Human language is structured to minimize mental effort by using familiar, predictive patterns grounded in lived experience.

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 ...

Linguistics is the study of language, but what does that even mean? Language is everywhere. Linguistics is the study of language, but what does that even mean? In this episode of Crash Course ...

In a new article appearing in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Cory Shain and Hope Kean, explore how the human brain shows ...

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, ...

It's widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains.

A team of linguistics and psychology researchers has discovered that when a brief sentence is flashed, our brains detect its basic linguistic structure extremely quickly -- in roughly 150 milliseconds ...

Until recently most linguists believed that the relationship between the structure of language and the natural world was mainly the influence of the environment on vocabulary. Now, a new study shows ...

Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. 13-40 (28 pages) Using Australian languages as examples, cultural selection is shown to shape linguistic structure through invisible hand processes ...