Scholars have recently question whether ancient Indus inscriptions code for language. American and Indian scientists used statistics to show that the 4,500-year-old Indus symbols' pattern follows that ...

Readers whose mother tongue is Arabic have more challenges reading in Arabic than native Hebrew or English speakers have reading their native languages, because the two halves of the brain divide the ...

From the stop sign to the laugh-cry emoji, symbols play a critical and ubiquitous role in everyday life. A forthcoming exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, “Give Me a Sign: The ...

As the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa stressed in his classic book Language in Thought and Action, words are not the things they represent. Words are symbols. It’s the manipulation of those symbols that ...

When tweeters use hashtags, they tend to be more formal and drop the use of abbreviations and emoticons. But when they use the @ symbol to address smaller audiences, they're more likely to use ...