Seeking the origin of Indigenous languages in South America

A new study indicates that one of the largest of the Indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the sixth century BCE in the basin of the Rio Tapajós and Rio Xingu, near the present-day city of Santarém ...

Database shows the diversity of the world's languages

What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and ...

How does language emerge?

How the languages of the world emerged is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken millennia, it is intriguing to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages spontaneously. Observations have shown that ...

Researchers develop grammar-aware password cracker

When writing or speaking, good grammar helps people make themselves be understood. But when used to concoct a long computer password, grammar—good or bad—provides crucial hints that can help someone crack that password, ...

Computing, Sudoku-style

When Alexey Radul began graduate work at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003, he was interested in natural-language processing -- designing software that could understand ordinary written English. ...