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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 you stumble naming the ink of a clashing colour word: the Stroop effect Name the ink colour of the word GREEN printed in red and you stumble, even though the rule is trivial. In 1935 John Ridley Stroop timed it: naming the ink of… Mind3 min read23 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 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 you can't ignore the word and name the colour: the Stroop effect Read the word, then name its ink colour: you can't turn reading off. In 1886 Cattell noticed that people read words faster than they name colours, and in 1935… Mind4 min read6 Oct How a Bloom filter says "definitely not" using just a few bits How can a computer check whether a word is on a huge list using only a few bits per entry? A Bloom filter flips a handful of switches for every word you add… Computing3 min read3 Oct Why everyone agrees which blob is 'bouba' and which is 'kiki' Show people a soft blob and a spiky star and ask which one is bouba and which is kiki. The words are made up, yet in the classic version of the test about 95%… Language5 min read27 Sep Why the most common words are the shortest: Zipf's two laws of language Count the words in almost any long text and a strange pattern appears: the most common word turns up about twice as often as the second, three times as often… Language5 min read26 Sep Why English spelling doesn't match how words sound Around 1400, English spelling roughly matched speech. Bite sounded close to "beet", meet roughly like "mate", and house like "hoose". Then, over about three… Language5 min read26 Sep