Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

The global distribution of grammatical complexity (fusion). Closely related languages resemble each other's scores. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 Languages around the ...

The bases of the human language faculty are now being investigated by means of highly specialised measurement techniques and with increasing success. Why can we understand complex sentences, while our ...

A contextual grammar is said to be of order k iff the next context depends on an initial and a final subword of length less than or equal to k. The families of languages generated by such contextual ...

At least some birds can learn a pattern once proposed as unique to the grammars of human languages, say researchers. Starlings trained in a lab have learned to distinguish between sounds strung ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

One characteristic that clearly distinguishes us from non-human primates is our ability to understand and produce language. In particular, the human ability to apply complex linguistic rules has been ...