It was as if the Korean-speaking children paid more attention to how their actions influenced the world, while the English-speaking children paid more attention to how objects fit into different categories. The likeliest explanation for this is that the children were influenced by what the grown-ups around them said, which in turn was shaped by the

By the third trimester, babies can hear the tones of their mother’s voice. Shortly after birth, babies born to Mandarin-speaking mothers (Mandarin is a highly tonal language) tend to cry with more complex intonations than babies born to German- or Swedish-speaking mothers, for example.

It turns out that, just by the nature of the grammar of their languages, Korean- and English-speaking parents talk about the world quite differently. Korean (like Latin or French) uses an elaborate system of different verb endings to convey different meanings. As a consequence, Korean-speaking parents can, and often do, omit nouns altogether when t