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 ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to ...

Understanding a simple-looking sentence such as “I read this article yesterday” actually requires some sophisticated conceptual computation: a subject (“I”) performed an action (“read”) on an object ( ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders ...

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers assess the impact of restricted language access among children on the organization of the adult brain in ...

Human languages are complex phenomena. Around 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, some with only a handful of remaining speakers, while others, such as Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi, are ...

Humpback whale song is a striking example of a complex, culturally transmitted behavior, but up to now, there was little evidence it has language-like structure. Human language, which is also ...

Orangutan calls have a complex structure that was thought to be unique to human language. Short sequences are nested inside longer sequences, much like the way we assemble long sentences from shorter ...