Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed
semantic domains (for example, time, space, colour, human body parts and activities), but …

Language is a complex behavioral repertoire in a cognitively advanced species. Thesounds,
words, and syntactic patterns of language vary quite widely across humangroups, who have …

Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-
linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of …

Real-time language processing is typically embedded in a complex social world. Any
instance of language comprehension in such circumstances is imbued with many potential …

The natural ecology of language is conversation, with individuals taking turns speaking to
communicate in a back-and-forth fashion. Language in this context involves strings of words …

In 1935 the linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the
relationship between a word's length and its frequency: the more frequent a word is, the …

A major open question in natural language research is the role of communicative efficiency
in the origin and on-line processing of language structures. Here, we use word pairs like …

By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However,
this speed is not constant—speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech …

The natural ecology of human language is face-to-face interaction comprising the exchange
of a plethora of multimodal signals. Trying to understand the psycholinguistic processing of …

For centuries, scientists have attempted to uncover commonalities that underlie the structure
of human languages (1). In a recent issue of PNAS, Piantadosi et al.(2) reported an exciting …