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 ...

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 ...

Orangutan calls have a complex structure that was thought to be unique to human language. Short sequences are nested inside longer sequences, much like the way we assemble long sentences from shorter ...

A heated controversy in linguistics in recent years involves a few hundred people deep in the Amazonian rainforest: the Pirahã tribe of Northern Brazil. Their idiosyncratic language has raised ...