Watch Your Mouth

From childhood, we're taught that honesty is the best policy. Yet in everyday life, we hedge, soften our words, and leave things unsaid. This week, we talk with psychologist Steven Pinker about why indirect speech is such a fundamental part of human relationships. How long can yo ...  Show more

Think about the last time a piece of music stopped you in your tracks, or a novel kept you up late at night. Why do these experiences feel so powerful? Psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt says engagement with the arts can help to regulate our emotions, build resilience, and support lo ...  Show more

Michael Rosen talks to neuroscientist Dr Julia Ravey about whether we think and act differently when speaking a non-native language.More and more people are finding themselves speaking multiple languages in our cross-cultural societies. But when we communicate in a different tong ...  Show more

Are there really dozens of words for snow in northern cultures? What did the movie Arrival have to do with language and cognition? Why are Russians better than Americans at distinguishing certain shades of blue? And what does any of this have to do with space, time, gender, and h ...  Show more

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses c ...  Show more

Welcome to The Story of Language: an original podcast series about language, linguistics, cognition, and culture. In this episode we talk about linguistic relativity: the idea that the language we speak can change the way we think.