Neanderthals may have been far more like us than once believed. A new review of genetic, archaeological, and fossil evidence ...

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 ...

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 ...

My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him ...

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 ...

Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago. It is a deep ...

Why does “bouba” sound round and “kiki” sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world. For at least a century scientists have considered this ...

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...