Noam Chomsky is the best-known advocate of the view that language skills are hardwired into our brains, and Steven Pinker made this argument in The Blank Slate. Authors Greenspan, a professor of ...

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 ...

Kanzi was not the first great ape to learn how to communicate with humans using symbols. Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimpanzee learned signs that were adapted from American Sign Language. But ...

What allows humans to infer “a notion of structure” (Otto Jespersen) when using language, art, music, and mathematics? All of these domains have their own unique representational units (words, notes), ...

Give Me a Sign examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower and connect people. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Symbol Sourcebook, this ...

We have an enduring cultural fascination with the early human ancestors who once lived on — and even shared — our planet. Now, it appears that one of our ancestral species had burial rituals that ...

Language is commonly understood as the instrument of thought. People “talk it out” and “speak their mind,” follow “trains of thought” or “streams of consciousness.” Some of the pinnacles of human ...

Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species. However, research published in Science has uncovered ...

At the very beginning of the “Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols” (1972), the book’s author and one of the era’s most accomplished industrial designers, Henry ...