Forty years ago, I published an article, "Can a Chimpanzee Create a Sentence?" My answer was, definitively, "No." At the time, that conclusion was controversial. It was also headline news because ...

Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it's difficult to prove a negative like this because we'll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

SPOKANE, Wash. Washoe, a female chimpanzee believed to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept. Washoe, who first ...

SPOKANE, Wash. - Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept. Washoe, who first ...

Humans are not merely adept at communicating danger — it is seemingly built into our brains. That may be true for most social animals, but not all animals can communicate using specific nouns or verbs ...

New research suggests wild chimpanzees have developed a far more nuanced communication system than previously realized, using several mechanisms that combine their vocalizations to create new meaning.

Hundreds of hours of recordings suggest that the apes can generate meaning by stringing sounds together in pairs. But some scholars are skeptical. By Carl Zimmer After listening to hundreds of hours ...

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, ...

Human speech isn’t something we’re born with. Rather, we acquire the ability to communicate using speech through a set of developmental stages we pass through as we grow from infancy. New research on ...

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND—According to a statement released by the University of Zurich, the ability to combine vocalizations into sequences to convey meaning may date back some six million years ago, to ...

SPOKANE, Wash. — Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept. Washoe, who first ...