A computer programme which could help identify and even translate messages from beings in outer space has been developed by a scientist from Leeds Met. Dr John Elliott believes he has come up with software which at least will decipher the structure of their language - and be the first step in understanding what they are saying.

Dr Elliott's programme would compare an alien language to a database of 60 different languages in the world to search see if it has a similar structure. He believes that even an alien language far removed from any on Earth is likely to have recognisable patterns that could help reveal how intelligent the life forms are.

All human languages have "functional terms" that bracket phrases, like "if" and "but" in English, but Dr Elliott believes such terms in any language are separated by up to nine words or characters. This limit on phrase length seems to correspond to the level of human cognition - how much information we are able to process at once.

In an alien language, analysing these phrases might make it possible to gauge how clever the authors of the message are. The programme should also be able to break a language up into crucial words such as nouns and verbs, even though their meaning is unknown. It can, for example, locate adjectives from the fact that they are almost always next to nouns.

Because languages have different word orders, Dr Elliott is compiling a library of the syntaxes of 60 human tongues as part of the computer programme.