An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

The study of language evolution and learning addresses the complex interplay between cultural dynamics and biological predispositions in shaping human communication. Researchers employ experimental ...

A growing body of genetic evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Denisovans carried many of the same regulatory gene networks linked to language and vocal anatomy in modern humans, challenging 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 ...

Birds across the planet share a learned warning cry that may echo the origins of language itself. Bird species that live ...

Language technology has grown fast, but it still feels frustrating at times. Maybe your virtual assistant misunderstands commands, or translation tools miss the tone of a sentence. These gaps can ...

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 ...

A photo by Seán Roberts on a recent hike near his house in Wales, which prompted him to recall the conclusion of a research paper he co-authored on the impact of environment on language. "Ultimately, ...

This research was supported by funding from: The National Center for Competence in Research "Evolving Language" (SNSF agreement number 51NF40_180888) Swiss National Science Foundation (project grant ...

The study of language and communication evolution investigates the processes by which linguistic systems emerge, stabilise and change over time. At its core lie game‐theoretic models, such as ...

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 ...