A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and ...

Brains sell magazines, mathematical linguistics sells caffeine. That basically summarizes coverage of a recent study on songbirds' "artificial grammar system". More on that later. First, a summary of ...

Neuroscientist Andrey Vyshedskiy from Boston University has recently published a paper that could explain the long-standing mystery surrounding language evolution that has baffled scientists for ...

Recursion—the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind—has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A multi-institutional ...

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An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link Deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, linguists are trying unravel the structure of a tribal language that might be radically different than ...

An aptitude for mentally stringing together related items, often cited as a hallmark of human language, may have deep roots in primate evolution, a new study suggests. But “this work shows that the ...

The key cognitive step that allowed humans to become the only animals using language may have been identified, scientists say. A new study on monkeys found that while they are able to understand basic ...

Timmy and Tommy are having a counting contest. “One,” says Timmy. “Two,” says Tommy. “Three,” Timmy replies. “Four,” Tommy responds. Timmy pauses. He can’t think of a higher number, and neither can ...