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 ...

From Spanish and Swahili to Finnish and Filipino, over 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today. Humans are unique in that we are the only species known to use language. However, new research ...

For thousands of years, spoken language has set humans apart from all other species. The ability to convey complex ideas, ...

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 ...

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 language capacities developed primarily to aid in rearing children, according to this lucid debut from biologist Beekman. Babies are born “underbaked,” Beekman writes, explaining that because ...

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 ...