Splish-splash, boing, bang, thud, sparkle, and pitter-patter are all fun words to say — they also happen to sound exactly like their definition. A study published recently in the Journal of ...

The wind is up; a dry wind. Between four walls, we're only aware of its presence by the sounds it makes. Whistling, hissing, sometimes howling. The effect on the building is noticeable: creaks in the ...

Ideophones, or words that sound like what they mean—words whose sound evokes the sensory experience they describe, like swish or twinkle—are easier to learn than other words, a new study finds. The ...

It appears that meanings of words are far more often associated with certain sounds than is printed in linguistics textbooks. Up to now, linguists assumed that the association between how words sound ...

Speaking usually feels automatic, but age can quietly change it. Simple words may begin to trip us up, and sentences that ...

Newer generations often hear certain words without knowing where they originally stem from. And while they may have their own version of these slang terms, there are 11 slang words boomers still use ...

For more than 100 years the standard view among traditional language theorists was that, with the exception of onomatopoeia like "fizz" and "beep," the sound of a word tells us nothing about how it is ...

What makes some words easier to learn than others? Researchers found that ideophones — words that sound like what they mean — are easier to learn than regular words. This suggests that some of our ...