A new brain mapping experiment shows that whether you read or listen to a book, the same parts of the brain are stimulated to help you understand and respond to the meaning of the words (or the ...

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs — and ...

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Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

Decades after I began writing about language, there are still words I avoid out of fear I’ll use them wrong. And worse: Some of these are terms I’ve learned, written about, then promptly forgotten.