Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don't? It's one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...

Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago. It is a deep ...

UC Berkeley researchers say large language models have gained "metalinguistic ability," a hallmark of human language and cognition no other animal has displayed. AI chatbots can analyze sentences like ...

A tiny set of ancient genetic “switches” may have played a surprisingly large role in making human language possible.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since ...

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...