Ellen Garland received funding from the following grants for this work: Royal Society University Research Fellowship (UF160081 and URF\R\221020), Royal Society Research Fellows Enhancement Award ...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational methods: To investigate the properties of written human language and to model the cognitive mechanisms ...

Human languages display a pattern known as Zipf’s law. Now, researchers have found the same pattern in whale song. In all known human languages there is a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in ...

Humans can create arbitrary, abstract symbols for words, and juggle them in our head to create a meaningful story or convey an emotion to others. Apes and other primates cannot. We can create ...

The way sperm whales communicate may be more similar to human language than previously thought. The acoustic properties of whale calls resemble vowels, a defining feature of human language, according ...

Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species. However, research published in Science has uncovered ...