The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since ...

The origins of human language remain mysterious. Are we the only animals truly capable of complex speech? Are Homo sapiens the only hominids who could give detailed directions to a far-off freshwater ...

Ellen Garland received funding from the following grants for this work: Royal Society University Research Fellowship (UF160081 and URF\R\221020), Royal Society Research Fellows Enhancement Award ...

The way sperm whales communicate may be more similar to human language than previously thought. The acoustic properties of whale calls resemble vowels, a defining feature of human language, according ...

Artificial intelligence was built to process data, not to think like us. Yet a growing body of research is finding that the internal workings of advanced language and speech models are starting to ...

The more closely scientists listen to the brain during conversation, the more its activity patterns resemble the statistical machinery inside modern artificial intelligence. Instead of following only ...

All human languages follow the same pattern: The most common word is used twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, four times as often as the ...

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 ...

New research on the rhythmic drumming and complex calls of chimpanzees could point scientists to the origins of language. Chimpanzees drum and make calls to communicate. Two new studies have found ...

At the turn of the 20th century, a famous horse named Clever Hans toured Germany. The horse stunned crowds as his trainer demonstrated the animal's alleged ability to understand German, tell time and ...