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 ...

Language evolution encompasses the origin, diversification and change of human languages over time. It integrates comparative and computational methods—such as phylogenetic modelling, phylogeography ...

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

A new study challenges the idea that language stems from a single evolutionary root. Instead, it proposes that our ability to communicate evolved through the interaction of biology and culture, and ...

Great apes and humans all laugh with a steady, even rhythm, and a new study finds it has barely changed in 15 million years.

In fact, when they were tickled, laughter from both apes and humans was isochronous, meaning that the laughs followed a ...

An international team from Fudan, Harvard, and Stony Brook has identified shared statistical patterns in the vocabularies of 22 languages, using AI and centuries of linguistic data. The study found ...

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?

From "yeet" to "social distancing," new words and phrases constantly emerge and evolve in American English. But how do these neologisms—newly coined terms—gain acceptance and become part of mainstream ...

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 ...