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 ...

Learn how early human language relied on simple verb-noun combinations, and how these structures still survive today as clues ...

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 ( ...

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 ...

It feels like every week, a new language app pops up promising fluency fast and claiming to be the smartest way to learn. But when you’re investing real time and money, trust matters. Babbel has been ...

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 ...

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 ...

Overview AI language is structured and consistent, while human English thrives on variation, emotion, and personal ...