Humans are the only species known to use fully symbolic language: a system capable of expressing abstract ideas, imaginary worlds and endless combinations of meaning. But how did we get there? The ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, cultural, and societal shifts. Studying the evolution of languages can thus ...

The research, published in the journal Communications Biology, compared laughter recordings from orangutans, gorillas, ...

The human environment is a very social one. Family, friends, colleagues, strangers – they all provide a continuous stream of information that we need to track and make sense of. Who is dating whom?

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A photo by Seán Roberts on a recent hike near his house in Wales, which prompted him to recall the conclusion of a research paper he co-authored on the impact of environment on language. "Ultimately, ...

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 ...