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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, linguists are trying unravel the structure of a tribal language that might be radically different than any other. Only a few hundred people are members of 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 ...