At the turn of the 20th century, a famous horse named Clever Hans toured Germany. The horse stunned crowds as his trainer demonstrated the animal's alleged ability to understand German, tell time and ...

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 ...

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: ...

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, ...

A new study suggests that the NOVA1 gene may have been a key player in the evolution of human language. By Carl Zimmer Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words ...

All human languages follow the same pattern: The most common word is used twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, four times as often as the ...