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 ...

An AI model trained on dozens of hours of real-world conversation accurately predicts human brain activity and shows that features of language structure emerge without being coded in. When you ...

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 ...

The success of ChatGPT and its competitors is based on what’s termed emergent behaviors. These systems, called large language models (LLMs), weren’t trained to output natural-sounding language (or ...

Understanding a simple-looking sentence such as “I read this article yesterday” actually requires some sophisticated conceptual computation: a subject (“I”) performed an action (“read”) on an object ( ...

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 ...