Headlines Discussions surrounding racial justice have been on the rise in light of recent events and many people are more willing now than ever to address racism. This article gives an overview of different measures some states have taken to…

Headlines In these pandemic times, wearing a mask might seem to interfere with both speech production and comprehension. While masks limit mouth movement, they also cut off visual cues (e.g. lip reading) that we rely on as listeners for processing…

Headlines The Oxford English Dictionary issues regular updates throughout the year to include new words and meanings. This year, the editors released special updates to document the impacts of COVID-19. Many of these changes include the rise in usage of…

Headlines The first dictionary of Umpithamu, one of Australia’s indigenous languages, has been published, after a long compilation process of 17 years and more tragically, after the deaths of its two last active speakers. Dr Jean-Christophe Verstraete worked with the…

Headlines While being under quarantine is challenging in a number of ways, Sophie Hardach talks about the benefits quarantine has had on language use in multilingual families around the world. Children are spending more time around their direct family and…

24/08/2018–31/08/2018 Headlines Eye-tracking is a technique that captures the eyes’ behavior during reading—both when the eyes remain fixed on a part of the text or when they “jump from word to word”. A database of eye-tracking data obtained from reading done…

01/06/2018–08/06/2018 Headlines If you’re bilingual, you’ve probably noticed that swearing and venting frustration comes more easily in your second language. Generally speaking, you may feel more emotionally detached when using it. Well, it turns out that this is due to…

25/05/2018–01/06/2018 Headlines There’s a body of research that points to the trend of low-income kids scoring lower than their more well-to-do peers on cognitive and standardised tests. But new evidence suggests there is a mitigating measure: learn another language. Researcher…

This week’s round up compiles language news from the last fortnight. 04/05/2018–18/05/2018 Headlines Babies prefer to listen to other babies than to Mummy and Daddy. These are the results of an experiment “probing infant speech perception”. Infants were found in to…

18/05/2018–25/05/2018 Headlines Will English remain the world’s favourite language for much longer? Robin Lustig claims that advances in machine translation will make a lingua franca unnecessary; the rise of China may mean Chinese takes English’s place; and the hybridisation of…

27/04/2018–04/05/2018 Headlines According to a recent study in the journal Cognition, it is nearly impossible to reach native-level fluency in any language after age 10. The good news, though, is that conversational proficiency is still achievable at any age, writes TIMES. Dr…

This week’s round up compiles language news from the last fortnight. 13/04/2018–27/04/2018 Headlines Michael Halliday, the father of a “theory of language known as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)”, has passed away at the age of 93. Having been educated, both…