The Silence Between Words: What Pauses Communicate
The gaps in speech carry as much meaning as the words—if you know how to listen.
The Sounds That Languages Ignore: Universal Gaps in Phoneme Inventories
Why thousands of possible speech sounds never appear in any human language, and what this reveals about communication itself.
How Children Crack the Code: The Remarkable Logic of Language Acquisition
Children decode language through statistics, inference, and structure—accomplishing what AI still struggles to replicate.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Small Words Reveal About Cognition
How the smallest words in language reveal the most sophisticated cognitive operations
Why Sarcasm Fails in Text: The Hidden Complexity of Prosodic Meaning
Writing preserves our words but discards how we meant them—and that missing melody changes everything
The Physics of Speech: Why Human Vocal Tracts Limit Language
Your vocal tract is an instrument with physical limits—and those limits sculpt every language humans have ever spoken.
How New Words Are Born: The Mechanics of Lexical Innovation
Discover the systematic rules governing how languages manufacture vocabulary, from morphological patterns to borrowed words to metaphorical meaning shifts.
Why Conversation Works: The Hidden Rules of Turn-Taking
The split-second predictions and unspoken signals that transform two speakers into one seamless conversation.
The Invention of Writing: How Symbols Rewired Human Cognition
How marking clay tablets 5,000 years ago created new kinds of minds and made modern knowledge possible
Why Languages Die: The Cognitive Cost of Losing Linguistic Diversity
Each dying language takes irreplaceable cognitive tools with it—unique systems for perceiving space, time, and reality that millennia of evolution created.
The Babel Problem: Why Machine Translation Still Struggles
Machine translation errors reveal deep truths about how human languages actually encode meaning and why perfect conversion between them may be impossible.
Why Languages Have Grammar: The Cognitive Economy of Syntax
Discover why every language develops systematic grammar rules and how syntax solves the computational puzzle of transmitting complex thoughts efficiently.
The Grammar of Thought: How Sentence Structure Shapes Reasoning
The syntactic patterns you practice daily quietly train your brain to attend, remember, and reason in language-specific ways.
Why You Mishear Song Lyrics: The Science of Auditory Pattern Completion
Discover how your brain's predictive machinery and statistical biases construct what you hear—even when it's completely wrong.