Physics – Phillip Ball
“A long-standing puzzle in linguistics is how children learn the basic grammatical structure of their language, so that they can create sentences they have never heard before. A new study suggests that this process involves a kind of phase transition in which the “deep structure” of a language crystallizes out abruptly as grammar rules are intuited by the learner. At the transition, a language switches from seeming like a random jumble of words to a highly structured communication system that is rich in information.” (more)