Exaggerating phrases and talking in a sing-song way can actually help, not make it harder, for young children to master speaking a language.

Why do some people maintain good memories and have healthy brains even as they age? Research that my colleagues and I recently published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, explored the effects and interactions of social, linguistic, and endocrinological factors on cognitive health.

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, cultural, and societal shifts. Studying the evolution of languages can thus offer valuable insight into how human societies and cultures have transformed over time.

A new model to predict how language changes over time has been developed by a statistical physicist at the University of Portsmouth. The model is a step towards understanding the “statistical physics of language,” a scientific theory which borrows ideas from the physics of interacting particles to explain how words, accents, and dialects spread, shift, and disappear across regions and generations, and how they might change in future. The research is published in the journal Physical Review E.

A new study challenges one of the most widely accepted ideas in psychology and linguistics: that the meaning of words is fundamentally organized around expressing emotion. Instead, a team of scientists at the University of Vermont have looked at the use of billions of words and discovered that language is structured by something deeper—and more consequential: the need for safety and survival.