Why is language uniquely human? As mentioned in previous posts, chimpanzees can’t learn language because they can’t learn to name things. Only humans can. We’ve also argued that an infant’s ...

Among the many developmental milestones that new parents look out for, few are as highly anticipated as their baby's first words. Despite some gibberish preceding actual language, a baby's earliest ...

The AI program was way less cute than a real baby. But like a baby, it learned its first words by seeing objects and hearing words. Some ideas of language learning hold that humans are born with ...

Human language allows us to learn new words for things we've never witnessed directly. We do this seamlessly, for example, in conversations, using clues from the overall context to infer a new word's ...