is thanks to "speech repair", the brain's subconscious autocorrect system that detects our own verbal errors mid-word. This remarkable…