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 ...

Welcome back to "Teaching in Room 9," our region's largest classroom. My name is Julia, I'm one of the second grade teachers at the Soulard School, in here for "Teaching in Room 9," this time around, ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. How many vowels does English have? Five, right? A, E, I, O, U. Oh, and sometimes Y. So, six? Actually ...

Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either. Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps ...

What's the most common sound in English?

When we hear a sentence, or a line of poetry, our brains automatically transform the stream of sound into a sequence of syllables. But scientists haven't been sure exactly how the brain does this. Now ...

The English language has very interesting sound patterns and pronunciation rules that sets it apart from other languages. These sounds tend to be difficult, if not tiresome for non-native speakers to ...

Does [a:] as in 'baa' sound more green or more red? And is [i:] as in 'beet' light or dark in color? Even though we perceive speech and color are perceived with different sensory organs, nearly ...

In this lesson Julia starts by doing a mindful moment Rainbow Breathing exercise and discusses some learning strategies to use in school. Then using letter cards she sings to review the letter sounds ...

English bursts with consonants. We have words that string one after another, like angst, diphthong and catchphrase. But other languages keep more vowels and open sounds. And that variability might be ...

Does [a:] as in baa sound more green or more red? And is [i:] as in beet light or dark in colour? Even though we perceive speech and colour are perceived with different sensory organs, nearly everyone ...