Forest floor-dwelling fungi can send one another electrical signals to form word-like clusters, according to a computer scientist, but whether that represents something akin to language isn’t clear.
People who had cognitive functions depleted by noninvasive brain stimulation or a mentally demanding task could subconsciously recognize individual words in a made-up language more easily than controls, researchers find.
Gardner famously claimed to have taught chimpanzees to communicate with people using American Sign Language by raising them as if they were human children.
Our perception of quantity, separate from counting or estimation of magnitude more generally, is foundational to human cognition, according to some neuroscientists.
In both a mouse model and the hospital records of more than 3 million children, researchers found a connection between strong immune activation in males and later symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.
By studying the vocal behavior of 20 baby bats from birth to weaning, researchers have identified striking similarities between how young humans and bats develop communication skills.
Male researchers are more likely to describe their work in publications using positive superlatives than their female colleagues are, a habit tied to more citations.
A small study finds that patients who had half their brains removed to treat epilepsy have stronger neural networks than controls, perhaps explaining how they can retain language and cognition skills.
A small study reports that, among children who had left-hemisphere damage as newborns, the complementary region of the right hemisphere appears to compensate and protect language development.
Drastic dietary changes during the agricultural revolution altered the configuration of the human bite, paving the way for new sounds in spoken language, a new study finds.
In an email, biostatistics professor Megan Neely warned students of “unintended consequences” from speaking their native language on campus. She has since left a leadership post.
