Mother chimps crucial for offspring's social skills

Orphaned chimpanzees are less socially competent than chimpanzees who were reared by their mother. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, observed that orphaned chimpanzees ...

Language use is simpler than previously thought

(Phys.org)—For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls.

Study shows ancient relations between language families

How do language families evolve over many thousands of years? How stable over time are structural features of languages? Researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen ...

Chimpanzees create social traditions

(Phys.org)—Researchers have revealed that chimpanzees are not only capable of learning from one another, but also use this social information to form and maintain local traditions. A research collaboration between the Gonzaga ...

Humans like to work together in solving tasks, chimps don't

Recent studies have shown that chimpanzees possess many of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for humanlike collaboration. Cognitive abilities, however, might not be all that differs between chimpanzees and humans when ...

Historical context guides language development

Not only do we humans enjoy talking -- and talking a lot -- we also do so in very different ways: about 6,000 languages are spoken today worldwide. How this wealth of expression developed, however, largely remains a mystery. ...

page 1 from 2