People often seem to understand language before they have actually heard enough words to determine its structure. In everyday ...

Researchers discover that the brain proactively builds sentence structures during speech using predictive processing, explaining why second-language listening is difficult.

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS ...

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 ...

When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a ...

Figure 1: Timing of syntactic processing following different strategies. The colored circles refer to the nodes of the syntactic structure that are built at the time point the word in the same color ...

Once a popular way to teach grammar, the practice of diagramming sentences has fallen out of favor. When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming ...