As many educators and researchers will attest, there’s no exact science to choosing vocabulary words—no inherent reason the word “detest” is more important to teach than “despise,” or why “compassion” ...

One of the most amazing phenomena in young children learning a language is how well and how fast they learn new words. There comes a time in their development when we, adults, can hardly keep up with ...

Sometimes life, with the aid of an unrelenting news cycle, can feel like an exercise in parsing out the particular kind of bad we are experiencing. Are we anxious or depressed, lonely or stressed? Tim ...

A team of cognitive and computer scientists has successfully trained a basic artificial intelligence model to match images to words using just 61 hours of naturalistic footage and sound—previously ...

New research delves into how children build their vocabularies and what words are easiest for them to learn. The scientists worked with 32 children who were all 2 years old, studying their word ...

Corrected: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the tiers associated with challenging words. Children who enter kindergarten with a small vocabulary don’t get taught enough ...

A baby's first year brings incredible change. In just a few months, babies go from cooing and crawling to making sense of language in ways researchers are only starting to understand. One mystery has ...