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Why a language gets grammar when nobody designs it: the iterated-learning experiment How does a language get grammar when nobody designs it? In a 2008 experiment, volunteers learned an alien language of 27 random words for pictures, saw only 14… Language4 min read2 Nov How babies find words in a stream of sound: transitional probabilities Babies hear speech as one unbroken smear, with no gaps between words, yet somehow they start picking out words long before they can say one. One clue sits in… Language4 min read30 Oct Why Russians have two blues: how a colour word can speed up your eyes Russian has two basic words for blue, goluboy (light) and siniy (dark), and in a 2007 experiment Russian speakers were about 124 milliseconds faster at telling… Language4 min read27 Oct Why a sentence can nest forever on paper but not in your head: centre-embedding The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt. It is perfectly grammatical, and almost nobody can read it. English lets you tuck one clause inside another… Language4 min read23 Oct Why 'The old man the boat' stops you cold: garden-path sentences and a brain that guesses Read "The old man the boat." and your brain probably crashes at the fifth word. It guessed "the old man" was one person and waited for a verb that never came… Language4 min read20 Oct Why Latin p became English f: Grimm's law and the sound-shift chain Latin says pes, English says foot. Latin tres, English three. Latin cornu, English horn. The swap is not random: when the Germanic languages split off, their… Language5 min read16 Oct Why English plurals say s, z or iz: the wug test Say 'cats' and 'dogs' out loud and listen to the last sound. One is a hiss, the other a buzz, and 'buses' adds a whole extra syllable. English spells all three… Language4 min read13 Oct Why the most common word is twice as common as the next: Zipf's law Sort every word in a book from most to least common and a pattern appears: the top word is about twice as common as the second, three times as common as the… Language5 min read10 Oct Why “The old man the boat” reads as broken: garden-path sentences Read this: The old man the boat. If it stalled you at the end, your brain did exactly what it always does: it guessed ahead and lost the bet. A garden-path… Language4 min read7 Oct Why 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3: flip the 64 bits a computer uses for decimals Type 0.1 + 0.2 into almost any programming language and you get 0.30000000000000004. Nothing is broken. Computers count in powers of two, and a tenth is an… Computing3 min read6 Oct Why the same sound is a b to English ears and a p to Spanish ears Say "bat" and "pat". The only physical difference is a tiny delay between your lips opening and your vocal cords buzzing, about 12 milliseconds for an English… Language3 min read4 Oct Why Spanish sounds faster than Vietnamese yet says just as much Listen to Spanish or Japanese and it seems to rush past; Vietnamese or Thai can sound almost unhurried. Yet when researchers timed 170 people reading the same… Language5 min read29 Sep