Dependency linguistics examines the relationships between words in a sentence, focussing on how syntactic structure is determined by directed links—dependencies—between a head and its dependents. This ...

When learning a new language, we automatically organize words into sentences that will be both clearly understood and efficient (quick) to communicate. That's the finding of a new study reported today ...

Psychologists argue that human languages may adapt more like biological organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate ...

A new world atlas of colonial-era languages reveals massive traces of African and Pacific source languages. A new large-scale database and atlas of key structural properties of mixed languages from ...

There are two striking features of language that any scientific theory of this quintessentially human behavior must account for. The first is that we do not all speak the same language. This would be ...

People often seem to understand language before they have actually heard enough words to determine its structure. In everyday conversation, listeners react immediately, anticipate what others will say ...

Researchers find that comprehension is related to predicting sentence structure in real time. Notably, different languages guide prediction in different ways. People often seem to understand language ...