Listen closely to those baboon calls. They may tell you a thing or two about human speech. Scientists who studied baboons’ wahoos, yaks, barks and other vocalizations have found evidence of five vowel ...

Would you drive a SUV called a Himmer? Phonetic symbolism refers to the notion that the sounds of words, apart from their assigned definition, convey meaning. A new article applies this theory to ...

We learn about 6 vowel letters and the numerous sounds we make when using them. In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! We ...

The secret physics at the core of every syllable, starting with the first words we speak. Human language is an incredible thing: a combination of mouth sounds that we combine into words, sentences, ...

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is not all you need to know about vowels. There's more to these workhorse members of our linguistics inventory than you might think. The most common vowel sound in ...

Students [Berk Gokmen] and [Justin Green] developed an RP2040-based LED-illuminated lightsaber as a final project with a bit of a twist. It has two unusual sound-reactive modes: disco mode, and vowel ...

The sound of a word like “knife” or “truck” seems totally arbitrary–it’s just a random sound we’ve assigned to a thing, right? But for several decades, scientists have found good evidence that the ...