“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 ...

Mastering English idioms is more than just memorising funny phrases—it’s about sounding natural and fluent. Research shows ...

"The ability for babies to learn the structure of language and to segment sounds into phonemes, words and sentences is thought to rely upon how we extract statistical regularities of the sounds that ...