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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a ...

“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 ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Critics have generally considered Henry James's style to be a major element of his prose fiction. Previous discussions of his style have ...