Listen closely to those baboon calls. They may tell you a thing or two about human speech. Scientists who studied baboons’ wahoos, yaks, barks and other vocalizations have found evidence of five vowel ...

(By Roy Williams) According to cognitive neuroscientists, the most important gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds. The written language was developed only to make ...

The words you use can have a powerful effect on people, but new research suggests its not the words themselves that carry meaning, but instead its the individual letters. And researchers from Germany ...

We learn about 6 vowel letters and the numerous sounds we make when using them. In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! We ...

Would you drive a SUV called a Himmer? Phonetic symbolism refers to the notion that the sounds of words, apart from their assigned definition, convey meaning. A new article applies this theory to ...

The sound of a word like “knife” or “truck” seems totally arbitrary–it’s just a random sound we’ve assigned to a thing, right? But for several decades, scientists have found good evidence that the ...