© Pixabay - Changes of speech sounds during the Middle Ages shed light on how we process language Our language is changing constantly. Researchers of the University of Vienna found that, over centuries, frequently occurring speech sound patterns get even more frequent. The reason for this development is that our brain can perceive, process and learn frequent, and thus prototypical sound patterns more easily than less frequent ones. The results of the study were published in the journal Cognitive Linguistics. Languages from the past are very different from today's languages. This is not only true for their vocabulary and grammar, but also for their speech sounds. Theresa Matzinger and Nikolaus Ritt from the Department of English at the University of Vienna investigated which factors were responsible for these sound changes and what such sound changes can tell us about processing capacities of our brains.
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