Ravens use gestures to grab each other's attention

Ravens use gestures to grab each other's attention

How do you capture a raven's heart? Arrest its attention by showing it a twig or stone. Ravens use referential gestures – one of the foundations of human language – to initiate relationships.

St Andrews scientists ask if whales have 'dialects'

St Andrews scientists ask if whales have 'dialects'

Members of the public are being asked by scientists at the University of St Andrews to help them investigate the way whales communicate.

Darwin’s Tongues Languages, like genes, can tell evolutionary tales

Darwin’s Tongues Languages, like genes, can tell evolutionary tales

Talk is cheap, but scientific value lurks in all that gab. Words cascading out of countless flapping gums contain secrets about the evolution of language that a new breed of researchers plan to expose with statistical tools borrowed from genetics.

Understanding Emotions Without Language

Understanding Emotions Without Language

Does understanding emotions depend on the language we speak, or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture? According to a new study by researchers from the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, you don't need to have words for emotions to understand them.

Unconscious language learning

Link: Unconscious language learning

When linguists talk about unconscious or implicit language learning, they don’t mean learning while you sleep. Rather, they are talking about one of the most intriguing of all mental phenomena: the ability to learn the complex and subtle regularities that underlie a language without even realising.

Word: Like a human, smart chimp understands speech

Link: Word: Like a human, smart chimp understands speech

A 25-year-old chimpanzee named “Panzee” has just demonstrated that speech perception is not a uniquely human trait.

Well-educated Panzee understands more than 130 English language words and even recognizes words in sine-wave form, a type of synthetic speech that reduces language to three whistle-like tones. This shows that she isn’t just responding to a particular person’s voice or emotions, but instead she is processing and perceiving speech as humans do.