The International Phonetic Alphabet: one sound for each symbol, and one symbol for each sound, except for the sounds we can't ...

Scientists have found that a portion of the brain that handles decision-making also helps decipher different sounds. A front portion of the brain that handles tasks like decision-making also helps ...

In a Lingua Franca post a few weeks ago, I needed to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the different pronunciations of the English word People still talk about speech sounds ...

What is a digraph? Well, there are plenty of them in English and it’s where two ‘written letters’ represent one phonetic sound. For example, in the word ‘phonetic’. the first two letters <ph> are ...

Sometimes, teenagers make irritating noises. Now we know what those noises are called. Over at The Week, editor (and linguist) James Harbeck has penned an excellent piece titled, quite simply, ...

Speech perception requires the rapid and effortless extraction of meaningful phonetic information from a highly variable acoustic signal. A powerful example of this phenomenon is categorical speech ...