Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

A computational analysis has highlighted the poorly understood relationships and elusive histories of modern sign languages worldwide, revealing two major sign language families shaped by geopolitical ...

Cognitive and computer scientists at the University of Toronto, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies have found child language development and the ...

I prefer to keep to what is actually understood about evolutionary biology and not indulge in what evolutionary biologists dismiss as 'just-so' stories... stories we invent... 'maybe it happened this ...

Linguist Anne Curzan delights in the nuances and evolution of language. She says we should embrace they/them as singular pronouns---which have actually been used for hundreds of years. Anne Curzan is ...

The global distribution of grammatical complexity (fusion). Closely related languages resemble each other's scores. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 Languages around the ...

Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

Humans are not merely adept at communicating danger — it is seemingly built into our brains. That may be true for most social animals, but not all animals can communicate using specific nouns or verbs ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...