What do infants know? How does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for
learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers …

To tackle a hard problem, it is often wise to reuse and recombine existing knowledge. Such
an ability to bootstrap enables us to grow rich mental concepts despite limited cognitive …

Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use: You learn a language through
immersion in the language used in your linguistic community, and in using language to …

Constructed languages, also known as conlangs, are languages that have been
purposefully created for either real-world or fictional speakers. Within this article, I provide a …

While the languages of the world differ in many respects, they share certain commonalties,
which can provide insight on our shared cognition. Here, we explore the learnability …

While late second language (L2) learning is assumed to be largely explicit, there is evidence
that adults are able to acquire grammar under incidental exposure conditions, and that the …

The goal of this themed issue and the associated Royal Society and British Academy joint
Discussion Meeting is to advance, and bridge between, two topics and their respective …

Although passivization is productive in English, it is not completely general--some
exceptions exist (eg* One hour was lasted by the meeting). How do English speakers learn …

Communicative competence is an essential language skill, the ability to adjust language use
according to specific contexts and to employ knowledge and strategies for successful …

Linguistic research focuses primarily on the thousands of naturally occurring languages, but
there are also languages that have been consciously created by individuals. There are four …