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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

English typically uses a strict SUBJECT VERB OBJECT (SVO) word order in simple sentences, as in Students (S) read (V) books (O). This SVO word order becomes altered in many other English sentence ...

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 ...