In the 2016 blockbuster film Arrival, aliens with inscrutable motives descend on Earth—and it is up to a scientist played by Amy Adams to help communicate with them. Were this to occur in real life, ...

If earthlings ever make contact with intelligent space aliens, will we be able to understand them? We use a language of spoken and written words, of course, but aliens might use numbers, shapes, tones ...

Last fall the movie, Arrival, hit theaters and thrilled viewers and critics alike. More than a simple, science-fiction thriller, the movie’s thought-provoking themes had many looking forward to its ...

An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

It is widely believed that language is structured around ‘constituents’, units that combine hierarchically. Using structural priming, we provide evidence of linguistic structures — non-constituents — ...