But starting in the 1960s and ’70s, a surge of interest in the practical aspects of spoken language revealed just how elaborate and subtle the processes are that govern turn-taking, interruption, and composing a sentence or story on the fly while being attuned to a listener’s reactions every step of the way.

When you read or hear a new sentence, your brain, in less than a second, performs two types of analysis: (1) it parses the sentence, deconstructing it into its constituent nouns and verbs and what they mean, individually and collectively; and (2) it connects that sentence to what you know about the world, integrating the grammatical nuts and bolts

Oral speech is a dialog. We build the structure of conversation together. One person says something, and the next may add to it without constructing a full sentence. This makes the syntax of each utterance less important—we rely on each other to keep it flowing.