The hunt to decode one of the world’s strangest writing systems has shifted from a fringe obsession to a serious scientific ...

Scholars have recently question whether ancient Indus inscriptions code for language. American and Indian scientists used statistics to show that the 4,500-year-old Indus symbols' pattern follows that ...

Like Ariana Grande has shown, nobody is safe when it comes to inking yourself with foreign languages. Not even high-profile ...

Readers whose mother tongue is Arabic have more challenges reading in Arabic than native Hebrew or English speakers have reading their native languages, because the two halves of the brain divide the ...

From the stop sign to the laugh-cry emoji, symbols play a critical and ubiquitous role in everyday life. A forthcoming exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, “Give Me a Sign: The ...

What allows humans to infer “a notion of structure” (Otto Jespersen) when using language, art, music, and mathematics? All of these domains have their own unique representational units (words, notes), ...

As the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa stressed in his classic book Language in Thought and Action, words are not the things they represent. Words are symbols. It’s the manipulation of those symbols that ...