Without explicit feedback, humans can rapidly learn the meaning of words. Children can
acquire a new word after just a few passive exposures, a process known as fast mapping …

Whether and how shared intentionality (SI) influences the establishment of a novel
interpersonal communication system is poorly understood. To investigate this issue, we …

Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use: You learn a language through
immersion in the language used in your linguistic community, and in using language to …

How do drawings—ranging from detailed illustrations to schematic diagrams—reliably
convey meaning? Do viewers understand drawings based on how strongly they resemble …

When people interact to establish shared symbols for novel objects or concepts, they often
rely on multiple communicative modalities as well as on alignment (ie, cross-participant …

Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key
innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the 'baseline'of generalized ape …

How the world's 6,000+ natural languages have arisen is mostly unknown. Yet, new sign
languages have emerged recently among deaf people brought together in a community …

Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. Primarily
focusing on the latter, recent studies of emergent communication overlook the sketches; they …

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human
social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring …

Everyday conversation is, as the term suggests, a frequent and seemingly effortless
phenomenon. However, when closely examined, it is seen that the process of achieving …