Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language.
Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of …

Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on
to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our …

The rise and success of large language models undermines virtually every strong claim for
the innateness of language that has been proposed by generative linguistics. Modern …

Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the
wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters …

Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic
niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial …

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the
brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal …

Present-day hunter-gatherers (HGs) live in multilevel social groups essential to sustain a
population structure characterized by limited levels of within-band relatedness and …

Abstract Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of
combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex …

Language is an essential part of what makes us human. Where did it come from? How did it
develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective …

A novel cognitive theory of semantics that proposes that the meanings of words can be
described in terms of geometric structures. In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter Gärdenfors …