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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have shed light on the evolutionary roots of language in the brain. A team led at Newcastle University, UK, has shed light on the evolutionary roots of language in the brain. Publishing in ...

Linguists want to understand how languages have become so diverse and what constraints language evolution is subject to. To this end, they search for recurring patterns in language structure. In spite ...

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 ...