The AI program was way less cute than a real baby. But like a baby, it learned its first words by seeing objects and hearing words. Some ideas of language learning hold that humans are born with ...

My four-year-old learned three new words recently: derecho, generator, and cicada. She is old enough and talks so much that I no longer notice every one of her new words like I did during her toddler ...

A new study investigates where toddlers look when they learn new words. It finds that children with larger vocabularies looked quickly towards objects when learning new words. Meanwhile, children who ...

We often view the ability to construct and learn a language as a skill set so unique it sets us apart from all other creatures in the animal kingdom. Dogs, in all their unknowing wisdom, make a mess ...

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 ...

As ubiquitous as colored pencils and alphabet posters, lists of “sight words” have long been a fixture in kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms. These inventories identify some of the most commonly ...

Common house cats possess the ability to associate human words with images without prompting or reward, new research conducted by animal scientists at Azabu University in Japan has revealed. This ...

Sometimes life, with the aid of an unrelenting news cycle, can feel like an exercise in parsing out the particular kind of bad we are experiencing. Are we anxious or depressed, lonely or stressed? Tim ...

WASHINGTON -- It's called the "word spurt," that magical time when a toddler's vocabulary explodes, seemingly overnight. New research offers a decidedly un-magical explanation: Babies start really ...

As many educators and researchers will attest, there’s no exact science to choosing vocabulary words—no inherent reason the word “detest” is more important to teach than “despise,” or why “compassion” ...

All the Latest Game Footage and Images from First Words Animals * Now with French, German, Japanese, Spanish, plus British and American English* More than just a game, First Words Animals is a ...

One Friday in 1977, a 1-year-old named Nathaniel living in Leiden, in the Netherlands, said “mawh,” which his English-speaking parents enthusiastically greeted as his first word. It came with a ...