Made-up words like “clisious” and “smanious” are easier to remember when they sound beautiful. Could the feel of a word shape how we learn languages, sell products and even how languages evolve?

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 ...

Pleasant-sounding words are easier to remember, according to a study. People perceive words with different sounds as differing in their beauty, say linguists. The new study suggests that the phonemic ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Our brains "time-stamp" the order of incoming sounds, allowing us to correctly process the words that we hear, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers. Its findings, ...