Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is
known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human …

Words categorize the semantic fields they refer to in ways that maximize communication
accuracy while minimizing complexity. Focusing on the well-studied color domain, we show …

Languages are powerful solutions to coordination problems: They provide stable, shared
expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our …

Prediction in language processing has been a topic of major interest in psycholinguistics for
at least the last two decades, but most investigations focus on semantic rather than syntactic …

Recent work on emerging sign languages provides evidence for how key properties of
linguistic systems are created. Here we use laboratory experiments to investigate the …

Humans can find music happy, sad, fearful or spiritual. They can be soothed by it or urged to
dance. Whether these psychological responses reflect cognitive adaptations that evolved …

The frontotemporal language network responds robustly and selectively to sentences. But
the features of linguistic input that drive this response and the computations that these …

Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such
interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common …

No man is an island. Humans develop the ability to communicate with a large community by
coordinating with different interlocutors within short conversations. This ability is largely …

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that
support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word …