speech

(Newser) - It’s a bit weird to defend something like eloquence, but that’s just the task to which the primary season has inspired Calvin Trillin, writing in the Los Angeles Times. Rivals and pundits alike dismiss Barack Obama’s eloquence as some kind of liability, whereas Trillin sees in the...

(Newser) - Michael Jackson's Thriller has been added to the prestigious National Recording Registry's archive of the most important recordings in American history, Variety reports. The monster 1982 hit joins 24 other "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" new additions to the collection, including a 1925 recording of the first-ever broadcast to...

(Newser) - Being bird-brained might not be much of an insult: New MIT research paints a more intricate portrait of how songbirds learn to sing, with one part of the brain used for learning and another for singing itself. Rather than maturing from babbling to birdsong, the independent but overlapping pathways work...

(Newser) - Neanderthals may have spoken much like we do, new research shows. Scientists examined a gene linked to language called FOXP2 in the DNA of cavemen bones discovered in northern Spain, and found that it was identical to ours. The gene is the only one known to be involved in human...