Neuroscience

Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear

Our brains "time-stamp" the order of incoming sounds, allowing us to correctly process the words that we hear, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers. Its findings, which appear in the journal ...

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Word

A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content) in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme (e.g. cat), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g. the English plural morpheme -s).

Typically, a word will consist of a root or stem, and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create other units of language, such as phrases, clauses, and/or sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together form a compound. A word combined with an already existing word or part of a word form a portmanteau.

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