Physics World – Sam Jarman 
A key stage of a child’s development is the point at which they switch from seeing language as a random jumble of words to a highly-structured system for conveying information. After this transition – which happens remarkably quickly – they can for the first time use grammatical structures to construct meaningful new sentences, even if they have never heard them before. The cause of this sharp transition has mystified linguists for many years, and in this study DeGiuli tackled the problem from the angle of statistical physics (more)