There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as
they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of …

The form of a word sometimes conveys semantic information. For example, the iconic word
gurgle sounds like what it means, and busy is easy to identify as an English adjective …

When adults learn new languages, their speech often remains noticeably non-native even
after years of exposure. These non-native variants ('accents') can have far-reaching socio …

From the first moment of life, language development occurs in the context of social activities.
This book emphasises how language development interacts with social and cognitive …

We propose that human self-domestication favored the emergence of a less aggressive
phenotype in our species, more precisely phenotype prone to replace (reactive) physical …

Languages with many speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities
sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, the opposite …

Abstract Language complexity is an intriguing phenomenon argued to play an important role
in both language learning and processing. The need to compare languages with regard to …

Experimental work in the field of language evolution has shown that novel signal systems
become more structured over time. In a recent paper, Kirby, Tamariz, Cornish, and Smith …

Human cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than
language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous individual …

This paper studies the formation and persistence of gender identity in a sample of US
immigrants. We show that gender roles are acquired early in life, and once established …