Most scientists think language emerged in stages, as our ancestors evolved the necessary adaptations for speech.Credit: Sergey Uryadnikov/shutterstock Humans have language and other animals don’t.

For decades, scholars believed children’s speech errors were the seeds of language change, but new research challenges that ...

A new study shows that genetic evidence of historical contact between populations reveals consistent patterns of language change.

So random, and yet so normal. Letters tend to generate expressions. “OK” started in Jacksonian America with a jolly ...

For more than a century, scholars have repeated a powerful idea: that the mistakes children make when learning to speak are ...

This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joshua Plotkin, a biology professor at the University of ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is ...