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 ...

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 ...

If you have spent time with an infant, you might recognize the scene: A child is wailing, inconsolable, and you, the parent, have to go to the bathroom. Or eat. Or attend to a pot that’s boiling over.

An international team of linguists and geneticists has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of 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 ...