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 ...

The origins of human language remain mysterious. Are we the only animals truly capable of complex speech? Are Homo sapiens ...

Whales use complex communication systems we still don’t understand, a trope exploited in sci-fi shows like Apple TV’s Extrapolations. That show featured a humpback whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) ...

Scientists have long considered the complexity of language to be an obvious separation between humans and all other life forms on Earth. New research, however, suggests our linguistic abilities might ...

Language has long been seen as a defining trait of human intelligence. Unlike the communication systems of other species, human language consists of predictable, recurring elements that follow ...

Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic ...

Wild bonobos – our closest living relatives – communicate using vocal calls organized in compositionally complex semantic structures that mirror key features of human language, according to a new ...

Anna Jon-And receives funding from from the Swedish Research Council and has received funding from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Johan Lind has received funding from the Swedish Research ...

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation ES. Anthropomorphism occurs when we attribute human characteristics to non-human entities like animals ...

The AI craze has hit researchers trying to understand how our brains process language. The latest technique is to try and link the output of Large Language Models (or LLMs like ChatGPT) to the brain ...