Because animals have a limited capability of understanding human language, they cannot “read” the way humans do.

Human reading looks so ordinary that it is easy to treat it as the default way brains extract meaning from marks. Yet when I look at what animals can do with symbols, numbers, and sounds, the picture ...

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, ...

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 ...

The animals’ complex songs share structural patterns with human language that may make them easier for whales to learn, a new study suggests. By Emily Anthes The English language is full of wonderful ...

Language shapes the way we view our world. In the field of wildlife conservation, even very subtle word choices drive peoples’ perceptions around individual species or situations. These word choices ...

The origins of human language remain mysterious. Are we the only animals truly capable of complex speech? Are Homo sapiens the only hominids who could give detailed directions to a far-off freshwater ...

We humans concoct never-before-heard sentences with ease, embedding phrases within phrases to express the wildest ideas we can dream up (“the purple pangolin that waltzed across the ballroom had a ...

Humanity often describes extreme violence perpetrated by humans upon each other as ‘animal rage’ or ‘animal acts’, creating a false distinction between human and animal ...