Human communication is powered by rules for combining words to generate novel meanings. Such syntactical rules have long been assumed to be unique humans. A new study, published in Nature ...

Discover experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls, showing how Japanese great tits communicate with varied notes. Ordering words to create a variety of meanings (syntax) is a key ...

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...

For all the world’s linguistic diversity, human languages still obey certain universal patterns. These run deeper than grammar and syntax; they’re rooted in statistical laws that predict how ...