If you have spent time with an infant, you might recognize the scene: A child is wailing, inconsolable, and you, the parent, have to go to the bathroom. Or eat. Or attend to a pot that’s boiling over.

Until relatively recently, it was not considered good form to speculate on the origin of language. And, in part, this was a sound position to adopt. By the time that Charles Darwin published On the ...

A cap with electrodes is used to catalogue brain activity during various language tests. The image is from a research project that tests synchronization activity in pre-school children. Our brain is a ...

The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of ...

Alyssa Quinn said she was home alone one night — feeling hopeless as she struggled to start her first novel and incorporate the theories of language she wanted to write about — when the first line ...