prosody

The Sentence as a River: What is Information Structure?

This isn't just about grammar; it's about information structure, the art of packaging 'old' and 'new' information to guide your…

2 weeks ago

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…

3 weeks ago

The Hidden Logic of Baby Babble

Is a baby's babbling just adorable, random noise? Far from it. Linguists have discovered that babbling is a highly structured…

3 weeks ago

The Linguistics of the Dialect Coach

Ever wonder how Meryl Streep becomes Polish or Idris Elba masters a Baltimore accent? It's not just mimicry; it's the…

3 weeks ago

The Question That Isn’t a Question? The Surprising Linguistics of Uptalk

Ever notice how some people end statements as if they were asking a question? This rising inflection, known as "uptalk,"…

3 weeks ago

Cracking the Code Before Words: The Infant’s Amazing Ability to Find Word Boundaries

To an infant, spoken language is a continuous, unbroken river of sound. So how do they learn where one word…

3 weeks ago

The Accent That Wasn’t Theirs: Inside the Baffling Neurological Mystery of Foreign Accent Syndrome

Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a baffling and rare medical condition where a person, typically after a stroke or brain…

3 weeks ago

The Chameleon Tone: Unlocking the Musical Logic of Mandarin’s Tone Sandhi

Mandarin is famously a tonal language, but what many learners quickly discover is that the tones they memorize often change…

3 weeks ago

The Phonetics of Pop: Why Some Languages Are More “Singable” Than Others

Ever wonder why Italian opera sounds so smooth or why English dominates the pop charts? The answer lies in the…

3 weeks ago

The Unspoken Melody: How Intonation Carries More Meaning Than Words

Beyond vocabulary lies prosody—the music of speech. From the rising inflection that turns a statement into a question to the…

3 weeks ago

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