Compositionality is the ability to combine meaningful elements into new combinations with
novel meanings, and it has long been considered one of the main hallmarks of human …

Until the 1990s, the notion of brain lateralization—the division of labor between the two
hemispheres—and its more visible behavioral manifestation, handedness, remained fiercely …

The social complexity hypothesis for the evolution of communication posits that complex
social environments require greater communication complexity for individuals to effectively …

Many building blocks of human language can be found within the vocal communication
systems of other species, most notably songbirds. One of the most prominent of these …

Social play is ubiquitous in the development of many animal species and involves players
adapting actions flexibly to their own previous actions and partner responses. Play differs …

How human language evolved remains one of the most intriguing questions in science, and
different approaches have been used to tackle this question. A recent hypothesis, the …

The comparative approach is a crucial method to gain a better understanding of the
behavior of living human and nonhuman animals to then draw informed inferences about …

One promising method to tackle the question,“In which modality did language evolve?” is by
studying the ontogenetic trajectory of signals in human's closest living relatives, including …

Simple Summary In vertebrates, each of the two hemispheres of the brain controls the
opposite side of the body. Consequently, lateralized actions in animals may reflect that one …

Living organisms throughout the animal kingdom habitually communicate with multi-modal
signals that use multiple sensory channels. Such composite signals vary in their …