NIH-funded, AI-powered analysis of interviews suggests that a youth’s framing of stressful events is a strong indicator of risk for future disorders.

In 2024, Frank Muldowney learned he had aphasia, nearly 40 years after losing language following brain surgery at 19. What he experienced is now being confirmed by neuroscience.

WASHINGTON — Globally, people currently use roughly 7,500 languages, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and French the most common, counting native and nonnative speakers. That is a lot of languages. But it is a far cry from the peak number historically. Researchers used mathematical modeling and insights from anthropology, linguistics, and demography to […]

During a period spanning the first millennium B.C. and ‌first millennium ‌A.D., humankind may have spoken tens of thousands of different languages, compared to about 7,500 now.

A Taiwan–led study of Mandarin-speaking learners shows that the sounds we hear and produce are deeply shaped by our prior language experience, offering new insights into how humans learn and use language.

For a long time, the assumption was that ancient history was a endless sea of thousands of small isolated tribes—meaning language diversity must have started at its highest point and steadily decayed. The new models show a very different story: a massive bell curve where language diversity peaked just 1,000 to 3,000 years ago before crashing into a severe bottleneck.