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Many people misunderstand my recently published letter, The Behaviour of Language.The confusion, I think, comes down to our ingrained perception of meaning in nature. Picture a mother chimp and her offspring.‘I’m hungry,’ says the infant chimpanzee.Of course, it says nothing of the kind — but that is how we tend to see it. When the […]

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 […]