Vows of silence and humanist beliefs led European clerics to create new communication methods for the deaf 500 years ago. Charles-Michel de L'Épée teaching the hearing impaired in his Paris institute.

Table 1 List of variables analysed in this study (see also Supplementary Fig. 3), with the names given to the variables in the raw data available in Supplementary Data 1 Full size table While language ...

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

The evolution of philosophy can be viewed as a continuous process of self-reconstruction. The 20th century, an era of dramatic change in linguistic and cognitive theories, accelerated this ...

Two concepts – acquisition and learning – play key roles in the study of language. Although there are people who use the two terms interchangeably, in reality they embody two different processes in ...

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, ...

Language learning is often a daunting prospect. Many of us wish we had learned a language to a higher level at school. But even though adults of all ages can do well in acquiring a new language, fear ...