Stacey Pavelko is developing new ways to identify developmental language disorder earlier and give children and families tools to build the skills they need to read.

A study of 62,000 autistic individuals challenges traditional clinical labels, showing that evaluating what a child understands separately from what they can say provides a more accurate and clinically useful map of their abilities.

The Beatles’ cultural influence reaches well beyond music into television, fashion, and global media. As we show, it reaches into scientific publishing too. This study documents how often Beatles song titles and lyrics appear in academic article titles, identifying 2,237 exact references and 963 instances of creative wordplay in data from Scopus. Working from a curated list of Beatles songs and lyrics, we combine automated title queries with large-language-model screening, followed by manual verification, to detect both exact references and wordplay. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically identify wordplay on Beatles song titles and lyrics in scientific article titles. We report which titles and lyrics are referenced most often, trace how their use has grown over the decades, and show that this growth has outpaced the expansion of the scientific literature as a whole while varying systematically across disciplines. The result is the first large-scale, cross-disciplinary account of how the Beatles have left their mark on scientific writing.

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 78% of the 3,507 Americans interviewed said it was extremely, very, or somewhat important for children growing up in the US to learn a language other than English. Here are the survey’s findings about language learning in the U.S.: Four-in-ten Americans say it is extremely or very important […]

A newly discovered link between firelight flickers and the human brain suggests that campfire stories are part of our DNA.

A new study of healthy adults and patients with severe aphasia shows that the human brain uses distinct networks for processing language and solving complex logic puzzles, challenging the long-held idea that we think in words.

When people apologize, they do more than acknowledge a mistake. They also reveal how they understand responsibility, ethics, social and moral norms, and their relationship with others. These things all differ widely between cultural contexts.