The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

Humans are storytelling beings. As far as we know, no other species has the capacity for language and ability to use it in endlessly creative ways. From our earliest days, we name and describe things.

Paul Ibbotson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

Nearly 7,000 different languages are spoken across the world. But how these languages evolved has long been a source of debate. Now, a group of German researchers has uncovered exactly how language ...

Annabelle Lukin has received internal research funding grants from Macquarie University. In his recent speech accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, Chomsky returned to a recurrent theme from his work in ...

Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our ...