An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Patrick van Eyck (SFS ’28) intended to study Russian or Persian at Georgetown University. After three semesters of classes, he instead earned proficiency in Spanish, which he learned attending middle ...

But an in-depth look at the science behind how language is developed reveals an interesting parallel between the science of reading and second language learning. In fact, the science of reading can ...

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 ...