A laugh can feel spontaneous, messy, almost impossible to pin down. But deep inside that burst of sound, researchers found a ...

Words vanish the instant they’re spoken, and no skeleton can tell us when our ancestors first started talking. So how can ...

Great apes may have been laughing with a similar rhythm to modern humans for at least 15 million years, a University of ...

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 ...

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

Until now, it had been unclear how our laughter may have changed over millions of years of evolution, and how it might relate ...

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 ...

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don't? It's one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...

My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him ...

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 ...