SPOKANE, Wash. Washoe, a female chimpanzee believed to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept. Washoe, who first ...

Forty years ago, I published an article, "Can a Chimpanzee Create a Sentence?" My answer was, definitively, "No." At the time, that conclusion was controversial. It was also headline news because ...

Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it's difficult to prove a negative like this because we'll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

SPOKANE, Wash. — Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept. Washoe, who first ...

New research suggests wild chimpanzees have developed a far more nuanced communication system than previously realized, using several mechanisms that combine their vocalizations to create new meaning.

Scientists have moved one step closer to decoding the languages that animals like chimpanzees use to communicate. According to a new study published in Nature, chimpanzees have specific words, or ...

When we think about what sets humans apart from other animals, language often comes to mind. Language is more than words—it also relies on the ability to build shared understanding through ...

Grunts, barks, screams and pants ring through Taï National Park in Cȏte d’Ivoire. Chimpanzees there combine these different calls like linguistic Legos to relay complex meanings when communicating, ...

Human speech isn’t something we’re born with. Rather, we acquire the ability to communicate using speech through a set of developmental stages we pass through as we grow from infancy. New research on ...

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND—According to a statement released by the University of Zurich, the ability to combine vocalizations into sequences to convey meaning may date back some six million years ago, to ...

Kayla Kolff received funding from the DFG, German Research Foundation. This project is part of a project that was funded by an EUConsolidator grant (772000, TurnTaking) to SP of the European Research ...