The structure of languages may reveal more about their roots than their vocabularies do, according to a new biologically inspired linguistic technique. Studying languages can be extremely useful to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Studies on monolingual language acquisition reveal that although the structural basis of language acquisition is very much in place by the time children start school, language acquisition and ...

In the early 20th century linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf thrilled his contemporaries by noting that the Hopi language, spoken by Native American people in what is now Arizona, had no words or grammatical ...

LANGUAGE structure may reveal more about human origins than vocabulary. Traditional techniques for studying the history of languages have relied on evolutionary trees based on word-type, but the speed ...