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Humans have a very strong need to communicate. This ‘drive to share thoughts’ has been pointed out as one of the main differences between us and other species. It is, I suppose, what makes me write the present post to you, reader.  Another exclusive characteristic of human communication is our cooperative willingness to infer the […]

Imagine a parent explaining to their child that they ought to say ‘thank you’. They are at a restaurant, the food arrives, and the child doesn’t say anything. The parent gets angry, ‘very well, I won’t buy you any ice cream now!’ Essentially, the parent intends to make the child respond to his spoken words […]

I had friends over recently with their two daughters aged three and one, and the three-year-old suddenly called her father by his first name instead of Dad. We all started laughing and mocking our friend for not having any authority. The little girl was confused and did not seem to get the joke – and […]

Science is the most reliable form of knowledge that we have, but today, it has certain limits. Descartes prudently stated that science could only deal with the body and not with the soul (or the mind). From this original thought arose the dualism of mind versus body. Recently, this idea has been taken further by […]

The notion of language difference – in contrast to language disorder or delay – is important for clinicians and researchers studying children’s language acquisition. The distinction between difference and disorder reflects the need to distinguish between a standard path of language development, that might for example be described in literature or used as a normative […]

Spanish is considered by some of its speakers — including linguists and philologists such as Teresa Meana Suárez and Claudia Guichard Bello — a sexist language. This is mainly because in Spanish the masculine gender is used to refer to both males and females as a generic form. In terms of human beings, this means […]