How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on
the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without …

Dependency distance, measured by the linear distance between two syntactically related
words in a sentence, is generally held as an important index of memory burden and an …

When speakers talk, they gesture. The goal of this review is to investigate the contribution
that these gestures make to how we communicate and think. Gesture can play a role in …

Emoji have become a prominent part of interactive digital communication. Here, we ask the
questions: does a grammatical system govern the way people use emoji; and how do emoji …

The distribution of word orders across languages is highly nonuniform, with subject-verb-
object (SVO) and subject-object-verb (SOV) orders being prevalent. Recent work suggests …

The movements we make with our hands both reflect our mental processes and help to
shape them. Our actions and gestures can affect our mental representations of actions and …

Where do the different sentence orders in the languages of the world come from? Recently,
it has been suggested that there is a basic sentence order, SOV (Subject–Object–Verb) …

To what extent does human cognition influence the structure of human language? Recent
experiments using elicited pantomime suggest that the prevalence of Subject-Object-Verb …

A survey of reports of sign order from 42 sign languages leads to a handful of
generalizations. Two accounts emerge, one amodal and the other modal. We argue that …

Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages
have subject–verb–object order, and about 40% have subject–object–verb order. Extensive …