This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

Brains sell magazines, mathematical linguistics sells caffeine. That basically summarizes coverage of a recent study on songbirds' "artificial grammar system". More on that later. First, a summary of ...

Neuroscientist Andrey Vyshedskiy from Boston University has recently published a paper that could explain the long-standing mystery surrounding language evolution that has baffled scientists for ...

A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and ...

At a job interview on Friday, I had to write code, and one of the things that came up when we were talking about implementation of a concept was recursion. The director of the group said to me "Don't ...

The key cognitive step that allowed humans to become the only animals using language may have been identified, scientists say. A new study on monkeys found that while they are able to understand basic ...