predictive value

We’ve reached the final installment of our series on Ferdinand de Saussure and the scintillating study of semiology. In our last post we left our friend Saussure in a rather unflattering light, when we explored the first scientific evidence against his hypothesis: that the relationship between the sign (a word) and the signified (the concept a word represents) might not be as arbitrary as Saussure …

According to a Japanese proverb: “A crying child thrives.” A recent study that examines the complexity of an infant’s cries in relation to his or her language development seems to offer a scientific basis for this folk wisdom. For babies whose cries exhibited complex melodies by the age of two months, the study, published in the The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal says the probability of a …