RESEARCH on the evolution of language suggests that our communication is largely about cooperation. When we speak with each other, the idea goes, we do so to help coordinate our actions. Antelope ...

Janina Brutt-Griffler says she's always been interested in the interaction of different cultures and languages. "I grew up in a bicultural context," says Brutt-Griffler who joined the UB faculty in ...

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 ...

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 ...

Computers need programming languages to function. That’s just a simple fact of life. However, these languages didn’t just ...

I prefer to keep to what is actually understood about evolutionary biology and not indulge in what evolutionary biologists dismiss as 'just-so' stories... stories we invent... 'maybe it happened this ...

Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

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 ...