“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...

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 ...

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years. This year more than usual, those of you who wrote to me asked where you should find hope. Where you ...

Language processing happens at speeds significantly faster than it takes to speak one word aloud. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

One increasingly inescapable fact of modern life is fielding endless attempts to scam you—to get your financial details, to spoof your identity, or even to engage you in an improbable romance scam.

Dramatic structure serves as the backbone of storytelling, shaping narratives in plays, films, and literature. This framework guides the pacing, character arcs, and resolution, crafting stories that ...

Last March, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg labeled 2023 the “Year of Efficiency” in a company-wide email, noting that “flatter is faster.” According to Zuckerberg, “It’s well-understood that every layer ...

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 ...