Good news, kind of. I discovered a new sentence structure I hate. It’s a pattern I see often but only recently, while editing an article, realized it belongs in my writing hall of shame. Why would I ...

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 ...

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 ...

The hierarchical structure of sentences appears to be less important in human sentence processing than previously assumed, according to a new study of readers' eye movements. Readers seem to pay ...

Most writers assume they write well. Yet most writers grapple with the reality of writing as a black box. That is, we know that writing works, but we’re a bit fuzzy on what makes readers grasp the ...

Let’s be honest—grammar isn’t the most exciting topic. It reminds most of us of red marks on school essays or confusing rules that seem to trip us up. But what if grammar wasn’t about rules at ...

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 ...