Reserachers Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of MIT published a “Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages“.
Words grammatically related tend to be closer to each other in sentences. Across all languages, in what can be a case of a linguistic universal. Linguistic universals are predicted by theories such as Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky and applied in many natural and formal languages.
Key novelty here is ‘Large-scale evidence’. Since Noam Chomsky (among other linguists) language models and hierarchy studies apply theoretic universal properties. More data and application of language parser made it possible to gather evidence of dependency length minimization.