Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so. Credit...Illustration by Denise Nestor Supported by By Sonia Shah Can a mouse learn a new song? Such a ...

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, ...

One of the big questions we raise in comparative psychology is about the main difference between humans and animals. There is an easy short answer to what sets us apart from the rest of the animals: ...

Studies of animal ethology began long ago, but today’s popular animal cognition books largely began with Stanley Coren in 1994, the year he published The Intelligence of Dogs. Coren had been a highly ...

In our attempts to identify how human culture differs from that of other animals we have been focusing on the wrong things, a ...

Zipf’s law of abbreviation explains how commonly spoken words tend to be shorter. The idea is so intuitive, birds appear to ...

Anna Jon-And receives funding from from the Swedish Research Council and has received funding from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Johan Lind has received funding from the Swedish Research ...

Birdsongs have inspired poets and lovers, becoming one of the philosophical focal points in ancient Greece and Rome. They have also led to several long-ago debates about the relationship between ...