In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, ...

Those of us who have cared for someone with Alzheimer's disease know all too well the pain of trying to communicate with someone who is losing their language abilities. People with the disease tend to ...

Like learning math, from simple counting to solving complex equations, language learning happens in a similar stepwise fashion, with each new step building on previous knowledge. Brown (1973) outlines ...

The language patterns a person uses in describing their feelings can reveal their true sentiments about other groups of people, researchers report. “There are times when people might lie about how ...

Two researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom have shown for the first time that the law of brevity in human language, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the broad intersection of data and society. When it comes to using “big data” to analyze the patterns of society, ...

A comprehensive analysis of English-language literature published over the last century reveals distinct patterns in how race and gender intersect within written text. The findings suggest that Black ...