If you want to effortlessly become an expert in a new language, you’re probably too late. That’s an opportunity largely reserved for children. And yet, adults regularly set out to study a second (or third, or fourth) language. They embark on the difficult journey for different reasons. Some want to More
Linguistic anthropologists have observed that people all over the world perceive languages, and speakers of those different languages, as fundamentally different from one another. When people listen to others’ speech, they hear discrete categorical boundaries even when differences in speech exist along a continuum. Our minds, and not just our More
When she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Jinjing Jenny Wang kept wondering: How do children learn to count? It’s so basic, “but when you think about the problem, it is really difficult,” she said. “There is no number in this world we can see and touch. There’s More
Babies don’t learn language just by listening to speech, but also through what they see and how they move. This and other findings from APS William James Fellow Janet F. Werker. More
APS Fellow Usha Goswami has been named a recipient of the Yidan Prize for Education in recognition of her world-leading research on the importance of linguistic pattern recognition in reading acquisition. More
The role of birth order in shaping who we are has been a matter of some debate in psychology. Recent research has cast doubt on the idea that an individual’s position in relation to their siblings influences their personality, for instance. But there may be other domains where birth order is still More
