Why is language uniquely human? As mentioned in previous posts, chimpanzees can’t learn language because they can’t learn to name things. Only humans can. We’ve also argued that an infant’s ...

Human language allows us to learn new words for things we've never witnessed directly. We do this seamlessly, for example, in conversations, using clues from the overall context to infer a new word's ...

The speed and success with which infants acquire language is astonishing. In a matter of months, they progress from babbling to producing meaningful words, and within just a few years, they can ...

The Shared Book Reading Corpus is a collection of audiovisual recordings of English-speaking caregivers and 13–14-month-old infants (N = 44 dyads) reading together in a controlled lab setting.

Among the many developmental milestones that new parents look out for, few are as highly anticipated as their baby's first words. Despite some gibberish preceding actual language, a baby's earliest ...

A new study out of the University of Cambridge has found that singsong speech is vital for a baby’s ability to learn language skills. The study found that infants first understand language through ...