Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words from each other with astonishing precision and speed. To find out how this is possible, a team of linguists has ...

For most of our school lives, we were told a neat little rule: use ‘a’ before words beginning with consonants and ‘an’ before words beginning with vowels. It sounded simple, almost soothingly ...

An example of word-initial lengthening in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawakan language spoken in the Amazon region of Bolivia. The word-initial /n/ (100ms) is significantly longer than the /n/ in the ...

Distinguishing between words is one of the most difficult tasks in decoding spoken language. Yet humans do it effortlessly - even when languages do not seem to clearly mark where one word ends and the ...